DOI: 10.4324/9781315147505-3
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critics, the authors, the academics, the competent readers, the publish-ers, etc., means that its inquiry can never actually explain or illuminate the meaning and value of specific works, that is, it is not equivalent to literary criticism. Nor can it be particularly appreciative of seeing lit-erary works as meaning generation machines, necessarily encouraging multiple and fragmentary forms of research into their actual content, hidden ideological commitments or their existence as cultural text, all of which is commonly accepted in contemporary literary theories. The analytic aesthetician narrows the scope of their research by claiming that in the logical order of our use of concepts, literature is an artis-tic category, a linguisartis-tic artifact to which a specific artisartis-tic value is attributed. Their research is to determine the conditions under which literature and concepts related to its reception and appreciation are used. Thus, analytic aesthetics and literary theory can serve, at least to some extent, complementary functions. Analytic philosophers of literature tend to emphasize that one of the key tenets of textualism is rejection of aesthetics and conversely, some textualists see aesthetics as an unilluminating and naïve celebration of an author. Whereas I argue that neither need be true, it is important for the sake of the argument to cross-examine some central ideas of analytic philosophy of art with those approaches to literature that sprung before the age of Theory, so as to show that analytic philosophy of art can more effectively deal with some philosophical challenges and does not mark a return to some quaint idea of aesthetics.
We cannot forget, however, that the name “literary theory” is often attributed to some approaches that intended to study the workings of literature as art, and which in most cases, predate the post-Sausserean and ideological approaches. Hence, if analytic aesthetics can be said to contribute something to contemporary literary theory, it has to be shown as distinct and more productive than those, crudely speaking, pre- theoretical aesthetics. Otherwise, the call to re-include aesthetic cat-egories in literary studies will be merely a naïve dream of returning to the pristine, pre-theoretical world of art. In what follows I shall briefly comment on some problems of the phenomenological, hermeneutical and New Critical theories of art.
Phenomenological Art Theories
In the early forms of phenomenological criticism, as represented by Poulet and the Geneva School, what was perhaps considered the chief value of literary art was that it enabled encountering and merging with a different consciousness. If, as phenomenologists observed, consciousness is always already directed at something and presupposes the existence of a subject and an object in a unified act, then art, and especially literary art, constitutes the space which is created both by the consciousness of
Literature and Art 47 its author and of its reader. As Poulet suggested in his “Phenomenology of Reading,” to read literature is to experience the other consciousness in oneself. To identify it one has to look for its traces, to find that, as one critic observed, one’s own consciousness becomes, in another critic’s words, “filled with objects that are at once dependent upon it, i.e., clearly the result of its own intention, and yet recognized to be the thoughts of another” (Ray 1984, 10).
In congruence with the principles of phenomenological reduction, one investigates only the phenomena appearing in one’s consciousness, ig-noring all sources of information about the empirical author, biography or historical context. Nor can the work be equivalent to an autonomous verbal structure. It is rather an event during which the reader animates it, being absorbed in a different consciousness which leads one to a state where “a work of literature becomes (at the expense of a reader whose own life it suspends) a sort of human being, a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects” (Poulet 1969, 59).
The problems with such aesthetic theory are severe. To claim a pos-sibility of objectively constructing other consciousness from scratch by identifying its traces is essentially expressive of a belief in Cartesian sub-jectivity and as such prone to falling into the pit of solipsism. After all, the consciousness experienced by the reader seems to be an artificial construct that does not exist apart from a single act. As some critics noticed, such form of analysis “is inevitably self-referential” (Ray 1984, 57–59), as the original consciousness, in fact, never appears in its de-scribed configuration outside of the imaginative act of reading Poulet postulates. As a result of accepting such Cartesian assumptions, it is never possible to differentiate between the actual authorial conscious-ness and that of whatever the reader intends it to be, and there is no way to distinguish the reader-author dialogue from the reader’s imaginative monologue.
