What Are We Doing Here? Page 11

  Grace and Beauty

  The Comparative Literature Lecture Series at Princeton University: April 7, 2016

  I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify my doubts about their usefulness.

  The fact is that I have begun to feel both intrigued and comforted by the thought of everything we do not know, which is almost everything. The 95 percent of the mass of the universe that is dark matter holds the galaxies together, so they say. It is like a parable, this aloof and unknowable power sustaining us, the patron, so to speak, of the spangled heavens, which are so grand to our sight, and baubles when the universe is thought of whole. Whatever it is, it is utterly unlike the matter that is familiar to us, so I have read. How excellent it is that anything could be so unforeseen. And just as excellent, and fully as remarkable, that humankind has managed to catch a glimpse of it. Increasingly I think of the mind and the universe as one great system, and the unknown and uncomprehended in their infinite variety as sutures, fontanels, that accommodate the growth of human awareness. I’m thinking of the sutures in the skull, of course, that foresee and permit the great expansion of the brain unique to our species. This is a faulty metaphor for a number of reasons. At some point the fontanels do close, while nothing we have learned implies that the unknown is by any means reducible, let alone exhaustible. Wallace Stevens says, “The squirming fact exceeds the squamous mind.” Squamous means “bony.” Flawed as it is, I find my metaphor more serviceable, better suited to my purposes, though there is no poet I return to as often as I do to Stevens, and among his poems, few more gratifying to me than “Connoisseur of Chaos.” Brilliant consciousness pondering the imponderable. Stevens is the great realist. “How high that highest candle lights the dark.” Yes and amen.

  By implication, Being is addressed to the mind as the mind is addressed to Being. Both should be thought of as emergent, Being infused with its roaring history and on its way to somewhere or something, but, given the difference between its time and ours, as if paused to tolerate our contemplation of it. And then the mind reaching after it. To call it Deus absconditus would not be wholly wrong, since it is both hidden and manifest, elusive and radically sustaining. I suppose I always find myself writing theologically because only theology supports an ultimate coherency that can embrace equally the true, the tentative, and the flawed, as reality itself embraces them—which is only to say that we, our erring kind, are as intrinsic a part of reality as mice and moonlight.

  * * *

  There is tremendous play in reality, or, to put the matter another way, there are far too many layers and orders of complexity in all of Being to abide the simple accounts we try to make of things. This complexity is dynamic because from moment to moment every layer of complexity introduces any number of variables. I am aware that play and variability might not be exactly the terms I need. If they do not describe the workings of things intrinsically, but only as they are experienced, they do well enough for my purposes, since my interest here is in reauthorizing experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself. The tendency of the behavioral sciences, in their accounts of the evolutions of intelligence and language ability and also their stark models of human motivation, are parsimonious in ways and degrees experience cannot justify. And since we all do live with our motives, even struggle with them, and since we all spend a great part of our time putting thoughts into language, mere proximity to the phenomena should give us some credibility as witnesses. We choose an utterance, a gesture. By these means we identify ourselves and, in the same moment, discover and create ourselves. If it does not seem quite true to say one acts freely, the problem may lie at least in part with the common understanding of that abstract entity “one,” the individual self, and with our habit of subordinating important but unacknowledged sources of manifest behavior to the behavior we think of as willed, even when it is not enacted. In other words, there are no grounds for saying that our tedious, impolitic selves, our conventional selves, however much they give us to dread or regret, are less free than any other behavior. If we understand our lesser selves as a product of social conditioning, as much can be said of our best selves. True, since Freud the commonplace has been that our darker motives, being more primitive, are therefore more authentic, therefore freer, insofar as the word can be said to apply to this model of the human psyche. Neither statement is true or sufficient, of course.

  I know that my years at the work of writing fiction have conditioned my thinking about many things. The problem of finding and sustaining a credible character, a creature made of words on a page, which, or who, can seem to a reader to be worth attending to, perhaps caring about, brings all sorts of questions with it. Character implies consistency of a kind. A word, even a punctuation mark, can be out of character. There is an inaudible equivalent of a clang or a clunk where this kind of mistake is made. To ignore it is an option the writer really does not have. It is fair to call this an aesthetic response, and also a test of the phenomenon of credibility, that Ariadne’s thread. What fiction is not experimental? What fiction does not work in delicate signals, flickers of sensation evoked by language that simulate the ways in which we know what we know?

