persiflage

Is it possible to enjoy a poem you don’t understand? In today’s instalment I shall carry out an experiment. I shall quote a typically cryptic poem by John Ashbery and then interpret it. The question you should ask yourself, as a reader, is whether you prefer the poem interpreted or not.

Wet Casements

“When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much,”
Kafka, “Wedding Preparations in the Country”

The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes. A digest of the correct impressions of
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present
Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

This poem is a little like a crossword puzzle. To ‘explain’ it, first we need to know the significance of its opening epigraph. The poem is (partly) addressed to Kafka; he is “you in falbalas”. Why though does Ashbery pick this particular quotation? In fact the quote is a kind of misdirection: the passage from Kafka that is relevant to Ashbery’s poem occurs elsewhere in the same story–

“One is alone, a total stranger and only an object of curiousity. And so long as you can say “one” instead of “I,” there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified.”

The reason why this quote is relevant is that Rabans’s habit of addressing himself in the third or second person leads us to wonder if “”Wet Casements” possesses a similar pronominal ambiguity. When Ashbery says “you” does he mean “I”?

We also need to clarify the poem’s reference to the bridge at Avignon. In France, a popular children’s song runs (in English):“On the bridge at Avignon, we dance [one dances] all together”. Significantly, furthermore, the bridge at Avignon only goes halfway across the river.

We are now in a position to interpret the poem. “Wet Casements” is concerned with the question of whether meaningful communication is possible. It is about reading and writing, and by extension the question of whether we can understand other minds. At the beginning of the poem Ashbery assumes the role of reader. The “interesting conception” is the idea that by reading a text (such as Kafka’s story) we can understand the mind of its author. Such an understanding would involve a transcendence of time and historical situation (“the timeless energy of a present/ That would have its own opinions on these matters”). However, Ashbery answers the question of whether true communion between reader and writer is possible in the negative.

Although Ashbery assumes the role of reader, reading Kafka, at another level, he identifies himself with someone reading his own work. “You in falbalas” is both Kafka and Ashbery. It is in the second stanza that Ashbery makes this explicit, turning from a concern with reading to a concern with writing. The “bridge” in the poem is a metaphor for the poem itself. Because Ashbery cannot fully commune with Kafka he surrenders hope that he can himself commune with his own readers (the bridge at Avignon, remember, does not go all the way across the river). Ashbery settles for the idea that he will be able to see his own “complete face” in the bridge he has built – even if no one else can. Others, true, may enjoy the poem for the “feeling of dancing on a bridge” but this pleasure is not derived from any true understanding of Ashbery or his poem. Which returns me to the question that I posed at the beginning of this instalment: is it possible to enjoy a poem without understanding it? Because Ashbery does not believe he can fully communicate his perspective, he chooses not to try – at least, apparently. The poem is inevitably ambiguous on this point (the poem exists afterall).

When I was writing about Ashbery some years ago, my supervisor asked me why I liked him. To be honest, I am not sure that I do (although I like “Wet Casements” very much). What I do like about Ashbery though is his unswerving focus on the reader of his work. Ashbery’s poems are almost universally concerned with the question of whether real communication is possible. His poems, like much Modern and Postmodern poetry, are difficult– but unlike other difficult poets Ashbery makes his poems’ difficulty a part of their subject matter. Ashbery continually seeks to put himself in the shared space between reader and writer. This makes his poetry, in principle, fully recuperable. And this is what I like about it.

The other night I induced my father to read this blog. He commented that it came across as a stream of consciousness and suggested that, if I turn it into a PhD thesis, I should make it a Socratic dialogue. This is a legitimate point: I tend to pick up ideas, discuss them and reject them. In this dilettantish spirit, I now turn my attention to Objectivist aesthetics. Objectivism is interesting because it presents, I believe, a view of aesthetics that is popular among many educated people (though less so among academics and art professionals). One cannot escape the feeling, when reading Leonard Peikoff’s introduction to the subject, that one is being confronted with plain common sense and it is this sensation that no doubt endears Objectivism to its followers. It is a feeling one does not experience reading, for instance, Heidigger.

For those who do not know, Objectivism is a philosophical system created by Russian refugee Ayn Rand and expressed most famously in her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”. Objectivism is a highly systemised theory that begins from the premise that “existence exists” and proceeds to a defence of laissez-faire capitalism. Objectivism is not taken seriously by the academy. Perhaps this is because Rand does not enter into meaningful dialogue with other philosophers. Nevertheless, Objectivism has a strong following among laypeople who share her political convictions, including my father: I have wasted many a boozy lunch trying to persuade him that Objectivism is incorrect. Perhaps the only way one to argue against Objectivism is to apply un-common sense. Certainly, I believe Rand is wrong and that the reasons why she is wrong are as interesting as the theory itself.

To summarise Objectivist aesthetics, we need to start with Rand’s “psycho-epistemology”. Rand argues that people form concepts by integrating a number of different perceptions (called “percepts”); the philosophy of life created by integrating concepts is then embodied concretely in an artwork that is a new percept. Although the real world is highly complex and disorganised, the artist imposes order on this world by selecting those aspects of reality that she considers important. Art is “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgements”. Consequently we can speak of the metaphysics of an artwork (its subject) and of its “psycho-epistemology”, given by its style. The fullest form of aesthetic appreciation occurs when the viewer (or reader or listener) finds his own beliefs, his “sense if life” (a kind of pre-philosophical perspective held by those who have not yet bothered to develop an explicit, coherent philosophy) reflected in the artwork. If a person has a muddled sense of life, then he or she will respond most fully to a muddled artwork. Rand’s often implies that if a person is fully rational then they will naturally accept her conclusions and that anyone who does not is irrational and, at least to some extent, muddled.

However, Rand does not go so far as to say that only those artworks that present an Objectivist perspective are ‘good’. The theory treats aesthetic value and aesthetic appreciation as separate categories. Value is determined ‘objectively’, by estimating the artist’s success in communicating her chosen theme. Aesthetic value does not depend on one’s enjoyment of an artwork. It is in fact perfectly possible to say simultaneously of a painting, for instance, that it is a masterpiece and that one does not like it.

There are various reasons why Objectivist aesthetics is wrong. Rand’s empiricist theory of concept-formation, a kind of hard-cored empiricism, overlooks the fact that most of our knowledge is derived from hearsay (I have argued this before in the instalment “The World”). Her theory furthermore makes no allowance for the role metaphors play in the way we perceive the world. The concept of God, for instance, which even atheists possess, has no foundation in empirical experience and so must be seen as, if anything, a metaphor,

A second reason why Objectivist aesthetics is wrong is that it puts the cart before the horse. The theory suggests that, if our judgment of value is to be founded on an estimate of the artist’s success in communicating her theme, we must know the content of an artwork first. But this ignores the fact that our understanding of the artist’s intent is based on an appraisal of the work itself. We (usually) have no other access to the artist’s intentions. In reality, when we look at a painting, we do not compare the finished work to what we conjecture to be the artist’s intentions; we either find it meaningful or not. And furthermore, we have to put some effort into making sense of the work. Objectivist aesthetics does not take into account the pleasure derived from interpretation.

I admit this is a highly condensed rebuttal of Objectivist aesthetics but I am trying to keep these instalments relatively short.

To sum up, it seems to me that Objectivism provides a great aesthetic theory for people who do not particularly like art. Ayn Rand’s novels are simply well executed melodramas with an extremely narrow moral compass. In this respect, Objectivism is very like Marxism (and Fundamentalist religion): it provides simple answers to the questions posed by a complex world. Perhaps the attraction of Objectivism is based partly on the distance between it and the real world. Ayn Rand in fact frowned on ambiguity and Modernist art and literature generally. However the bulk of the art-world is made up of those soft Lefties who value empathy and pluralism and presumably this counts for something. Perhaps it is the muddled who have the clearest view of reality.

In today’s instalment, I venture into new territory. In my previous instalment I tentatively suggested that the content an artwork possesses is irrelevant, that aesthetic pleasure arises simply out of the viewer’s process of interpretation. On the other hand, I have also implicitly argued that we enjoy those artworks most that we can relate back to our own life and World. My intention now is to attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction.

The reason why I have been ambivalent about this question is that, if we survey the entirety of art, we find that it is enormously heterogenous. Not only can we find an enormous range of subject matter, we find that the statements made by some artworks contradict the statements made by others. An artwork can apparently say anything. This is the reason why I asserted that it is the manner in which an artwork communicates its content rather than the content itself that matters.

Certainly, the diversity we find in art debunks the thesis that art communicates eternal truths. The number of eternal truths is surely much smaller than the number of false beliefs; consequently we would expect to find much more repetition in good art that we in fact do. It is interesting to note that Baudelaire, for instance, has claimed, at different times, that good art conveys eternal truths and that good art necessarily has a quality of strangeness. If art conveys eternal truths we would surely not find it strange! Baudelaire has contradicted himself (though I should believe that the latter claim comes closer to the truth).

The diversity we find in art also puts a strain on the idea that art reproduces an ideology shared by artist and audience. Although we can find commonalities in the art of a particular period, the works of an era still show too much variation for us to say that they possess a common ideology. This is particularly true of modern art.