Moreover, the idea that literary works or whole artistic oeuvres can be unified by positing a stable authorial consciousness whose private inner experiences can be accessed through the language of the text is hopelessly naïve and goes against the grain of the greatest achievements of the twentieth-century philosophy of language, be it continental, as in the case of the followers of de Saussure or Bakhtin, or analytic as with Wittgenstein. Their greatest merit was to notice that language is nec-essarily public and autonomous and cannot be said to express strictly private mental states of individual Cartesian subjects.
Finally, phenomenological criticism is blind to most aspects of the ac-tual reader’s (be it expert or naïve) practice and artistic appreciation.
Ascribing value, enjoying the form, placing the work in the artistic tra-dition and acknowledging its unique character is nowhere to be found in Poulet’s theory (Lawall 1968, 74–135). Similarly, the hunt for the
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consciousness of the other does not seem to be the chief preoccupa-tion either of the trained readers or the ordinary consumers of popular literature.
A much more sophisticated theory of phenomenological literary aesthetics was put forward by Roman Ingarden, although some of its central claims also remain objectionable. Contrary to Poulet, Ingarden acknowledges that the literary work exists as a relatively autonomous skeletal structure, so to say, which the reader animates by filling its spots of indeterminacy, by concretizing it in the act of reading. As Eagleton spitefully commented “rather in the manner of those children’s picture books which you colour in according to the manufacturer’s instruc-tions” (Eagleton 2008, 70).
The relation between the reader’s imaginative, creative reading and the intended form of concretization (which should be controlled by the structure of the work) is, however, again paradoxical. As Ingarden him-self admits, “the first reading provides the reader with just that suppos-edly intuitive aesthetic concretization of the work and provides him with guidelines for what can and should be sought in an analytical investiga-tion of the work” (Ingarden 1973, 283). So, specific concretizainvestiga-tions are simultaneously given to the reader and at the same time bring the literary work into givenness. Individual concretizations of the work are, then, at the same time the reader’s own creation. In the end, it seems impossible to distinguish the creation of the imaginative critic from the recreation of the work itself. One the one hand, the realization of the aesthetic object requires active participation of the reader who can supply the aes-thetic factor “independently of the work of art, but he can also be moved to supply it by certain qualities of the work of art” (Ingarden 1973, 295).
If, however, the work fails to do it, and the reader delivers it on her own, then it is “a pure creation of the observer, however much it may appear in the aesthetic object” (Ingarden 1973, 283). The question how to dis-cern the two seems to be left without any answers, leading one critic to claim that Ingarden’s theory of reading “may be as much a tribute to the reader, as to the work” (Ray 1984, 45).
Another intentionality-related problem with Ingarden’s ontology of art is his discussion of aesthetic experience and aesthetic object in
“Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object” (Ingarden 1961). Briefly, Ingarden claims that the object of aesthetic experience is not identical with the physical object that we might intuitively call the artwork, e.g., a sculpture or a painting. In his famous example, Ingarden says that Venus of Milo can be regarded as an aesthetic object which evokes aes-thetic experience thanks to it having (among other aesaes-thetic properties) a property of being “uniformly colored” (Ingarden 1963, 293), or as a physical object which evokes purely sensual experiences such as observ-ing “a dark stain on the nose” (Ingarden 1963, 292), a property which we deem aesthetically irrelevant. According to the intentionality thesis,
Literature and Art 49 every type of experience has a separate object, and consequently, the two aforementioned attributes do not belong to the same object as they are tied to different experiences.
But such a distinction turns out to be either false or uninformative.
If such an intentional ontology is not easily falsified by cases of illu-sion or imagination (does the experience of thinking about unicorns entail their existence in any interesting sense of the word?), then how can it enrich our understanding of the ontology of art? To point to an entirely separate mode of existence of aesthetic objects is clearly to multiply unnecessary entities. Paradoxically, Ingarden’s ontology might be more appropriate when discussing other arts and the prob-lem might be the case of his bad choice of example. The identification of the sensory-experienced objects with the aesthetic objects is neces-sarily strong in most cases of traditional painting and sculpture and the artworld has always been particularly sensitive about detecting art forgery as well as distinguishing between copies, replicas, repro-ductions or pastiches, emphasizing the unique status of the original object.