  But consistency cannot mean predictability, which yields didacticism or melodrama. The old Kantian moral imperative, that a human being should be treated as an end rather than a means, can be restated as an aesthetic imperative radically limiting the degree to which character can be put to the writer’s use, whether to represent a type or to make a point. These rules of mine are ignored all the time, of course, by the authors of valuable books. I do not want to imply that literature is or should be limited or judged by one set of standards. I am speaking only of my own sense that to have the feeling of human presence about him or her a character has to seem free and constrained simultaneously, and that when this ceases to be true, credibility is lost. From this I have concluded that a better understanding would create a synthesis of these states, though so far I can only think of them as being in opposition to each other.

  Practically speaking, when I am writing I tend to think of a character as having a palette or a music. An aesthetic, in other words. While this is in some ways constraining, it establishes the limits within which substantive invention is possible and, more to the point, within which variation is meaningful. These limits liberate the character, a fact that would be accounted a paradox if it were not so familiar. There are analogies in every art, which permit me the use of these metaphors.

  Now, if I were to give a character a childhood trauma, say, or if I were to make her materialistic or pietistic or paranoid, then she would most likely be acting out the behaviors we are conditioned to expect of people of whom such things are true. Then characterization preexists the character, and to the extent that it does, she is deprived of autonomy. If, on the other hand, she has a kind of coherency of tone and manner, which might be called a repertory of behavior if this could be understood as something emergent, self-renewing, self-elaborating, then these same things could be true of her without any loss of autonomy.

  This is beginning to sound a little like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition.”

  I absolutely never think out characterization in terms like these before I write, or as I write. But I do work from a sense of the experience of human presence, which forbids that diagnosis or moral judgment should have a central place in my attempts to conjure it. I reflect on my own exclusions, and when I do this in retrospect it can seem as though I have proceeded on the basis of a theory rather than by following the grain of the credible as it presents itself to my mind. The standard I use is strictly experiential. What is the specific absence I feel when I miss someone? The most estimable person on earth could not fill the place l
eft empty by a dear friend, even if it is never clear at all why that friend should matter so much. What is the abstract, the ghost, that persists in the mind, meaning him or her and no one else? What makes the atmosphere of a house change when some particular person walks in the door? Or to put the matter another way, how does our brain compose the ominous strangers who come to us in dreams, with their greasy hair and sidelong looks, full of insinuation and much too believable? Why just that coat? That crudely bandaged hand? Every detail is perfectly evocative of someone we don’t want to be so uncannily aware of us. I tell my students to ponder the difference between knowing about someone and knowing him. There was a time when they were inclined to provide a curriculum vitae by way of characterization, and it was necessary to remind them of the powerful distinctiveness of actual or dreamed or remembered human presence.

  What all this has to do with grace or beauty is not obvious at this point, I know. And to compound every difficulty, I will add another word to the discussion, an old and philosophical word, entelechy, which means “the active principle of wholeness or completion in an individual thing.” I have been thinking about this word for years, since I found it in the introduction to an edition of Leibniz’s Theodicy, a book I seem to have begun at some point, to judge by underlinings and coffee stains, and then to have put aside, taking away no impression except of this one word and its definition. I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas. Entelechy means “soul” in some contexts, which discourages its use. And it is teleological by clear implication. So I had this word in mind for years without having any use for it.

  Then, because teaching and writing made me reflect on how fiction emerges and, within fiction and perhaps every other art, how good choices are made, I came back to the idea of “the active principle of wholeness or completion.” As a fiction develops, a writer has the exhilarating experience of losing options, of saying “Of course!” to things that emerge on the page with an aura of necessity about them. A great part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the strange compound of utter originality and perfect inevitability invested in his best characters. After one or two brilliant details, every subsequent choice is disciplined by them. The characters, as writers so often report, have taken life and will go their own way, and their creator is obliged to respect and be grateful for their autonomy. Grace and beauty are, in the same way and in the very fact, intrusions upon authorial intent because the fiction has found its way to its wholeness and completion. They also emerge on the page, asserting an authority the writer should be grateful to acknowledge.

  I am very much in the habit of going to contemporary science for analogies when I want to lift my thinking out of a course that seems conventional, which in my internal vocabulary is a synonym for deeply suspect. It seems to me, now that I grant myself the term, that there is entelechy everywhere, from the seed to the flower to the seed again. But the concept does not flourish in an environment where Darwinist assumptions prevail, with their anti-teleological answer to every question—the organisms who lack a given trait or have it in a relatively deficient form are less likely to survive and reproduce. Change is accidental variation winnowed and shaped by selection. A cuttlefish can camouflage itself instantly by becoming like the stone behind it, because the ones who couldn’t do this did not survive. The most complex phenomena are ultimately that simple in the Darwinist view.

