Paul Scott Derrick Grisanti - Lines of Thought

Okay, it’s a lesson. But what sort of a lesson is it? Are we talking here about “facts”? Well, obviously not, if we only think of facts as objective phenomena that can be validated through scientific procedures. If, however, we admit the validity of another kind of fact, or truth, that can only be corroborated by an appeal to personal emotional experience, then we obviously are.

This other kind of fact, this subjective truth, which takes us essentially nowhere and does nothing but bring us back home to ourselves, this is the province of poetry.

You may recall that Robert Frost described the figure a poem makes as the same as the figure for love: that is, not thought and explication, but feeling, empathy and intuitive illumination. He calls it “ecstasy,” to signal that e- motion , deep feelings, move us. But where does this ecstatic motion that gives rise to poetry go? “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” The ecstasy of a poem, he says, “[...] ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion” (Baym 1989: 1112). No ambitious theories, no pretentious revelations, only the fragile comfort of a glimpse of clarity.

I hope you will agree with me that Emerson’s words to his daughter, uttered at that moment of what is probably the deepest loss we can experience, also offer a modest clarification of life and a momentary stay against confusion.

This is why I say those sentences of Emerson’s dwell in the province of poetry, and why, as well, it’s not necessary for me, or anyone else, to explicate their content. If you can respond to the message they convey, and I hope you can, it’s because they are telling you something that you already knew.

Now you may think that this appeal to tautology, to circular thinking, is facetious; but I assure you it’s not. Indeed, it brings us directly to the point I’m trying to make. Poetry is language whose sense reaches down to those interior regions where, as Emily Dickinson said, “the meanings are.” And it expresses those vague, unformulated meanings, that are our common heritage as human beings, so effectively that we can begin to comprehend them, and therefore, to understand ourselves. To paraphrase Robert Frost again, poetry is a way of remembering something that we didn’t know we knew. It brings our complex and ambiguous feelings and emotions into the light of consciousness, and in this way, it constantly keeps us aware of what we are.

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What I suppose I’m trying to remind you of here is that poetry, literature, art—all of the materials of our most humanistic disciplines—grow out of and impart a different kind of knowledge than the sciences—a subjective form of knowledge that arises primarily from emotion and intuition rather than empirical observation, measurement and calculation. And if anything significant is being said in this talk, it is probably the claim that this kind of “soft” knowledge is also, in its own way, valid and worthy of serious attention. At least as worthy of serious attention as the hard knowledge of the sciences.

If, as the western myth informs us, the scientist sells his soul for ever-increasing knowledge and power, it is the poet who tries to redeem it.

In this age of an almost exclusive faith in the absolute value of hard, objective knowledge, those of us who attempt to teach literature face, to an even greater degree, that problem I alluded to before. I don’t know about my colleagues, but I often wonder just what it is I’m supposed to be doing in the classroom (and I suspect my students do, too).

For many years now, there has been a tendency in the Humanities to mimic the Sciences. Because of the cultural prestige of the scientist, because of the relative simplicity of objective demonstration, because of the power granted by converting natural processes and human interactions (or even human beings) into data and percentages, because of the alluring charm of new techniques and technologies—for all of these reasons, and more, we have been hoping to hitch a ride on the scientific bandwagon.

And I think I am probably safe in suggesting that this same tendency is responsible for the dizzying and confusing apotheosis of critical theory, all of the famous -isms, in the last 20 or 30 years. Just as scientific theories tell us how we should understand the world, critical theories presume to give us comforting formulae for how we should understand art or literature.

But do they instead (as does science, in its subtle way), act as cultural blinders? Isn’t the “critical tool” actually a particular bias that gives us the satisfaction of understanding, but only at the cost of filtering out all of those uncomfortable or contradictory aspects of the artwork that the theory cannot account for? All too often we study the critical theory first. And then, once it is mastered, the act of criticism, or of teaching, consists in forcing the artwork to fit into a pre-conceived mold. If it is necessary to ignore those facets or facts that don’t confirm the theory, to snip off a few problematic corners, well, that’s also a tacit part of the intellectual game.

I would agree with those who maintain that the cultural enterprise of science, through its unavoidable influence on how we think about the world, acts to simplify human experience by breaking down the world into easily manipulable elements. It’s certainly true that we gain power and control by negating complexity. But at what cost? You only need to compare the scientist’s reductive formulation for salt, NaCl, which eliminates all personal and emotional connotations, with a poetic formulation such as Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a la sal” (Neruda 1957: 211-13), which restores the powerful experiential mystery of this essential ingredient of life, to see the kind of difference I am getting at.

It seems to me that our contemporary dependence on critical theory, in a similar way, acts in too many cases to betray the work of art. It may give us greater powers of interpretation, but it reduces complexity to simplicity and de-values richness.

I’m sure many people will disagree with what I’m about to say, but I don’t think we are here to exercise power and control, although exercising them is certainly both stimulating and materially gratifying. I don’t think our task as teachers and critics of literature is to offer simplifying or reductive explanations, or to use interpretation to further some ulterior program. Instead (and possibly more humbly), we should perhaps be trying to cultivate an awareness and appreciation of complexities, of ambiguity, of inexplicable uncertainties.

I think I should hasten to affirm that this is not intended to be a diatribe against science. You may as well denounce hair, or fingernails. Like them, science is a part of what we are. And obviously, our lives—or at least, the lives of a certain, very lucky portion of the human race—have been greatly improved in any number of ways by scientific discoveries and advances—especially in the field of medicine. We should be thankful for that. But it is also obvious that scientific discoveries and advances have brought us quite close, in any number of other ways, to the brink of destruction (if indeed, we have not already embarked on the gradual process of destroying ourselves).

What I am saying, however, is that, as a culture, we have been enchanted by the knowledge and power that science has offered us, but at the same time we have lacked the necessary wisdom and restraint to use them responsibly. It may be ingenuous to ask, but the question this inevitably leads to is: “Will we be able to acquire the necessary wisdom and restraint to control our own power before it is too late?”

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Those two forms of “hard” and “soft” knowledge I talked about earlier correspond to the two ways of using the mind that Emerson called Reason and Understanding. He already realized, 160 years ago, that we are terribly free, even though we may not know it. We are free to choose the kind of world we live in by choosing, either consciously or unconsciously, the way think about it. He was already expressing the potential existence of the quandary we face today when he wrote in 1836 that: