Living by Fiction (13 page)

Say, then, that although criticism may produce solid and useful interpretations of texts, it can never test its methods or guarantee its findings. Is criticism then prose poetry? What can we say of criticism's many and excellent interpretations—J. Hillis Miller on
Bleak House
, Harold Bloom on “Byzantium,” Northrop Frye on “Jerusalem”—that these readings are true? Or that they are, by consensus, probable, workable, and fruitful? We can say the latter. And that is good enough.

 

For on what ground do the other branches of knowledge stand? After all, there is no epistemological guarantee between
any
subject and
any
object. The world itself may be sealed. If we are talking about knowledge (holding interpretation at bay for the moment), criticism is on no swampier ground than any other branch of knowledge. It could be, even, that texts are a great deal
more
accessible to knowledge than other objects. At least we do not dispute that texts
exist
. Even when general debate stretches to the point where we doubt (or feign to doubt) that the world out there exists, any of it, we seldom if
ever find our epistemological panic focused on the issue of texts. To vary a Woody Allen joke: It could be that the universe has no existence independent of our perceptions, that the universe is a fabrication of our dreaming senses—in which case I definitely overpaid for my copy of
Lord Jim
.

At any rate, even if the great world exists, there are ample reasons to deny that we can know it. The abyss between any subject and any object and the utter lack of any guaranteed relationship between them confronts anyone who thinks about anything. All possible knowledge, from the identification of species to the size of your foot, is necessarily interpretative. Inhibitors in our neurons edit the garbled impressions of our meager senses before they reach our programmed brains. All language-using endeavor is culturally purblind. So all our data are at best biased. At worst, we can know nothing. Profound epistemological skepticism and the blithe relativism which accompanies it are always intellectual options, or at least roles, and for anyone who assumes them,
all
the branches of knowledge are prose poetry.

But as C. S. Peirce wrote, perhaps sentimentally: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” We may well doubt that all things can be known or understood, but we do not really doubt that
some
things can be known and understood—or else we would neither argue nor teach our children. It is always instructive to ask a relativist how he raises his children.

Since we agree that some things can be known and understood, our human endeavor is to extend the boundaries of sense and meaning; it is to shift phenomena one by one out of the nonsense heap and arrange them in ordered piles about us. If you argue that this endeavor yields only a human kind of sense, and that our interpre
tations yield only human meanings, not absolute meanings, you will be required to propose a definition of meaning that is
not
, first and last, meaning for people.

If, as even the early skeptic Arcesilaus granted, we can obtain at best probable knowledge, that in itself is no mean feat. We have come a long way on probable knowledge.

For Einstein, the final mystery of the universe was that we are able to know it. (“One may say that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”) Our little human prose poems somehow connect to the mechanism. Einstein must have felt very queasy when the 1919 solar eclipse demonstrated that light does indeed bend in a gravitational field—a demonstration that corroborated general relativity and with it curved, inbounded space. He must have been dumbfounded, must have wanted to issue a telegraphed disclaimer to the universe:
I WAS JUST KIDDING
. For although we often feel pleased by the connections our minds make, we rarely, I think, feel they are absolutely true. (What if Chekhov went to heaven and God clapped him on the shoulder and said, “
YOU WERE CORRECT
”?)

Consider a tangential phenomenon. Opinion polls collect opinions, which are human judgments and interpretations. Opinion polls do not ask us to mark statements “true” or “false,” but “agree” or “disagree.” It could be that poll-takers would have a hard time finding any educated adult who would mark any interpretative statement “true.” I would readily mark a number of statements “agree” which I would hesitate or refuse to mark “true”—even statements with which I may passionately concur. Do I agree with the Sermon on the Mount? (Yes.) Is it true? (?) Do I agree with this editorial about the presidential candidate? (Yes.) Is it true? (?)

Why is this so? It is a very interesting phenomenon,
and one which, from one point of view, casts higher education in a dubious light. I do not judge this hesitation peculiar to myself, but freely ascribe it to others: why do we say we agree with a proposition we will not call true? Is this, perchance, becoming modesty? Not likely. Is it then intellectual cowardice, or “healthy” skepticism, or simply hypocrisy? Which of these did we learn in school? Which do we teach?

I have worried these questions for some days and settled on a simple answer which disburdens us all of the labels coward and hypocrite, and which you knew all along: we do not ordinarily apply the criterion of truth to any interpretations whatever.

Is Linnaean classification true? Is Plato's metaphysic true? Physical scientists, of course, speak of an interpretation's being probable, or workable, or fruitful, just as critics do. Interpretations of data do not have the truth status of data themselves; nor are they, I think, intended to, which is why I attribute queasiness to Einstein, albeit jokingly. Physical interpretations and methodologies are debatable, just as critical ones are. To determine the “truth” of a given interpretation of physical data, we poll the experts. Even in mathematics, consensus is the final judge. Writing in
Scientific American
, Martin Gardner says: “The validity of a difficult proof rests on a consensus among experts, who may, after all, be mistaken.” At this level the only status difference between a physical interpretation and a critical one is that new data will likely appear in, say, physics, altering as it were the world text, but it is unlikely that a substantially new literary text will replace the old one. In this way, too, criticism may be on firmer ground than physics.

Matters of scientific interpretation, then, are subject to
heated debate along the lines of “agree”/“disagree.” The debate can come to blows. But when the terms change to “true” or “false,” a curious hush descends on the ring. The blows cease and the air fills with disclaimers: gee, it's dark in here. Who turned out the lights? That is why science has so much trouble talking to the press; the press thinks in terms of “true” and “false.” When the reporter, notebook in hand, enters the arena, the scientists who have been exchanging blows only seconds before now join hands and sing, “We cannot know. We are only fooling around.” The same situation obtains in theology. At any rate, to worry that we can never call a given critical interpretation “true” is not to worry.

