Imagination, Truth, and Dreams

A Quick Response to John Pistelli and Julianne Werlin

I’m grateful to Julianne Werlin for her notes about the recent Literary Imagination issue to which I and several other people on here contributed. I’m glad in particular that she has flagged and praised Victoria’s contribution. I haven’t quite figured out how to produce discourse around Victoria’s poems and translations, but I’m very proud to appear in print alongside them.

I should also note that Paul Franz hasn’t transformed Literary Imagination into the Substack Review of Books, or even the Johns Hopkins Review of Books. It remains an academic journal, opening with James Barszcz’s carefully prepared edition of Richard Poirier’s lectures on Antony and Cleopatra (this one alas retains its paywall). Literary Imagination differs from other academic journals only in being something someone might actually want to read.

I’d been hoping both to comment on John Pistelli’s contribution to the issue and to respond to his kind discussion of my own essay over at Grand Hotel Abyss, and Werlin’s comments on both (here and here) are a good occasion. Both John and Julianne are friends of mine (Julianne is also on the LI editorial board), so I’d planned to respond via note. The note, however, got long, and Substack posts aren’t subject to double-blind peer review. So I’m sending one out to you fine people.

I’ll do my feeble best to match the portentously vatic yet jazzy note of poetic madness that the house band at John’s Grand Hotel strikes so effortlessly each week, as tourists and regulars take in their splendid view of the Abgrund.

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It will seem an odd thing to say, but although it is very critical and to my mind largely convincing, John’s essay on René Girard made me feel more sympathy for Girard than I ordinarily do. Girard’s theories are indeed inadequate to Shakespeare, particularly to the comedies, as Julianne writes. Yet any painting of the sea is inadequate to the sea. You can still look at the waves differently thanks to a painting. Girard notices some important things in Shakespeare that we would miss or see less clearly without him, as Julianne acknowledges.

This analogy of mine will itself seem inadequate on many levels, because Girard claims to capture the essence of what he is writing about. This is more even than the essence of Shakespeare. It is something like human nature or the human essence, which—if human nature abstracted from history is something we can talk about in a meaningful way—is certainly Shakespeare’s subject. From Shakespeare and the novels that he so loved, Girard attempted to extract a philosophical anthropology that was true in itself, and that could be stated independently of the literature that had inspired it. The danger John rightly perceives in Girard’s approach—beyond the limitations of Girard’s reading of Shakespeare—is that if you interpret art in this way, criticism can become a mere illustration of philosophical anthropology. This danger is more than realized by Girard’s vulgarian disciples on the contemporary right, who extract an eccentrically conservative heterodox theology and a simplistic reactionary politics from his teaching, one that they tend to illustrate with examples drawn from The Lord of the Rings. Whatever one makes of Girard as a political and religious thinker, in terms of aesthetic taste there has been a precipitous falling-off from the master to his high-profile apprentices.¹ Perhaps, of course, Girard’s thought lacks the internal safeguards needed to avoid being abused in this way.²

What shouldn’t be abandoned, I think, from interesting and risky enterprises like Girard’s is the aspiration of the critic to find truth in literature, indispensable if we think the artist aspires to express truth in the work of art. The danger that what results from this will be “banal” philosophical or socio-anthropological theories that the work of art seems merely to illustrate is real, but it is a danger the critic must run. As John concedes, Frye, if read unsympathetically, is just as much a Mr. Casaubon as Girard, decoding works of imagination using his key to all mythologies.

The correct and truly romantic approach, it seems to me, can only be that of German Idealism as it was reformulated by Schelling when he gave the first orderly presentation of the ideas of the Jena circle in his System of Transcendental Idealism. (I wince at inflicting this sentence on people who have begun to follow this account because they like reading about Alice Munro; please bear with me!) Art, Schelling there claims, is the organon of philosophy. Art shows us what is true in the nearest and most important sense, helping us to see what is meaningful in life. Yet if art is a source of truth or an illumination of the truth, then this truth must be something concrete, something we can make sense of. This we do not mostly through connoisseurship (although connoisseurship is an indispensable preliminary to appreciating the art of the past), but by trying to make sense of the world and of ourselves in light of what we glean from art, and vice-versa. Perhaps this sense-making has its limits, and our interpretation butts up against the trace of something ineffable that the work of art discloses to us, something that exceeds or evades our cannons of sense-making. Perhaps (another stretch) this ungraspable thing is the trace of human creativity, individual imagination bodying forth the forms of things unknown, giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

However sympathetic we may be to what John calls “the sweeping gesture and the bold claim,” we do have to be careful with this sort of rhetoric. Taken baldly, it both mystifies the literary imagination and banalizes it. When the doctor in Molière is asked why a sleeping potion works, he explains that it possesses a dormitive virtue, which of course is no explanation at all. To say that the imagination apprehends more than cool reason can comprehend risks becoming a similar platitude—a different sort of dime store philosophical anthropology—unless one tries seriously to explore what cool reason and its banalities can comprehend, and hits a limit.³

Both Girard and Frye make honorable attempts to see art as a source of meaning. If Girard ultimately subordinates the truth of art to the truths he claims to glean from Catholicism (which he thinks provides the authoritative interpretation of the patterns of behavior his philosophical anthropology describes), he deserves credit for seeing the close kinship between what we get from art and what people like him seek from religion. The most important limits of Girard’s literary criticism stem from his narrowness as a reader of texts. His vast ambitions as a theorist, at least in principle, are no problem at all but a standing reproach to less ambitious readers. Or so an admirer of the still more ambitious systems of Schelling and Hegel would say.

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This brings me to my own essay, in which I attribute a sort of philosophical anthropology to Alice Munro. For Munro, the erotic bond is one of more-or-less violent domination, mirroring the creative violence of the cosmos. Poetry and language can render this primal violence bearable, but only by submitting to its spell. This for Munro means being “honest,” doing without illusions about how dominating violence might be tamed. Munro thinks that illusions about the taming of desire are shared by Christians, particularly Calvinists, on the one hand, and by socialists and feminists on the other. There are many socialists in Munro’s fiction, and she is always mordantly critical of them. Rose in “The Beggar Maid” resents the “dreary secular piety” cultivated by the socialist Dr. Henshawe, an ambiguously Sapphic retired professor who collects protegées. Kent in “Jakarta,” contemplating the shelves of Marxist books owned by American refugees from McCarthyism, feels judged, “[just] as you’d feel in a room full of gospel tracts and pictures of Jesus on a donkey.” (The tension between her “honesty” about sex and the residual late-Victorian stuffiness of the Canada she emerged from is why what Julianne rightly—rightly at least on the basis of my interpretation—calls Munro’s reactionary view of sexuality passed unnoticed for so long. I may have over-egged things in my essay. It goes too far to say that conversation and companionship forms no part of Munro’s idea of the sexual bond: she is able to describe both things movingly. They aren’t at its core, however.)

The philosophical anthropology I attribute to Munro really is present in her writing. Yet it is certainly not something that she was interested in expressing in abstract terms. All of Munro’s important fiction, including the fiction she sets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is meant to be a reflection on her own historical moment, the “change in the lives of girls and women” through which she lived. I don’t think I’m substantively disagreeing with Julianne here, but I wouldn’t say that Munro resists historicization. She invites it, and this is one of the most appealing things about her fiction.⁴ Trying to put her moment in perspective, she attempts to understand the changes she describes in her fiction in light of what hasn’t, or does not change. This is part of why her fiction is so full of references to the geological evolution of her region and to astronomy. It is out of this effort to situate herself that Munro arrives at her unappealing, reactionary set of anthropological constants. Nothing is easier than to criticize or reject these in the abstract; what is powerful in her work is the historical vision and the commitment to a dreamlike artistic honesty about desire that motivates her to arrive at them. These two things are her principal, troubling legacy to later women writers like Ferrante, Gaitskill, Cusk, and Heti. All four are committed to feminism in ways Munro wasn’t, but in their different styles they each describe a tension between this commitment and an aspiration to be “honest” about desire in a way that is partly inspired by Munro’s work and the tradition of writing that Munro tried to perpetuate.

Responding to John, Julianne in spite of her own sociological orientation concedes a certain priority to “culture, and above all literary culture” as compared to the material and the social. It is culture that renders the material and social meaningful, makes material and social facts not a bare series of events but a context in which ethical and historical action becomes possible. I agree wholeheartedly, with the proviso (which I doubt Julianne would reject) that the distinction between the cultural on the one hand, the material and social on the other is—however necessary—a rough and ready one. It is important to be able to draw this sort of distinction, but just as important that we not allow it to calcify into an unbridgeable dualism. We cannot consider a social or material fact independently of the cultural context in which it emerges for us, any more than we can describe it without using language.

