"Truth in Diegesis"

Tom Pappalardo on fiction

The title of this post comes from the title of a chapter of a book by Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth. He has also penned Semiotics of Poetry and Text Production. Those last two titles suggest something of the nature of professorial approaches to literature. "Diegesis" basically means narrative.

I bought this book (published in 1990) when I was in graduate school, thus some years ago, but have never got around to reading it. At the moment I am "de-accessioning" things in my apartment, including many, many books, and I thought I would take another look at this one before disposing of it. I even thought it might offer some interesting insights, and indeed the opening paragraphs of this chapter did seem promising. Here is what Riffaterre writes:

"The only reason that the phrase 'ficitonal truth' is not an oxymoron, as 'fictitious truth' would be, is that fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being a genre, it rests on conventions, of which the first and perhaps only one is that fiction specifically, but not always explicitly, excludes the intention to deceive. A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary."

Despite such reminders of artificiality, fiction still manages "to interest, to convince, and eventually to appear relevant to the reader's own experience."

After that, I am afraid it went downhill Here is a sentence at random from the book to show why that happened: "The clausula may be true mimetically, that is, psychologically. Its narrative function is to provide the pseudo-story, the ostensibly familiar tomato construct, with a punchline, however, and at the same time to reintegrate it into verisimilitude . . ."

Too much going on in my head

Such academic writing is why I so seldom read contemporary secondary literature when researching a subject. For instance, I understand what the words mimetically and psychologically mean, but why does he make the second one a variant of the first? It takes the traditional meaning of mimetic (going back to the Greeks) and applying it to a category to which it does not belong. This is not at all unusual in academic writing. There seems to be a desire here to sound more profound that the material calls for. The rest of the sentence is likewise obscure.

Back before I finished my Ph.D. I published two novels, which were pretty well received, so I have always been interested in fiction and its "reality." I have read lots of works on all manner of aspects of narration and technique, but it is the way that readers are able to sink into the reality of the fictional world and, moreover, identify with the fate of characters in this world that gives me most to consider. It seems to be the case that we can identify with them more than with the fortunes of people we actually know and love, which, I think, must be because fiction is the only medium where we actually get "into the heads" of other people –– even if they are not real! One has the feeling that one knows Elizabeth Bennett or any other favorite fictional character in a way that one doesn't know one's own husband.

One more book de-accessioned.

Picture credits: Tom Pappalardo; Writers Cafe

Human progress

I am beginning to think that there is a "progress" gene in the human physical makeup, a factor that propels humans to move beyond their immediate environment. Lower animals may roam, but they seem to have a genetically limited environment in which to do so. The original sense in English of "progress" was spatial, as in moving from one place to another. An early use was "a royal progress." Or one progressed from point A to point B. Such has been the history of homo sapiens, one of movement and expansion across the earth. This sense of progress was "neutral," without the present-day connotation of improvement in time. The development of the the latter sense indicates a transformation in world view and of our power to harness nature for the benefit of humans. Yet the two are intertwined: since the dispersal of homo sapiens from their original habitat in Africa about 60,000 years ago, they have not only progressed across the earth but also continually increased their knowledge of the workings of nature and applied the resulting technology so that each succeeding generation, especially in the past three centuries, has a better standard of living than the previous one. Thus, we now have the "ideology of progress."

The transition in meaning occurred incrementally in the 18th century. Reinhart Koselleck, in his article on progress in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, notes that the "denaturalization" of "progress" often appeared in the context of  "history," which was no longer regarded as cyclical (as with the ancients) or as one darn thing after another. The process of progress and of history began to be seen as having a dynamic character.

One of the earliest studies of the subject (often footnoted by Koselleck) is that of John Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into Its Origins and Growth. Bury links the idea of progress to "an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely." Although one may look at the records of the past and see that civilization has gradually advanced, "you have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely in the future." In his view "the intellectual climates of classical antiquity and the ensuing ages were not propitious to the birth of the doctrine of Progress."

Ludwig Edelstein, in The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity, takes issue with Bury and seeks to prove that pre-Socratic and classical thinkers did have a notion of progress. By his own examples, however, it is clear that not a single thinker devoted a complete work to the subject. It is true that the ancients (whom Francis Bacon instead called "the youth" of the world) were aware that things got better with time, especially in the arts and sciences and perhaps even in manners and mores. The Greeks in particular felt themselves superior to non-Greeks, who, in their view, had not advanced to their own civilized status, but did any of them believe that humanity itself could be progressed, especially in morals? Perhaps the right political order would correct the shortcomings of humans and create a better organization of society, but only Sparta seems to have put such an order into practice.