The case is not the same, however, with literature, film, performance and contemporary visual arts. It is clear that when we talk about the work of literature or a film we do not mean a unique physical object.
We experience and appreciate these works regardless of their form; a literary work might be printed, spoken and recorded or it might be a hypertext or an e-book. A film can be recorded on celluloid, on VHS tape or digitalized in multiple data storage formats. These types of art may, then, indicate that Ingarden is right to posit the existence of onto-logically separate entities: the aesthetic objects. But his theory becomes again highly problematic when it comes to contemporary art and the indiscernibles mentioned in the first chapter. If a urinal or a box of soap is absolutely indistinguishable from ordinary objects we encounter in a lavatory or in a store, but still we consider them valuable art when they are placed in a network of art-related institutions, then Ingarden’s ontol-ogy can in no way account for this fact, as it would have to paradoxically claim that there exist ontologically separate objects whose physical and aesthetic properties are indistinguishable. As a side note, indicating this problem with theories of art was perhaps partly the point of the famous comment about the contemporary status of art made by Benjamin in his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 2007, 217–253). Benjamin claimed that due to technological progress, artworks have lost their aura of uniqueness and authenticity and that art would, thus, become liberated from the ritualized institutions that used to govern it and become open to politics. But in reality, no radical change in our approach to art, authenticity and creativity has appeared.
Not every urinal is a work of art. Similarly, suppose someone were to replace the original closing credits in a film with one’s own name and
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then distribute it. One would obviously not create a work with a status equal to the original, but rather commit plagiarism.
The above also applies to literary works, as the famous example of Borges Pierre Menard story indicates (Borges 1964). In short, Menard is a fictional twentieth-century author who composes a work which is identical with Cervantes’ original but which can elicit a different type of interpretation and critical commentary. This can perhaps lead to con-struing Borges’ point as a rather banal claim about language: a particu-lar token of a sentence type can have different meanings depending on the context. The real point is, however, more nuanced and more relevant to aesthetics. We would not see Menard’s work as having the same qual-ities as the original, since informed appreciation depends on a proper identification of the object in question. The original Don Quixote and Menard’s creation share the same textual-linguistic tissue, but they con-stitute entirely different works, precisely because a body of linguistic tokens is not equivalent to the notion of the work. The latter must in-clude extra-linguistic elements, chief of them being the work’s relation to the artistic tradition. It is precisely the work, and not the text, that is the object of informed appreciation, and consequently, Menard’s and Cervantes’ works cannot have equal artistic value.
Perhaps a staunch defender of traditional, pre-Duchamp art might ar-gue that indiscernibles and most contemporary art is not real art. But that would mean presupposing in advance a theory of art that ignores the actual practice surrounding artworks and institutions and margin-alizes a large portion of what has become generally accepted as art since the twentieth century. As opposed to institutional theories, Ingarden’s ontology simply cannot successfully account for most art.
The problems of Ingarden’s overall theory should not, however, over-shadow the merits of his work. As Iseminger, an analytic philosopher of art, correctly observed (Iseminger 1973), Ingarden is entirely right both to posit a distinct type of experience, the aesthetic, and to distinguish between aesthetically relevant and irrelevant properties. It is also per-fectly understandable that we use the notion of the “aesthetic object,”
but it is not always valid to claim its separateness from physical objects.