In my essay I try to remain almost completely within Alice Munro’s frame of reference, which however politisch Verdächtig it may be (as Settembrini says about music in The Magic Mountain) is more sophisticated than Munro’s reputation would lead one to suspect.⁵ I sincerely hope that unwary readers don’t guess that my Literary Imagination essay was written by a student of German philosophy. (I do make Munro out to be a kind of Nietzschean, although Nietzsche was not one of her authors. Yet Lawrence, Yates, and Mann—three great readers of Nietzsche—were.⁶) My own thinking on the issues Julianne raises, however, owes a lot to Robert Pippin’s effort to reanimate Idealist philosophy of art, in particular the stylized comparison between Michael Fried and T. J. Clark that Pippin draws in After the Beautiful. I will stylize it further, past the point of caricature, in this note. From Clark, Pippin takes the lesson that the artwork draws upon the resources of intelligibility available within a given culture and a given historical moment (including, of course, the resources of tradition). The artwork will for this reason express the contradictions that animate the society in which it was made. The great precedent for Clark’s approach to art, according to Pippin, is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s mistake was to believe that the contradictions of modern society are on the course of being overcome, to the point where art’s privileged role can be superseded by philosophy. From Fried, Pippin takes the lesson that art must be understood in terms of the artist’s intention to express the Absolute, the unity of self-consciousness, reason, and freedom.

The scholar-critic must strive to make sense of what I’ve been calling the resources of intelligibility that were available to the artists they study, and in doing so it can be worthwhile to bend far in the direction of materialism and even very technical sociology. Julianne does a magnificent job on her Substack showing how, for instance, the study of birthrates can help us to see Shakespearian tragedy in a different light. A proviso to all this is that what Jensen Suther in a useful recent book has called “true materialism” must be guided by the literary imagination. This is not because imagination comes first and matter afterwards, but because the two are inseparable. When it guides the artist, the literary imagination is hungry for the very details that absorb the intelligent sociologist, or at least for the “truth” of them.

This all seems very far from little old Alice Munro of Clinton, Ontario, writing tasteful and elegantly crafted stories for The New Yorker. (Although without pretending she’s Zola I do want to insist gently that there is more material culture in her fiction than you’d think; as a fanatical historian of her region she would have understood the relevance of birth rate studies to literature). Yet I think that the attitude towards art that I have described with Hegelian accents is not so very far from how Munro understood her method as an artist. She did not of course say anything about the Absolute, but her highest aspiration as a writer was, as she put it, to be honest, to tell the truth. She hoped that she could combine personal memories and observation (often including quite a bit of research) to create art that was true, “as a dream might be true.” This is a beautiful description of the literary imagination.

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1. Peter Thiel would be more plausible and entertaining in the role of sophisticated supervillain if he drew his company names from Proust instead of Tolkien: Vinteuil Ventures; Elstir Enterprises; Charlus Capital…

2. Blake Smith criticizes Sam Kriss for admiring the scope and ambition of Girard’s theories while shrugging off their import: “Taking Girard to be a stimulating crank rather than a genuine, and disturbing, champion of messianic apocalypticism, Kriss laments that ‘the world feels poorer’ for a dearth of similar thinkers. One shudders to imagine how wealth, so conceived, would feel.” This is an important point, but Blake agrees that the likes of Vance and Thiel don’t understand Girard very well. So far as I can judge, the intellectual menagerie of the post-liberal right is just as crankish as Girard, but their ideas are less interesting. This is something it is permissible to regret, although there are worse things wrong with the world. On the other hand, and I guess this point is contra Kriss, not all of Girard’s serious and respectable students are boring academics. Some are interesting academics: I’ve gotten a lot out of Camille Tarot’s brilliant and eccentric Girardian history of French religious anthropology, Le symbolique et le sacré.

3. Also perhaps what hot reason apprehends or comprehends, if there is such a thing. Something to keep in mind when we try to think about Plato’s criticism of his fellow poets.

4. In inviting historicization, Munro also very self-consciously places herself within a tradition of female writing, as Julianne says. She was intensely aware of her debt to the Brontës, starting with her teenage effort to write a Canadian imitation of Withering Heights.

5. I did write a defense of capital-T theory for Republic of Letters a few months ago, but reading academic criticism of Munro that applies half-digested ideas from Kristeva or Derrida to her work like a decoder ring helped me remember why so many people hate it. It makes me somewhat less embarrassed by John’s very flattering remark that I’m more fun to read than Jacques Derrida. Some of us have a peculiar idea of fun.

Two Cheers For Theory?

6. Lawrence and Mann, incidentally, make John’s list of neo-Romantic novelists. Is Munro a romantic? The word can mean a million things, but I’d suggest “no.” If Munro is committed to what she understands to be truth, it is less clear that she shared the belief, common to Christians and post-Christian romantics, that the truth will set you free.