Homo sapiens (click to enlarge)

For Koselleck, Bury, and Edelstein, progress is an idea, and, as Bury writes, "When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism." Such ideas, as he continues, "are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they are true or false." What is missing in the study by Bury, however, and also in Koselleck and Edelstein, is attention to the conditions that made progress dynamic, that gave birth to the idea that history could be channeled into a desireable direction with benefits to all of humanity. As Bury writes, it was only in the 16th century that obstacles to progress appeared to be transcended and "a favorable atmosphere" began to be prepared. But what exactly happened in the 16th century that produced "an atmosphere" favorable to progress? All of these works are heavy on ideas, less so on the effect of material changes.

It was in the 16th century that Europeans, after the initial discovery, began to exploit the New World. This exploration led to a number of inventions and improvements in already existing technologies, and also to increasing wealth for the European nations. Competition for the seas and for the wealth of overseas territories also led to wars but also to the first international "instruments" for regulating commerce and ownership. By the 19th century, the citizens of France, Germany, Britain, the United States, Holland, and Denmark were aware that they lived better than their ancestors. They could also imagine that their descendents would do even better.  For wealth to increase, of course, ships had to be sent all over the world. It required new products to be manufactured for people to buy, and new tools invented for mastering the natural world. The engine of industrial growth had to progress if Europe and its offshoots were to progress in their standard of living.

Could ancient hedonists ever imagine people could live like this?

We moderns lived in a different world from that of the ancients. The Greeks may have felt superior vis a vis their barbarian neighbors, but they were also aware of how difficult was the task of creating civilization. Thus, they did not take it for granted that their accomplishments would outlast their lifetime, certainly not into the far future. The surplus and affluence of the modern world are such that we can hardly imagine that life could be otherwise. Progress seems natural to us. But our present affluence is the work of past generations.

Picture credit: Reproductive Revolution; Psychic Tourism

The rise of Europe

The Suez Canal

My recent immersion in human prehistory (as in the earliest posts on this blog) has deepened my notions about world literature and its connection with material progress since the navigational conquest of the Atlantic by Europeans and the discovery of the New World. The scholarly world literature industry is focused on texts, on books, on publishing, whereas Goethe's conception (in my view; see posts on this subject on my Goethe blog) was influenced by something more dynamic and progressive, by the continuing processes of transnational exchange that were in force at the beginning of the 19th century. Exchange between savants and among ordinary people had existed throughout recorded history, but the accumulation of knowledge took place with the speed with which people could travel: no faster than men could achieve by walking or on horseback. The appearance of the locomotive, which Goethe did not live to see, would vastly speed up this process, but already in the 17th century the beginnings of the postal network in Germany and in Habsburg territories had brought the countries of Europe into closer and speedier concourse with one another. Goethe's interest in the prospect of Panama and Suez canals indicates that he imagined a world-wide spread of this concourse, which would encompass the literary products of the nations. International trade was the engine of this commerce. (Click all pictures to enlarge.)

Even though trade over large areas of the earth has existed throughout recorded human history, it was carried on by middlemen operating in discrete territories. As Holger Afflerbach writes in his fascinating book Das entfesselte Meer: Die Geschichte des Atlantik:

"The Roman-Hellenistic cultures of the Mediterranean achieved a trading network with Indian merchants, in a few cases with China, which were resumed in the late Middle Ages and then took off to some extent in the early modern period. But they did not venture West. The boundaries of their cosmos was Morocco in the south and Britain in the north, even if there was local trade in the North and occasionally individual travelers who ventured to Scandinavia or even somewhat deeper into Africa. The Atlantic was simply the end of their world."

Pilgrims traveling to shrine of Thomas Becket, ca. 1400

The benefits of trade were of course enjoyed solely by "higher ups." Most people stayed where they were, excepting perhaps travel for religious reasons, and had no knowledge of foreign ways, which over millennia resulted in the deepening of regional identities, even ethnocentricism, as can be seen in the case of the early Greeks, who felt superior to surrounding natives.