Ingarden distinguished between mere physical objects, artworks and aesthetic objects. Artworks potentially have aesthetic qualities, but they can be truly manifested only in the aesthetic object which is the concret-ized artwork. However, this distinction still leaves us with the problem of the aesthetic value of indiscernibles or Borges’ Menard story. The notion of an institutional object, as presented in the previous chapter, seems to offer a more comprehensive solution. On the other hand, Ingarden’s discussion of the ontology of the literary work and its strata is well worth exploring through the analytical lens, and one can definitely find multiple common grounds with analytic aestheticians in this area.
One of the reasons that Ingarden’s work has not been widely discussed
Literature and Art 51 in Anglo-American aesthetics and that it lacks a proper historical recog-nition is clearly due to the rather late translations of his works. Although written in 1930s, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art and The Literary Work of Art were first published in English in 1973 and in 1979, many years after the emergence of both Wittgenstein-inspired anti-essentialist aesthetics and the institutional theories of art. Sadly, a serious discussion of how his work could inform or interact, or in some cases, be translated into analytic jargon would clearly require an entirely separate book.
Wellek and Warren
One important “pre-Theoretical” theory of art I wish to briefly discuss is the one laid down by Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature.
Although the publication of their work probably marks the first use of the phrase “literary theory,” which they, nevertheless, sometimes under-stand as “poetics” (Wellek and Warren 1949, 7), both the aims and the method of their research differ significantly from what “Theory” has been engaged with for the last couple of decades. Still, their objectives, that is, to unite poetics, criticism and history of literature in a coherent system of principles and procedures that inform the practice of literary studies do not seem to be very different, at least at first glance, from those of, say, Lamarque and other analytic aestheticians. Their method and their objectives are obviously closer to those of analytic philosophy of art than any of the other aesthetic theories that are sometimes in-cluded in the umbrella term of “literary theory.” Wellek and Warren’s work is apparently under the influence of the structuralist linguistics of the Prague School and the Russian formalists, though phenomenology remains another important predecessor (Creed 1983). Even though the ambition to lay down the principles for a systematic, rigorous, scien-tific study of literature is also indebted to the early twentieth-century formalist and structuralist theories, Wallek and Warren remain critical of purely formalist, language-internal definitions of literature and their remarks at times parallel those of Olsen (as quoted in the previous chap-ter). Nonetheless, there are reasons, though, to think that Wellek and Warren ultimately offer a narrow theory of literary aesthetics which, contrary to analytic aesthetics, is incompatible with bulk of the research carried out by literary theorists from 1970s onward.
A systematic study requires, according to Wellek and Warren, a meth-odology entirely separate from those of other disciplines, a methmeth-odology which is literature-specific (Wellek and Warren 1949, 8). Thus, in order to carry out systematic, scientific literary studies one has to formulate and clarify all the principles and norms that enable it, by analyzing po-etics, literary criticism and literary history, three constituents of liter-ary studies that remain in mutual interdependence. In congruence with
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the formalist theories, they claim that the study of literature must be
“ super-personal” (Wellek and Warren 1949, 8–10) and go beyond the study of the idiosyncratic, of the individual response (as in the affective fallacy), and that it cannot focus on the psychology or the biography of the author (as in the intentional fallacy). The literary work itself is the sole object of scientific study. Unfortunately, Wellek’s and Warren’s scientific ambitions are fraught with serious difficulties from the very beginning, starting with their definition of literature.
Wellek and Warren criticize those definitions of literature that they deem too narrow, such as an aestheticist belles-lettres definition, or too inclusive, such as a definition that would encompass the whole of the written language. Instead, they propose that a proper definition is that of “imaginative literature” (Wellek and Warren 1949, 11–14), that is, a category which includes, say, fiction and poetry, but does not limit itself only to the established canon of the classics. Though it might sound intu-itive and commonsensical, the definition is far from clear and, as they do not elaborate on it in the introductory part, but return to it throughout their book, it becomes more confusing.
In some passages they are clearly reifying literary text, stating that literary works simply possess certain objective features, such as beauty
In some passages they are clearly reifying literary text, stating that literary works simply possess certain objective features, such as beauty