Preface

An Autobiography of the Book

Here were two grown men discussing “beauty”

seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic
were as normal topics of discussion
between men as soybean prices.
—B. H. Fairchild, “Beauty”

I envy these men. I confess I sometimes feel at a loss when speaking

about beauty. Although I can easily get hooked by a novel or film, or
find myself unable to move away from certain paintings, I have often
stumbled when trying to explain why this experience is important in
academic language. Of course, I have come to realize that I am not alone
in this dilemma. Many people have concluded that aesthetic abandon is
incompatible with the gravitas of scholarly discourse. Or they allow such
enthusiasm to students only. Why is this so?
We once believed that culture made us into better human beings, that
we could find solutions to our problems in literature, or that art provided
us with solace for the imperfections and injustices of life. I, for one, ac-
cepted these principles, like many other people before me, as my entry
into bourgeois, Anglo-Saxon culture. I, too, became “Romansfähig,” capa-
ble of reading novels, an expression used for Jews who had become assimi-
lated into the European Enlightenment. For many reasons, we no longer
trust the justifications we learned in school of literary self-fashioning and
aesthetic redemption.
Few critics or scholars nowadays agree with the central tenets we ascribe
to literary humanism, namely, that the pursuit of a literary culture will
produce better people. Moreover, we have lost faith in humanism’s most
animating feature—the compensatory powers of culture. We no longer
have confidence that culture can save us or that it can offset the nega-
tive effects of modernity. To make things worse, we have not developed
our own “defense of poetry,” a set of arguments about the importance of

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literature to society. While we have deconstructed inherited justifications

of literature, we have been neither willing nor able to offer others in their
place at any level of education, from elementary school to university.
At the same time, the position of literature in society—always unstable—
has become more precarious. Although literature has been involved in an
agonistic relationship with society, this struggle has become particularly
sharp in the last decades. The old class structures that supported the arts
and the concomitant aesthetic ideologies are falling apart. New technolo-
gies, such as the fluid electronic writing made possible by the computer,
are eroding print, which is so closely associated with literature as a public
institution. Literature, like all the arts, has had to justify itself in a way not
necessary before.
Many critics have celebrated this development, hailing the disappear-
ance of literature, the collapse of culture’s social autonomy, and the con-
version of art into a thing among things. Others have withdrawn into a
numbed silence. There are a few, however, who over the last few years have
spoken up in defense of art, beauty, and the aesthetic experience.1 These
writers, inside and outside the academy, have begun to reevaluate the aes-
thetic and steer the discussion beyond knee-jerk condemnation and facile
celebration.
My study belongs to this group, motivated by a sense that we are do-
ing our students and ourselves an injustice by not drafting a theory of art
relevant for our time. We require not retrenchment, a return to the past,
but rather the reconceptualization of art’s place in society that takes into
account our current social situation and the theoretical questioning of
the last thirty years. We do not need another attack on theory or more
reverie about the world of the New York intellectuals or even the salons
of nineteenth-century Paris or Goethe’s Weimar. These worlds are not
our own.
We have to craft our own defense of art in general and literature in
particular. How else can we resist the termination of funding for the arts
or, the elimination of art programs in schools, while securing the place
of the Humanities in the corporate university? If we don’t believe in art,
why should we bother to fight against those politicians who call for the
closing of controversial art exhibits? Is the only plausible case we can
make the one of free speech, no matter how noble that argument is? Can
we say nothing more about art? This seems like the ultimate aestheticist
position, namely that art has no value other than expressing itself. It is

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 Preface 3

ironic that those who have attacked the isolationism of aesthetic theories
see any defense of art as ahistorical and essentialist.
It is time to move beyond this predictable reaction to the mere men-
tion of the words art, beauty, literature, aesthetic experience, and literary
value. There are many socially responsible reasons for doing this, not the
least, professional survival. If we—and here I speak of myself as a teacher
of literature—cannot provide our students a rationale for taking classes of
literature, as opposed to those in history, geography, economics, or psy-
chology, why should they honestly come? Can we tell them anything
more than that it would make them better writers for today’s market-
place, or that it is required by the core curriculum? Can’t they learn how
to write equally well in history, philosophy, or political science? And why
are literature classes required? Many of the “practical” disciplines have
no qualms about telling students why they should major in mathematics,
physics, or psychology. Why do we?
My study is intended to contribute to this discussion by providing a
partial answer, one based on an ancient but still vital tension in our un-
derstanding of art—the conflict between reality and fiction. I hope to
reconcile two antithetical approaches: that art is an autonomous entity
and that it is a social convention. What binds these strands together in
my theory is the human need for simulation. When we engage in art
(listening to a song, watching a film, looking at a sculpture, or reading a
poem), we are conscious of entering another, invented world. Although
this experience may be inherently valuable, it also sharpens distinctions
we make between the real and the imaginary. I call this whetting of bor-
ders the parabatic potential of literature, a term I adapt from that part of
Aristophanic comedy, when members of the chorus step forward, remove
their masks, and address the audience as fellow citizens rather than as
actors on the stage.
This double role of the chorus, as performers and members of the po-
lis, highlights the dual capacity of art, to provide pleasure and a social
purpose at the same time. On the one hand, we derive much enjoyment
and excitement as we step into an illusory world. Yet from its fictional
universe, we are also able to gaze back at the actual one, criticize it, see
alternatives, or seek to transform it. In short, though we love art for its
inventive potential, there is something beyond personal delight in our at-
traction that is political. This parabatic function underscores literature’s
structural relationship to reality.

