Literature and the Lamp

From my collection, Points of Attack (Clash Books, 2020)

That literary studies have given way to cultural studies over the past half-century, that the artistic value of a text is largely reckoned to be diagnostic vis-à-vis social ills, can only be put down to a pervasive worry about literature’s import in the modern world, particularly the sort that finds little favor with the culture at large and so cannot sustain itself through market forces.

The line of thought runs thus: if unpopular art forms, and the study of such arts, are not to come across as mere aesthetic indulgences, other purposes must be found to vindicate them. Luckily, one lies at hand. Outside of the natural sciences, most areas of university life—and the university is far and away the great patron of the arts today—legitimize their activity on social grounds, in particular, the grounds of social justice. In MFA programs, poets and novelists are taught formal techniques for throwing disinfecting sunlight onto every benighted corner of life; in literature departments, scholars scour the poems and novels themselves for symptoms of social disease. The unstated aim, issuing from the university mission to produce knowledge for social improvement, is fostering a more just world.

One might have thought an abiding value of literature and the other arts was the affordance of intrinsically valuable experiences, just as knowledge for its own sake is the defining aim of the basic sciences. Yet consensus on the worth and validity of scientific results is easier to come by than any similar agreement in the arts, where the problem of taste has loomed for over three centuries. The surest way of reaching accord on questions of artistic value is by sidestepping knotty philosophical debates and focusing on how artworks help us defend other values already avowed by the academy: equality, cultural diversity, inclusivity, and freedom. Understood as sources of knowledge about these ideals and their realization, literature and its study can only be seen as goods. The problem of taste falls away as irrelevant and the dangers of disengaged aesthetic experience are neatly met.

But assimilating literature and art to straightforwardly intellectual endeavors, turning them into knowledge-seeking discourses like the rest, fails to acknowledge that art is rarely compelling for its assertions. We don’t come to, and anyway don’t stay with, literature for the arguments. It’s why the notion of paraphrasing a poem or a painting—unlike a line of reasoning—hardly makes sense to us.

This is one way of recovering something from the maligned notion of art’s ineffability. There is something rationally ungovernable about it, something which puts it out of phase with every cognitive enterprise that can be instrumentalized at will. Simply attending to a novel or a poem, just as we might to a person, may be all that needs doing; our ideal response, the most difficult one, might be silence itself.