In fact, the diversity of art can only be explained by assuming a certain qualities in the nature of humanity. The bold claim that I would like to make is that people possess an appetite for meaning. We might term this appetite an “epistemic hunger” (this term may not be original, but I do not know who coined it). The World of most people is heterogenous and rife with contradiction, one’s own beliefs are usually provisional and pragmatic. Nevertheless, we possess a strong need that the world be meaningful. It this need that art satisfies. Our epistemic hunger is so strong that we are quite prepared to believe, temporarily, in anything an artwork says; we suspend our disbelief for the duration of time that we focus on a particular work. Our appetite for meaning is stronger than our need for a stable and consistent ideological framework. We do not ask of an artwork that it be true, only that it be plausible.

We might even go so far as to say that that the statements we prefer are those that differ most from our everyday experience but which we desperately want to believe. For example, my most intense experience visiting an art gallery occurred when I was at the height of my psychosis. At that time my views about society were such that I felt utterly alienated from it; I believed moreover that I possessed a truth about society (it had come to me by revelation) that people were too scared to say aloud. At the Wanganui Art Gallery, it seemed to me that the modern artists in the exhibition suffered from the same kind of censorship but were nevertheless trying to communicate the ideas I believed. The themes of alienation and imprisonment in the exhibition resonated with my own feelings and made me feel part of a wider community, oppressed and anguished but a community nevertheless, a community that was familiar with my situation.

Needless to say, my appreciation of these artworks was directly proportional to the lack of evidence I found in the wider world for my beliefs. One does not need to be psychotic to have this kind of attitude. Marxism, that reductive and overly simplified theory of anthropology so prevalent in the early part of the twentieth century, has encouraged its adherents to seek in art and literature the support for their views that they cannot find in the real world. There could be nothing more ridiculous than a Marxist interpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphoses” – and yet it has been carried out. In this case, as in many cases, it is precisely the divergence between the ‘message’ of a work and the real world that creates pleasure. The aesthetic value of the work originates in it asserting something that we want to believe but about which we entertain serious doubt. Or in other words, the artwork is concerned less with truth than with desire.

For some time, this blog has used the concept of ‘the interesting’ as a pivot. The subject of art, I have argued, is ‘the interesting’. In the previous instalment I touched on a possible definition of what constitutes the interesting – we are interested in the human condition and in how other people think. I am going to use this posting to further explore these ideas.

First of all, it needs to be noted that the two statements in the definition above are diametrically opposed. To say that art conveys ideas about the human condition is to imply that these ideas are shared by both the artist and his audience. The human condition becomes a unified, eternal ideal that transcends artist and audience. The second conception, by contrast, emphasizes difference: the artist’s perspective is unlike our own and we appreciate his work because, through it, we encounter the Other. Both conceptions are appealing. Sometimes a part of the enjoyment we feel is based on the thrill of recognition when an artwork evokes something we have felt or experienced, and this thrill can easily be explained by supposing a shared human condition. Sometimes, by contrast, the pleasure we feel is based on a sense that we are being granted access to the inner sanctum of the artist’s life; it is the personality of the artist, as he reveals it to us through his artwork, that we find interesting.

Before we get carried away, however, we should take care. The ‘human condition’ is a myth. We need to substitute for the idea of some timeless, eternal set of truths, the notion of ideology. An ideology can be defined as a person’s set of beliefs, the beliefs that enable him to make sense of the world into which he is thrown. An ideology is socially constructed, and will vary among cultures and periods, and even indeed among individuals. For example, in Te Papa there is a painting (I have forgotten its name) of a house set against a mountainous backdrop. The way in which this painting is rendered suggests the impermanence of human settlement in New Zealand compared with the permanence of the landscape, an idea of New Zealand society captured by Alan Curnow when he talks of “a land of settlers with never a soul at home”. This belief, which was widely felt by Pakeha at the time that Curnow was writing and the painting created, is felt no longer by modern generations of New Zealanders. The ‘truth’ that the painting conveys is no longer valid. Another painting (I have again forgotten its name, though I think it can be found in the Auckland Art Gallery) depicts a group of Maori on a vessel, wracked by storm, at the moment one of them spots land. This painting presents an idea that was common well into the twentieth century, that Maori discovered New Zealand accidentally. This painting legitimises British control of New Zealand by presenting Maori as primitive, and hints at another idea common at the time, that Maori were doomed to extinction. Neither of these beliefs is any longer current: we now know that Maori were skilled mariners who actively sought out new lands, and the Maori show no sign of dying out. Again the ‘truths’ of the painting are no longer valid.

Nevertheless, these painting retain great aesthetic power. To me this suggests that artworks need not convey eternal truths, it suffices simply that they be meaningful. Every brushstroke must contribute to the message, feeling or tone that the painting conveys. However, the painter cannot force his meaning on his audience. The viewer must reach out and create what he finds in the painting, and it is this I think that creates aesthetic pleasure. Does this suggest that, ultimately, it does not matter what an artwork is about so long as it possesses meaning? I am undecided about this at the moment.

A final point. In discussing these paintings I have neglected one extremely important aspect. Both pieces are highly ambiguous. The house in the first painting is simultaneously impermanent and monumental; the Maori in the second are poised between salvation and disaster. I shall discuss ambiguity later, with reference to the work “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by William Empson.

My last posting was rubbish. I would delete it but I believe that if I did so I would not be remaining true the spirit of this blog. My intention is to explore and elaborate a certain set of ideas in a public space, and this process is necessarily a hit and miss affair. I set off down different roads to see where they lead, and sometimes I end up in a cul-de-sac. Nevertheless I feel that I am, indeed, working something out even if it is at the moment inchoate, embryonic. Most philosophers, when they write a treatise, are not completely certain what they’re trying to say; they work it out in the process of saying it.

I am currently writing this in a backpackers in Wellington and have a cold.

The stupidest idea in the previous blog was the statement that the contemporary art scene is in crisis. What a reactionary, curmudgeonly remark to make! Rather than repudiate it entirely however, I shall amend it. The art-scene is always in crisis. It seems this way (to a discerning observer) because mediocre artworks outnumber the genuinely good art. There is a lot of bad concept art around but this does not mean that concept art is necessarily bad in itself. It simply means that innovators attract lesser imitators, and these imitators crowd out the real talents, and this has always been the way.

In my time in Wellington, I have been wandering the gallaries and chatting with an aspiring Painter about the works we have seen. As addition to reviving my faith in visual art, these conversations have provided an new perspective on the questions this blog has been trying to address. I shall try to summarise her viewpoint. For her, painting conveys emotion; the painter has a particular attitude towards the subject matter of his work and it is this attitude which is the proper topic of interpretation. Furthemore, she believes that art gives its viewer insight into how other think and act, and into the human condition generally.

This last claim, that art in essence provides knowledge about others and about the human condition in general, is very important. I have shared this belief myself- it is intuitive and I think probably shared by many others. It seems to answer the central question of this thesis. We are interested in art and literature because it teaches us about others. I believe however that this idea does not stand up to serious analysis.

My present situation is not conducive to writing, so I shall return to this theme when I return home.

Hello, World! I am writing this latest instalment from sunny Whanganui, which I am visiting as part of a road-trip around New Zealand. I thought initially to take a break from blogging but a trip to the Sargent Gallery, Wanganui’s cultural centre, changed my mind. If this post seems looser than usual, it is because I am not in my usual context.

When I began writing this treatise, I indicated that I would discuss all the arts. However, I have so far restricted myself to discussing literature and film. I always intended to talk about poetry and music, and shall at some point, but thought I would probably not speak at all about the visual arts – by which I mean painting, photography and sculpture. These ‘static’ arts I put in the ‘too hard’ category. I thought I lacked the requisite aesthetic sensibility to speak authoritatively about them. I thought I might flounder.

My uncertainty about how to proceed is in fact symptomatic of a malaise afflicting both the art-world and the criticism that surrounds it. The art-world is in crisis and has been for a long time. The audience for visual art has lost its ability to judge good work from bad, and this has led to the ascension of the gimmicky and the pretentious, the trivially scandalous. As was pointed out to me yesterday, television commercials are aimed at nine year olds; the art-world celebrates work that is likewise aimed at the lowest common denominator. This crisis in the art-world is partly cause and partly effect of a failure to theorists to speak effectively about the nature of art. I did some some reading into aesthetic theory some time ago; my impression of it as this distance is that the theorists divided into two camps, the idealist and the cynics. The idealists believe that aesthetic appreciation and art in general has a ineffeable quality. You either get it or you don’t. You’re either “one of us” or just another member of the herd. The cynical view, presented in the essay “The Art World” (by, I think, Howard S. Becker), is that art is whatever the community of artists, curators and critics say is art. Both views suggest a snobbery pervading the art-world. Could this snobbery be a kind of defensive posturing to avoid self-doubt?