What intrigues me is not simply the great expansion in knowledge of foreign peoples that resulted from the expansion of trade across the globe. It is rather that this modern expansion was fueled by Europeans. The Chinese, as Afflerbach writes, already in the early 15th century had a fleet of 3,000 war ships. They undertook seven great expeditions between 1405 and 1433. These fleets, with 20,000 to 30,000 men on board, consisted of 60 great junks that ventured to Ceylon, Sumatra, India, Hormuz and finally the coasts of Africa and Abyssinia. The Chinese were in Mecca and brought back from East Africa a live giraffe. Yet, just as quickly as they began, these expeditions ceased.

As Afflerbach writes, for economic reasons the unexplored parts of the world were of no interest. There were no gains comparable to the expenses and outlay and the incalculable dangers of such expeditions: “Die vormodernen Gesellschaften waren keine Überflußgesellschaften; sie mußten ständig mit Problemen der Massenarmut, Hunger und Seuchen fertig werden. Viel weniger als heute konnte man es sich da leisten, für Expeditionen aus purem Wissensdrang beträchtliche Summen auszugeben.” Quoting from Fernand Braudel, he writes that the length of maritime voyages even on the Mediterranean was variable. A trip from Alexandria to Venice could be made in 17 days or in 89. The “normal” time for the voyage was 55 days. Because of the perils of the sea, the Mediterranean was closed in antiquity to maritime travel from October to spring.

Area of early Portuguese Atlantic exploration

While Europe in the 15th century was still plagued by the problems of mass poverty, starvation, and plagues, trade was nevertheless vibrant in Europe, and shipbuilding had improved. The Genoans and the Venetians established colonies in Cyprus and in the Crimea, where they traded in grain. Agricultural production also began in the 15th century on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, with sugar cultivation, also using slave labor. The Europeans began to set their sights farther afield.

Dispersion of homo sapiens out of Africa

So, what does this have to do with human prehistory? The origins of homo sapiens, it seems, are in Africa, between about 200,000 and 60,000 years ago. By the latter date, some numbers of the species had begun leave Africa. Homo sapiens fossils and skeletal remains in Asia and even Australia are documented earlier than those in Europe. Thus, homo sapiens has been historically characterized by its tendency to dispersal across and possession of the earth. Yet, it took a while. That humans did not enter the New World before about 15,000 years ago may have been due to the transition of humans from hunter-gatherer and nomadic communities to quasi-permanent settlements with the rise of agriculture. And until Europe ripped the rest of the world out of its isolation, most countries were satisfied with their traditional ways of doing things. Indeed, what seems most to have interested the larger integrated political or social entities in their earliest encounters with the West –– China, the Islamic world –– was technical expertise and the utility that might gained from such expertise.

Bathing pilgrims on River Ganges before non-traditional background

In the meantime, of course, the intermixing of peoples that has been propelled by Western technology and trade continues to erode the traditional content of non-European cultures. Thus, although it appears to be a "human thing" to disperse and to mix, it is understandable that Europe is blamed for the problems that this mixing produces, especially as the speed with which it now occurs is unprecedented in human history. Yet, in prehistory already we see the tendency to disperse, to interbreed, to eliminate difference. Thus, the subtitle of Chris Stringer's book Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Human Race.

Picture credit: Gnome Planet

Reality in literature

Eurycleia washes odysseus feet

Not long ago I was looking through a recently published volume of English translations of essays by Erich Auerbach. The volume contains a range of essays, but my interest concerned the new translation by Jane Newman in this volume of Auerbach's essay on world literature. Previously, the "standard" translation was that of Edward Said. Auerbach's intention in that essay is hard to grasp, even if one has read it, as I have, in German –– several times, indeed. It is probably necessary to go back and read many of Auerbach's earlier writings to speak more definitively about what he meant by "philology of world literature," which is Newman's translation of the title. In contrast, Said rendered it as "philology and world literature." Both are somewhat odd, as is even the German title, "Philologie der Weltliteratur." After all, Auerbach is asserting that, in our globalized world, all nations and cultures are becoming homogenized, whereas (what he does not say) philology was a study of texts, particularly of the historical evolution of texts and the relationship of texts through history. Now that we have reached "the end of history" (a phrase Auerbach doesn't use, but it seems to be suggested),  the discipline of philology would appear to be irrelevant.