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But this link is not Platonic. It does not ask whether literature is truth-
ful. The novel, for instance, may indeed aspire to be true to the world, as
Myra Jehlen and James Wood have recently claimed. Literature may sup-
ply us with ways of knowing the universe. Rather than pursuing this mi-
metic line of inquiry, I wish to change the direction, away from objective
reality to the threshold literature draws between itself and that reality.
The parabatic capacity of literature illuminates the boundary separating
a world of invention from the actual world.
A paradox wends through my study, namely that literature is autono-
mous and simultaneously socially embedded: we enjoy the execution of
aesthetic form; we love particular sounds or arrangements; we take plea-
sure in discovering the correspondence between nature and its represen-
tation. As Wallace Stevens put it, there is “always an analogy between
nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange
dimension of that parallel” (1951: 118). At the same time, we inhabit
institutions and partake in social processes: the places where we read po-
ems, look at paintings, listen to music, and talk about works of art.
People often feel that they have to choose between these two aspects
of the aesthetic experience—beauty versus place, form versus action, and
pleasure versus duty. My theory of the parabatic incorporates both di-
mensions. It sees the imaginative world of art as the formal creation that
makes sense only when compared to the real. The parabatic, therefore, is
interested in this ongoing duet between aesthetic portrayal and nature,
art and empirical reality, and culture and politics. If Athenian parabasis
signaled the chorus’s sloughing off its fictional role to criticize the politi-
cians, the parabatic is that accordion-like divide linking actuality and its
aesthetic replication.
This state of being divorced yet yoked constitutes the reality of lit-
erature. On the one hand, literature is a social institution with a long
history, rooted in society and subject to political struggle and economic
regulations. At the same time, it creates a cosmos in its own right, free
from the denotative strictures of language, the rules of logic, and the ne-
cessity of one-to-one correspondence. Literature has leeway to construct
and reconstruct the world, a freedom otherwise possible only in dreams
or madness.
The ambivalence of literature is neither forced nor facile. Many think-
ers through the ages have had to confront this paradox—that arts are
useless and useful. “What harm is there in that?” asks Jacques, in Denis

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Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, when his master complains that his servant
carries too many paradoxes in his head. “A paradox isn’t always a lie”
(1986: 64). Neither is literature. It is fiction that claims to be true. We
lean on its truths.
We need literature, like the aesthetic in general, as a space where we in-
teract with invented forms, and more important, where we experience the
disparity between life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis.
Literature is important not only because its depictions are truthful but
also because it enables us to reflect on that tension between a verifiable
reality and its distorted reproduction. The ability to distinguish between
the actual and the imaginary is essential to us as human beings. Our
capacity to imagine something new, to invent, to project ourselves into
the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this
distinction. The role of literature then is to highlight itself as a separate
realm of human practice wherein we can imagine alternate possibilities of
human relationships and political institutions.
Literature, therefore, must stand as a separate institution among other
institutions in modernity. Those critics, who push for the collapse of lit-
erature into culture and culture into life, will not find support in these
pages. This fusion is neither possible nor desirable. If, as I will show, po-
etry began to differentiate itself from other writings as early as Euripides,
then we would be hard pressed to return to some Homeric organic unity,
before our lapse into self-reflection.
But what type of autonomy can we now imagine for literature today
when the expansive textuality of the Internet and the amphibian World
Wide Web threaten to capsize the values of the book age? Certainly not
the isolationism of late-nineteenth-century aestheticism. Rather I pro-
pose a complex semiautonomy where literature is both separate, as an art
form, yet part of society.
Literature is a line and the breach of that line. A parabasis. It is there,
yet not completely so, like the apparition of Eurydice we catch anxiously
behind us, between the dead and the living, between above and below. Is
it real or our imaging? And what’s the difference?

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