I have tended to side with the cynics in supposing that there is no intrinsic way to define the nature of art or the aesthetic experience. However, my trip to the Sargent Gallery has persuaded me that it might yet be possible. The Sergent, a fantastic gallery that I visit it every time I come to Whanganui, I enjoy far more than I do the Auckland Art Gallery: perhaps this is because the Sargent is remote from the centres of the New Zealand art-world and can take a more independent attitude. When wandering through the rooms, I felt completely absorbed in the works I was observing, so much so that when I stepped outside, I felt the real world, which had been held in abeyance, descend like a sudden burden. My postive experience makes me feel I might have something to say about the visual arts after all.

Visual art consists of a subject and its representation (I have discussed this before with relation to literature). A gap, however, exists between the form and the content; when we look at a painting, even of the most realistic sort, we are aware that it has been created, that every effect is the result of a number of brush strokes. This gap transforms the work into a kind of communicative act; we concern ourselves not so much with the topic of the painting but at the way it has been rendered, the artist’s technical mastery. Prior to the advent of photography much painting aimed at realism; yet even the most realistic painting was still a painting and of a different ontological status to the thing depicted. The impressionists widened the gap between the subject and its representation so that viewing a work became a kind of interpretation. The Impressionist does not show the World, nor even does he show an impression of the World. In fact we do not see the world this way at all. He alienates the viewer from the world, introducing a layer of artifice between the viewer and the scene portrayed. The viewer must overcome this gap and in the process of overcoming experiences aesthetic pleasure.

Great art steers a course between the two extremes of revealing and concealing, creating a tension between form and content. Where art has gone wrong in the twentieth century, is that it has failed to maintain this tension. Some art, such as the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian, of Jackson Pollack, has abandoned representation entirely, opting instead for pure form. Perhaps a viewer can enjoy these works, but only by projecting onto them the content they lack , by interpreting them in terms of abstract rules, and this requires extensive training. On the other hand, we have ‘ready-made’ art such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”. In these cases, content has obliterated form almost entirely; we are not longer interested in the thing, only in the artist’s decision to present it. The object itself has been rendered irrelevant.

It is unsurprising that among the general public Impressionist art is the most popular.

These thoughts are provisional at the moment. I am aware, for instance, that I have not discussed ‘the aura’ of the artwork at all. I need to do some more reading and, more importantly, view more art. Hopefully, I will be able to expand and sharpen these thoughts at a later date.

“The Only Meaning of the Oil-Black Water” by David Eggers was first published as part of a collection in 2005. The aspect of this rather brilliant story that is pertinent to this discussion is that Eggers weaves through it a kind of meta-commentary on the art of story-telling itself. He anticipates and forestalls the interpretive strategies of the reader, beginning in the first paragraph.

“Pilar was not getting over divorce or infidelity or death. She was fleeing nothing. She flew to Costa Rica one day[…] because she had time off and Hand, her longtime friend, was there, or near enough. There is almost no sadness in this story.”

In saying that there is (almost) no sadness in the story Eggers implicitly criticises the notion (which we are taught in high school) that stories are concerned with conflict, external or internal to the characters, and that the story is concerned with successful resolving this conflict. By saying that there is no sadness in the story Eggers is throwing down the gauntlet, attempting to demonstrate that a story can still be interesting when there are no obstacles for the characters to overcome.

Pilar has arrived in Costa Rica with the intention of having a fling with Hand. The story describes an episode in Pilar’s life, encapsulated by her arrival in Costa Rica and her departure from the beachside town in which they have stayed. Pilar has had such ‘casual’ encounters before and knows almost precisely the trajectory the relationship will follow. She is too hyper-critical and too protective of her own independence to permit the relationship to develop into anything more serious; to ensure the reader entertains no doubt about this, after a long passage in which Pilar considers a number trivial reasons why she and Hand might not “want to continue having sex”, Eggers breaks in to announce “This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love”.

Continually through the story Eggers disrupts its aura of realism. Sometimes he includes passages in which personified things or animals, such as clouds and treetops, enter into dialogue with each other. These snatches of magic realism do not illuminate any deeper themes but rather seem incidental, tangential to the story. Sometimes he addresses the reader directly. For instance, a number of horses feature early on (they graze just outside the hotel). The reader might wonder if the horses possess a deeper significance. Eggers disappoints our expectation by announcing that “The horses had no symbolic value.” During her time in the beachside town, Pilar and Hand visit bars and go scuba diving; they spend a lot of time surfing. Eggers justifies this by saying, “This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves or mountains.”