In this connection was another essay, "Vico and Aesthetic Historicism" (1948). We moderns, writes Auerbach, have a historically unprecedented access to all arts of the world and of all times, and our aesthetic preferences are "indiscriminate." It is not a contradiction to enjoy both Shakespeare and Sophocles, no matter the different dramatic choices of the two writers, or even such non-Western dramas as Noh and Javanese puppet plays. We enjoy for each, as he writes, “the same preparedness for understanding.” Unlike the Ancients, we do not judge art according to “certain aesthetic rules or judgments" that are shared by our contemporaries. The Greeks, when it came to art, had rules that pertained to each genre, but the same can be said of every other historical culture and to the greater civilizations, e.g., the Islamic empires, the Mayans and Aztecs, or China. Moreover, a civilization can be identified by its shared artistic ideals. Thus, philology, which exumes those ideals through texts.

The Sacrifice of Isaac (Rembrandt workshop), 1636

This week I read a review of this volume of translations. It was by Michael Wood and appeared in the London Review of Books. Wood's focus was on Mimesis, published in 1946 in German, which is the work by which Auerbach is principally known outside of Germany. It is subtitled "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." That study begin with a chapter contrasting two stories. One is Odysseus's homecoming as described in Homer's Iliad; the other is the Old Testament account of the sacrifice of Isaac (which of course does not take place). Auerbach finds that what Wood in his review calls "the erratic, immediate reality of the inhabitants" of the earth is captured in the Biblical account, but not in Homer. On his homecoming, after all, and after a decade of amazing adventures, Odysseus is the same man he was when he left Ithaca to join the Greek fleet for Troy. As Auerbach writes of the Homeric style, it knows "only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present." In a memorable coinage, Auerbach writes that the Homeric heroes "wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives."

How different the fate of the Old Testament characters:

"[W]hat a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!––between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealously, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues. [...] It is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality."

In connection with the representation of reality in Western literature, Wood connected this realism with a transcendent structure that does not ignore the earthly existence of humans. Real lives play out in real time, but it is time subsumed under a transcendental authority. Thus, one's character and one's fate are intertwined. One cannot escape who or what one is, quite literally in the afterlife of Dante's Inferno, in which one is condemned to repeat for eternity one's besetting character flaw.

This term irdisch (of the earth) in Auerbach is sometimes translated as "secular," which, to today's ears, lacks any suggestion of transcendence. Just the opposite. But as Wood points out, Auerbach also often uses the word "concrete" to suggest the situatedness of characters in Western literature in their milieu. But, again, human fate is carried out within that milieu. As Wood writes, however, we moderns, true secularists, are left to figure out the meaning of our lives ourselves. Some might disagree, but "individual destiny" sounds meaningless in a secular world.

Prehistoric art

Shield with guardian spirit, 1850

Lately I find myself hung up on prehistory, absorbed in the "evolution" of humankind, not in the biological sense so much as in the cultural. Clearly the two cannot be separated, and I would disagree with Colin Renfrew (see earlier posts) that humans were "set" in their genetic endowment by the time they migrated out of Africa. If I can speak as a layperson, perhaps certain "human tendencies" were embedded in the genotype.

This week I have been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is hosting an exhibition entitled "Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky." (How brave to use the word "Indian"!). Several of the works reminded me of the early cave art of Europe. For instance, compare the shield at left with the image below of a similar animal from Lascaux.

Horned animal at Lascaux

I will post the images here and let folks draw their own conclusions. (Click on links below images for Metropolitan Museum information on the works.)

Lascaux hunting scene

Drawing of artist's world, ca. 1830

Many millennia separated the two artistic manifestations, but the Indian examples would seem to be evidence of transmission of cultural products through time. What I find of interest is that Indian artists, as they developed and moved away from the early "naiveté," remained with the same artistic idiom, but went on to apply techniques that have been learned through contacts with "whites." They have become as "sophisticated" as European artists. Below are two examples.

Four Seasons Series (Winter) by Wendy Red Star) (2006)

Horse Effigy by Joseph No Two Horns (1880)

Between despair and strength

Angel of Grief, by William Wetmore Story (1894)

Or perhaps it is only a case of "zwischen Eifer und Einwand" (between enthusiasm and objection), as my friend Felicitas Hoppe expresses it in Verbrecher und Versager.