  New research in genetics describes the heritability of acquired traits, especially, it seems, if they are the consequence of trauma. And the fluent changes that occur within the genome, for example, make the simplicities of the Mendelian style of explanation seem very quaint. But simplicity is tenacious, and the arguments for and against are plagued by circularity. Teleology of whatever kind has been groomed out of the language in which we talk about reality, meaning that other relevant questions, about the nature of time first of all, have no place in the conversation.

  Before the modern period the natural world was assumed to reflect design and intention. This way of stating things did indeed tend to close down inquiry. In order to advance, science had to proceed on other assumptions. But brute reductionism also closes down inquiry. And this can only be particularly true when language is meant to exclude the possibility of interpretation that might be encouraged by tradition and by a kind of common sense. The odds are very good that our understanding of many things is faulty, and that it is premature to attempt to weed out what might appear to be imprecisions but are as likely to be a sort of aura of lingering possibility, intuitive play.

  It has been found recently that there are two immune systems in the human body: the intricate one science has long been aware of, and another, simpler one consisting of cells distributed throughout the body, which in the tongue sense bitterness. These cells identify and react to bacteria and toxins immediately, while the more elaborated system takes hours or days. A shorthand explanation for the redundancy would be that the first system is a kind of holding action to compensate for the slower response of the second system. Then again, since nature is elegant, the first system might also prepare for the onset of the second one, signal it as to the nature of the threat to the organism, or tend to aspects of the threat that by their nature need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. These deployed taste buds were originally discovered in the lining of the lungs. There is teleology in this kind of language, in the suggestion that such things happen in order to protect the organism, rather than that they happen and persist in offspring because they do, fortuitously, protect the organism.

  In this instance, as in a million others, it is impossible not to feel admiration for the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the body. There can be no doubt that this redundancy of immune responses in fact confers a great survival benefit on an organism. My own theology forbids me to interpose theological interpretation between whatever is to be known and any understanding that might be appropriate to it. To do so is, I believe, a presumption, however pious, that often tends to obscure whatever new marvels lie behind any present one. I’m impressed by great early scientists like Isaac Newton, deeply religious men who were scrupulously attentive to the given world. Still, granting that in cases like this one Divine Providence explains too much, it is true that natural selection also explains too much.

  I am absolutely not making the case for any kind of nostalgia when I say this. It is not nostalgic to express a doubt about the adequacy of a concept, even without reference to the fact that this one emerged, granting precursors, in the middle of the nineteenth century. I have said that I wish to reauthorize the testimony of experience, assuming that the brain and the senses are a part of nature. Who would dispute that they are? Scientists are as much inclined to dualistic thinking as the rest of us, and some of them are very inclined to alienate the mind from the world by dwelling on its long history of illusion—which might otherwise be called its long progress to our present state of knowledge, since there is no reason to assume that a higher primate should be capable of high-order intellectual clarity or interested in achieving it. It is easy to forget what an anomaly we are. Allowance being made, of course, for the propensity toward error we have always demonstrated, and which becomes evident only in retrospect, allowing any present time—our own, for example—to believe it has matured beyond this propensity.

  The fact remains that there is no other origin for the human mind which is not dependent on theistic assumptions we have agreed, in my case for theistic reasons, not to make. I propose two things: first, that if the mind is to be thought of as a product of the world, or of the processes of which the world is itself a product in its substance and in its history, then the mind ought to be of great interest as evidence about the nature of Being. It is the ultimate known instance of complexity organizing itself, not only to be efficacious
in innumerable ways but also to be free—to use a word it is difficult to use with precision. That said, it is only because we are so profoundly anomalous that we have any use for it at all. Therefore it is a subject that is even more interesting than it is difficult.

  We say the mind is creative, a phrase that certainly implies a meaningful freedom. I have said a little about this kind of creation as I experience it when I write. It is free in this sense—the world would certainly never have felt the lack of an imaginary minister dying in Iowa in 1956 had anything intervened to stop me from writing a book. I would have felt no need to give an old man imagined life, and death, if I had not realized one afternoon that there was a highly particular voice in my head. For me the impetus behind the book was simply that it was in my mind. I have never written a novel for any other reason. Teaching has provided me with an interesting life and a good income; nonfiction and the reading and research it requires are very satisfying to me. But from time to time I realize I have a novel in mind, and then it is a matter of consuming interest to me to see what it is.

  I overstate, of course. I am at risk of another kind of dualist thinking, representing my mind as a rather autonomous being in its own right, which now and then asserts its notions and preoccupations, obliging me to collaborate in realizing them. My mind and I. Since I have set about the project of reauthorizing experience, I can only report that the dichotomy sometimes feels this absolute. In the deeper sense of the word, what does a mind know, and how does it know?