Eggers thus assumes an antagonistic stance towards to his readers – at least to those readers who come to the story with fixed ideas of what literature should be, or assume that it must possess deeper meaning. One promising way of explaining the formal qualities of literature is to suppose that it poses questions and then answers them. Eggers attacks this standpoint by implication:

“If there were a question that needed to be answered in this story it would be not one but many, and would be these: How can a world allow all of this? Allow these people to live so long? To travel all these miles south, to a place so different but still so comfortable, and that place, meet again? To allow them to be naked together for the first time? What would their parents think? What would their friends think? Would anyone object? Who would plan for them? How many times in life must we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? […}”

The story does not address these questions. On first reading they seem irrelevant to the story; on second reading they seem relevant but in a particular way. The questions do not point to an underlying theme or message; they gesture outside the text. The story requires, Eggers implies, an interpretive stance that is speculative, subjective, what I have elsewhere described as a horizontal rather than a vertical criticism. Eggers is asking the reader to go beyond the text to the World that lies outside it.

In one respect, a lot happens in “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Black Water” but, in another more important sense, nothing happens. There is no real conflict, no serious arguments, no Joycean epiphany. Surprises occur but nothing that touches Pilar’s or Hand’s core selves. The sexual encounter happens almost precisely as Pilar has envisaged it and leads nowhere. Everything in the story is inconsequential.

And yet, despite all this, the story is interesting. It is interesting for several reasons. The central scenario is interesting because the idea of hassle-free, inconsequential sex is interesting. For most people, sex always comes with complications – yet we continue to believe there are people out there who can enjoy such relationships. Second, the setting, with its varied, colourful, local and visiting fauna, is interesting. The story comes across partly as extremely well written travel writing. Third, the style is interesting. The secret to good style is the piling up of detail on detail, and in this Eggers succeeds very well.

Fourth, the story is interesting precisely because it confronts the reader’s expectations. Its negative stance towards interpretation has the ironic effect of opening up a space in which the reader can form his own opinions. And although I said that the story contains no Joycean epiphany, it comes close. Pilar, considering the idea that God might be immanent in all things, discards this idea, deciding that the sea-water means nothing more than itself.

“It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn’t that enough?”

The story’s insistence that the things it describes have no significance beyond their surface, its celebration of nature and the physical body, together with its reminders that it is ‘only’ a story, means that it has no secrets it keeps from the reader. Its meaning is wholly recuperable.

In the last several instalments, I have discussed the similarities between aesthetic appreciation and, respectively, make-believe and psychosis. In make-believe, the child ‘creates’ a World the meaning of which is wholly recuperable, which gives her a feeling of control. A similar process occurs in psychosis- the psychotic forces the World to conform to his or her delusional beliefs, and so renders it wholly comprehensible. When we read fiction, likewise, we ‘create’ a World that, because it is not real, is an object over which we possess a feeling of control.

Is this conclusion tenable? To answer this question, I need to elaborate on two points. First I need to discuss further the relationship between psychosis and make-believe. Second, I need to discuss the way in which the reader can be said to ‘create’ the World about which he reads.

The notion that there is a relationship between psychosis and make-believe rests on the idea that the psychosis satisfies some kind of need, that the psychotic in some sense chooses to be delusional. This idea is contentious! The thing that makes child-play fun is that the game can be abandoned at any time; the psychotic, however, cannot simply ‘snap out of it’. Psychosis is apparently involuntary; the delusional World is, as it were, forced on the Psychotic as the only possible alternative.

I believe despite this, however, that the psychotic does indeed choose to be mad. She takes refuge in a delusional World because her real World is even more unpalatable.
Psychosis occurs when someone encounters environmental stressors in their everyday life with which they cannot cope, and devises an explanatory paradigm to at once account for and conceal the root cause of her anxiety. The stressors can be subtle, may simply take the form of perceptions, feelings, that are as repressed almost as soon as they appear. To deal with these perceptions in a way that preserves the coherence of her Ego, the Subject creates a ‘story’ to explain the world and then seeks evidence to support it. This creates a vicious circle, the subject seeking to reinforce her beliefs if necessary by creating evidence, which justifies further evidence-seeking. Soon the delusional beliefs have a life of their own and cannot be shaken. One explanation for psychosis, then, is that it arises from faulty feedback mechanism- a mechanism which instead of reducing noise so that a true signal can be heard, amplifies noise by turning passing fancies into dogma. Although this explains the somatic origins of psychosis, it does not explain the content of psychosis, This content, the delusional beliefs, are by their nature, evasive, escapist.

So psychosis is a partly volitional and can thus be compared to make-believe. Can these two aspects of human experience be compared to reading? I have argued, following Sartre, that reading is a kind of ‘directed creation’. This idea is also contentious. It might be argued that a book reveals itself to a reader the way the World does, as phenomena to be interpreted rather than created. However the book differs from the World in that it possesses an underlying order and unity. Perhaps we should say of the idea that the reader creates the work that it is partly true, or better yet, to say that it is a metaphor. The book reveals its meaning to the reader AS IF the reader were creating it himself. This explains why the reader feels that he is control of the World that is being revealed to him.

The discussion so far raises a third question – the problem of ‘the interesting’. The child when playing and the man or woman experiencing psychosis are naturally interested in the content of the make-believe Worlds. They are essential to these Worlds, are in fact the Worlds’ central characters. The same cannot be said when reading. I am currently burrowing through “Under The Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry, a novel that concerns an alcoholic ex-Consul living in Mexico; I am neither an alcoholic nor a Mexican and yet I am interested in the novel and in its protagonist. Why should I feel this interest?

The concept of the “The interesting” is a central crux my argument and I shall start discussing it in the next instalment, with respect to the short story “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water” by David Eggers.

To conclude, I would like to draw a connection between literary appreciation and another aspect of human life ¬– dreaming. The dreamer experiences a World that is both intensely meaningful and fundamentally related to her own concerns. The psychotic can be considered to be dreaming when she is awake. One cannot underestimate the richness of a person’s dream-life as indeed one cannot underestimate the richness of a psychotic’s delusions. The relationship between dreaming and literature is complex and contentious but I hope to pursue it later in this blog.

I concluded the previous instalment of this blog by saying that a large part of the pleasure of reading derives from the reader’s feeling that the entire meaning of the work is potentially available, that a book, a film, or a poem can be completely understood. This idea requires elaboration. In the ‘real world’, the World of the ordinary person, one is constantly confronted with an assemblage of things, phenomena, which we cannot fully comprehend– either this collection of data lacks any underlying principle of organization, is meaningless, or its meaning lies beyond us. Similarly when we are face to face with another person we are forced to recognize our own ignorance, our own helplessness. The Other has his own mind, his own ‘interests’ and these interests are not one’s own – at least, it is something of which we cannot be sure. This Existential anxiety does not occur when we read. The writer is not the book he has written; when we read we do not enter into a relationship with a genuine, historically and socially situated individual; we engage with the book itself. The book is a separate, completed artifact, a finished communicative act, an object that is by its very nature at once fundamentally meaningful and the meaning of which can be realized.

I believe there is a connection between aesthetic pleasure and schizophrenia. This connection is based on the idea of meaning being fully communicable. It is this relationship that I now wish to explore

Although I am not a professional, I have some understanding of schizophrenia. This stems partly from episodes of my own (I am myself ‘a recovered schizophrenic’) and my encounters with other sufferers. It is not easy to generalize about schizophrenia but it is worth hazarding the effort. Psychosis can be categorized into two sorts. The first is a kind of religious experience, characterized by a sense that the World possesses an underlying order. People I have met who are experiencing this sort of psychosis talk about “the interconnectedness of all things”; often they are drawn to mystical, Eastern spirituality. The second sort of psychosis is paranoid psychosis. This second sort varies from the first only in that, rather than seeing the underlying order of the World in a positive light (and positing God or the World-Soul as an explanation), the sufferer believes that she is the victim of a malevolent conspiracy. Nevertheless it possesses the same basis in ascribing to the world. The reasons why someone might suffer from the second rather than the first sort of psychosis are various, but include such things as a rationalistic mentality, an underlying guilt complex or feelings of powerlessness. It is helpful for the schizophrenic to try to ‘flick the switch’ – presume that the ‘conspiracy’ is benevolent rather than malevolent, spiritual rather than secular. (One of the things I found helpful in recovering was a kind of strategic faith in God, a prop I have since been able to discard.)

My own experience of psychosis is relevant. When I was ‘ill’, I believed, at various times, that everything on the news was faked, that I was Jesus or the Anti-Christ, that the ‘world’ in which I was living was a vast film directed by Peter Jackson and I was the star. This is just a sample of some of the things that I believed at the time. When I look back on my experiences, a number of themes emerge. The first was my need to believe that I was important to the world, even if that importance had a negative quality, deriving from my own culpability in the world’s disasters. The second theme is that I believed that I was the only ‘authentic’ agent in a fictive situation peopled by actor. I projected my own ‘interests’ –my own preoccupations- on others and assumed, when they failed to perform according to the roles I had assigned them, that they were ‘lying’. I would like to describe myself as a special case. However, I think these themes are quite common.

Psychosis and the enjoyment of reading have much in common- they both originate from the same need. When reading, the reader creates a reality that is logical, coherent and meaningful. When psychotic, the schizophrenic does the same. She forces the world to conform to the delusions that she believes and in this way makes the world both meaningful and, because in the end it relates back to her, ‘interesting’.