Strength is what I feel when I am at my work, with the result an essay, a review, a revision of the book I am writing. Sometimes even cooking does it for me. When I am not buoyed up by that sense of strength, in creeps that negative thing. Despair is probably hyperbole, since I am not a natural depressive, and the thought of suicide is not something that comes naturally to me. If I were dead, I would never again be able to read, to fill my mind, to write again. Intellectual activity brings me joy.  It is not surprising that I am a scholar of the Enlightenment, not of the Romantic period: my heart has never leapt to behold a rainbow in the sky. I admire the beauty, the order, and the like, all of which, especially after Rick's death, kept my mind active.

It is really sadness, a low-grade manifestation of despair, but when it arrives it is consuming. It is going on four years now that my darling husband died, and yet, in a nonce, sadness seems literally to invade me. It is said that one can die of a broken heart, and mine certainly suffered a blow.

From Descartes' De homine (1694)

It was the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) who first clarified the structure and functions of the heart. On the Circulation of the Blood (1628) not only described the systematic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart, but it also offered powerful support for the notion that the human body was a mechanism, like a clock or like the universe. Descartes (1596–1650), a brilliant contemporary who promoted Harvey's ideas on the circulation of the blood, compared the heart to a combustion engine or a pump. The heart's status was beginning to change.

It was human reason, according to the 18th-century philosophes, that had enabled us to penetrate the laws regulating the natural world. Between Galileo (1564–1642) and Newton, even the earth lost its privileged position in the universe. The body, like the universe, was subject to regular laws; it was the task of the scientist to discover them. In the Age of Reason, emotions and passions were seen as potentially irrational, and it was seriously thought that rational men could control their influence. Aristotle had believed something similar, using the term "acrasia" (from which the English word "crazy" derives) to refer to people who made bad choices even when they knew they were wrong. By the nineteenth century, J. S. Mill claimed that the highest pleasures are those given "by the operations of the intellect and of the feelings as they blend with the intellect."

A rheumatic heart

The life of the mind, however, is a very self-centered, solitary activity. The operative pronoun is "I." In The Symposium, in which Socrates has the last word, the highest stage of love is one of self-centered intellection.

My life with Rick involved much intellectual activity, but that was only one aspect of our shared life. The heart played a greater role, and it continues to suffer.

Picture credits: Glasgow University Library; Frank Edwin

Another mystery

Cave painting from Chauvet, ca. 31,000 years BP

Continuing on the previous post: the creativity of early humans is on display in Upper Paleolithic cave art and in portable sculptures, dating to about 40,000 years ago. According to Colin Renfrew, whose book on prehistory I have been reading, it took a long time for the scholarly world of prehistorians to accept that this art was truly so old. There is earlier evidence for decorative human "patterning," in a cave in South Africa dating to 65,000 years ago, but it consists of intersecting incised lines, not of images that shows the interaction of humans with their surroundings.

What is of interest, however, is that the brilliant examples European paleolithic cave art, aside from a few exceptions, occurred only in Spain and southwestern France. Non-figurative cave art dates to 40,000 years ago at the El Castillo Cave in Spain. Animal paintings dating to 30,000 years BP (before the present) were discovered in Chauvet in France. Renfrew writes that it would be tens of thousands of years later, "some time after the inception of the  Holocene climatic phase, to see the great upsurge in rock art that then occurs."

Since those discoveries in the 19th century, scholars of prehistory have branched out all over the world, and the earliest cave paintings with comparable "sophistication" have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Cave art from Sulawesi (image: CC 1.0 Luc-Henri Fage)

Where am I going with these reflections on prehistory? What interests me is the issue of "transmission" of culture. Renfrew distinguishes two facets of human development. One is species specific, called "speciation, which culminated ca. 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. The skills associated with this stage include the use of fire and of stone tools, which were important in the adaptation of humans to their environment. This phase occurred before the dispersal of humans out of Africa, . Everything afterward was "tectonic," with humans building on the Homo genetic endowment, which, it seems, was "hard wired" in the human DNA.

The tectonic phase brought no change to the genome, and the rest is history: cultural evolution and the transmission of "culturally inherited" behaviors. What was there in humans, in homo sapiens in particular, that drove the species to spread throughout the earth and to transform the environment, to mold nature itself to its purposes? This subject is close to my research on a more modern aspect of this human ranging across the world, namely, "world literature," in particular Goethe's concept. What propelled world literature was another dynamic phase of human history, the overseas explorations beginning after Columbus's arrival in the New World.