Who Is Crazy?

We may make an interesting distinction between two types of phenomena: those which we may know, and those which we may both know and understand in terms of meaning. For the hope of all criticism, and the hope of the race, is not only that we may know, but also that we may understand. Our understanding of meaning requires that things have meaning. Do things have meaning?

For a pantheist they do. To an Australian aboriginal before Europeanization, as is well known, every bush and rock, by its very existence, continuously uttered its human meaning as if it were speech. The desert was an elaborate and personal message, or a great book which people could read and interpret. Similarly, to superstitious people everywhere and at all times, events and objects are personal omens and portents and commands.

It has been many centuries since adult Europeans have enjoyed and feared a universe so sentient, so voluble, and
so interested in their doings. Christianity and science, which on big issues go hand in hand intellectually as well as historically, everywhere raised the standard of living and cut down on the fun. Everywhere Christianity and science hushed the bushes and gagged the rocks. They razed the sacred groves, killed the priests, and drained the flow of meaning right off the planet. They built schools; they taught people to measure and add, to write, and to pray to an absent God. The direction of recent history is toward desacralization, the unhinging of materials from meaning. The function of Western knowledge is to “de-spookify.” Christianity and early science began this process; the ideals of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, coupled with Enlightenment ideals of progress and democracy, carried it still further. The individual, with his society changing all around him, with his private prayer and reasoned vote, was the new unit of meaning.

From there to secular existentialism was but a single, natural step: you do not find or discover personal meaning in the world, nor do your unchanging social traditions dish it out, nor does your church. Instead, you make it up. You make it up from what is left, from internal elements alone, such as moods. The paucity of internal materials, you will find, leaves you free intellectually to range the whole gamut of relativism.

 

We can trace a progression, then, from the judgment that everything we see has meaning, to the judgment that nothing we see has meaning. Between these two extreme positions we have, believe it or not, criticism and the other interpretative fields, which assert that
some
things have meaning. Let us adopt this position: some things
have meaning. The question now is:
which
things have meaning? Where do we draw the line?

 

Which things have meaning? Let us consider the stirring example of Hans Prinzhorn. Hans Prinzhorn is a psychotherapist who wrote
Artistry of the Mentally III.
Referring to the doodles, and only the doodles, of hospitalized schizophrenics, Prinzhorn asserted: “Even the smallest loop…can be understood…and interpreted.” Happy Hans Prinzhorn! For he has found a method (presumably Freudian) for the finding of meaning in “even the smallest loop”! He will never run out of objects from which meaning can be derived, so long as schizophrenics keep doodling. In the happiness of his situation, and in the centrality of his position in the very thick of meaning, he is matched only by the schizophrenics on the other side of the desk, who were presumably hospitalized in the first place for, among other things, the creepy habit of finding meaning in even the smallest loop of everything.

“I know for a fact,” said one patient, “that each tree has a habeas corpus in front of it…. The habeas corpus tells everything about that tree.” “You'd be surprised,” this patient said on another occasion, “how much cosmics cobwebs give off.” Very busy in another asylum was an artist, Adolf Wölfli. Wölfli, a child-molester who spent the last thirteen years of his life in isolation from other asylum inmates, made elaborate drawings and paintings dense with meanings. (He conceived of a highest number called Oberon, “which may not be surpassed, at the risk of catastrophe.”) Of his work he said brightly, “There is so much to do here. You'd never guess how you have to use your head so as not to forget anything. It would be
enough to drive a body mad if he wasn't mad already.”

Schematically we could see an asylum as a meaning factory. The schizophrenics understand and interpret the world's smallest loops; the schizophrenics doodle. Hans Prinzhorn understands and interprets the schizophrenics' doodles' smallest loops. The only question is, why is Prinzhorn on one side of the desk and the schizophrenics on the other? How do we decide who belongs on which side of the desk?

We lock up people who gravely and harmfully trespass the limits of understanding. We consider harmlessly insane those systems of interpretation which violate the bounds of good sense by consensus, the bounds which separate that which can be understood from that which cannot. Some things have meaning; some things do not. It is well not to confuse the categories.

Why is it sane to find meaning in a doodle and insane to find meaning in a puddle of rain? Why is it sane to count the incidence of the word “murder” in Shakespeare and insane to count frost cracks in the sidewalk? Why is mathematics sane and numerology insane? Why is astronomy sane and astrology insane? Why is it sane to perform an autopsy and insane to read entrails? Why can we sanely inspect the clouds to learn tomorrow's weather, but not the sex of an unborn child? Why is it sane to assign meaning to the elements of a Nepalese altar and insane to assign meaning to the elements in a chemical compound?

The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear. We commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the given natural world does not. That human beings and human culture are “natural” phenomena is undeniable;
nevertheless, we draw our intellectual line so it divides the human from the inhuman—quite rightly. We separate culture from nature; we perform a limited set of intellectual operations on natural things and a more extensive set of operations on cultural things. And we agree that it is sane to inquire what cultural things mean and insane to inquire what natural things mean. Doodles, Shakespeare, and Nepalese altars are human; we can interpret their human significance. Puddles, frost cracks, clouds, and chemical compounds are not human and have no human significance. Mathematics, astronomy, and meteorology operate on nature without expecting the objects of their study to bear significant messages to living people. Numerology, astrology, and all forms of divination do; they seek human meaning in raw nature. You may plausibly chart types and meanings of schizophrenic doodle loops; but if you chart types and meanings of clouds and stones, they will come and carry you away. You will have regressed historically; you will have crossed the border, and committed yourself to the other side of the desk.