To conclude, I would like to offer some thoughts about what my own illness meant to me. It was not a complete waste of time. The idea that everyone is centre of their own World was born to me in a way that was almost visceral; and no-one understands that reality is a social construction better than a schizophrenic able to reflect on his own situation. For the longest time, I believed more or less continuously that I was on the verge of some incredible revelation. It is my illness that has inspired me to write this blog.

On the face of it, there seems to be no principle underlying all this activity. It encompasses pastimes as diverse as finger-painting, swinging on monkey-bars, games such as Cluedo and Checkers, and Holloween dress ups. This term we use to categorise it is ‘play’. Play defines the child as ‘work’ defines the adult; we categorise all activities as one or the other, although it might be fairer to say that the terms ‘work’ and ‘play’ constitute the opposite ends of a continuum of human behaviour

What is the essence of child’s-play? The evolutionary psychologist explains it by appealing to its ‘telos’, its purpose. By playing (he says), the child is developing the physical and cognitive faculties that will serve him or her as an adult: child’s-play prepares the child for roles and behaviours he or she will adopt when they grow up. In this explanation, the evolutionary psychologist ascribes ‘motives’ to the child that are not to be found in the child’s conscious mind – it is as if Evolution itself is acting through the medium of the child. Nor are these motives unconscious. Consider the child of accountants- does he make-believe that he is an accountant? No, he pretends to be a cop or an astronaut or a king or a wizard.

The evolutionary perspective does not satisfy. To explain child’s-play we cannot assimilate it into the World of the adult; we must seek to understand it in terms of the World of the child, a World which is quite distinct and has its own rules and preoccupations. Consider the game of tag. In this game the child who is ‘it’ runs around trying to transmit this ‘it’ status to another child, while the rest of the children try to dodge him. Certainly, this game provides an excuse for physical exercise and develops motor skills- but this is now what interests the child about the game. The child who is ‘it’ is a pariah, tapu; the other children avoid him as though he carries a contagious disease (which in a sense he does). In the World of the child, even the young child, friendship is important, and there is always the child who is shunned, feels excluded from the community. Perhaps an acute feeling of difference, of singularity, underlies the experience of all children. In tag, the children who flee the one who is ‘it are united by the game, form a community based on the exclusion of on of their members. Tag is not dissimilar from sacrifice.

And then when a child becomes ‘it’, what a transformation! Because the child who is ‘it’ is not just a pariah; he is a monster. He is all-powerful and the other children fear him. The game of ‘tag’ converts social ostracisim into potency. The child who is ‘it’ is the centre of the system; the game could not exist without him. So at a deeper level he, too, participates in the community.

The analysis I have undertaken shows how strongly the element of make-believe features even in so simple a game as tag. To speak paradoxically, tag is an imaginary re-presentation of the child’s World. In this it resembles more complex games of make-believe. I remember when I was a child that my best friend and I would pretend to be super heroes and invent super-powers for ourselves quite unsystematically. Although super-heroes feature little in the World of adults and not at all in the real world, they feature strongly in the Worlds of children. For the child, superheros are ‘interesting’ and this is sufficient to justify why one should pretend to be one.

The essence of child’s-play is make-believe. The game of tag finishes at the end of recess and the child who is ‘it’ stops being it and returns to the classroom. When a child pretends to be a superhero, the narrative he creates is determined by him and his friends, not by adults or the adult world, and he can alter its rules as he sees fit. Even the child on the jungle gym constantly informs his play with adventurous, adventitious narratives. The attraction of make-believe is simply this: when playing the child has complete control of the World he creates, because that World is imaginary. The real world cannot interfere even by implication.

How does this relate to literature? I believe that reading literature is a form of make-believe. The difference is that it is passive, rather than active. As a person ages his ability or willingness to ‘make stuff up’ deteriorates, but he still seeks the pleasure he found in childhood make-believe. Because he ‘creates’ (in Sartre’s sense) the World about which he reads, the reader theoretically possesses total control it. All the meaning of a book or a film is, so to speak, ‘on the surface’ – potentially available to a thorough enough reading or viewing. This contrasts with the real world when we can never be sure. Why are many people obsessed with the details of Tolkein’s Middle Earth? Simply because Tolkein’s creation, despite its complexity, can (in principle) be completely understood, understood in a way that the history of the real world cannot.

This instalment should be considered a direct continuation of the previous, “Reading Sartre”. I hope that the connections between the two are obvious. I have not yet decided what the topic of the next instalment shall be.