From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
7.2 (1987): 91-94.
Copyright © 1987, The Cervantes Society of America
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In his haunting introduction to the Grove-Press
edition of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1952), Richard Blackmur
describes the trilogy to which The Golden Bowl belongs as “poetic
dramas of the inner life of the soul at the height of its struggle, for good
and for evil, with the outer world . . . in which a very little
soul may by its spiritual intensity balance a great deal of life. Something
of this sort is what is meant when we refer to the novel as a way of looking
at life, or, better, it is what we might mean if we said that the novel provided
us with a theoretic form for life. The novel gives the imaginative parts
of our minds a theoretic form for life which will modify or correct the forms
which other parts of our minds —all the conceptual and administrative
and routine parts— provide; and the novel does this precisely by providing
forms in which we can see the soul in action.” Ages before Derrida,
one is struck by the ghostliness of the Blackmur formulation, in which he
wonderfully perseveres, coming at last to see Maggie's ultimate encounter
with the Prince in purely Dantean terms: “It was a shade embracing a
shade, but in the shades of poetry.” And yet, despite the seeming
insubstantiality of this idea, it stands richly related to experience even
in the absence of experience. More than a view of actuality, the novel expresses
a relationship to the actual which the soul, as Blackmur says, “must
deny, or renounce, or accept.” The Jamesian novel, then, does not reproduce
raw experience but does address it: “Life” is not present. It is
implied. It is a factor in an intellectual relationship, an oblique factor.
The novel turns to its beloved experience much as the poet turns to his departed
daughter in Wordsworth's “Surprised by Joy,” hoping to find in
her a receptacle for his own overflowing plenitude and encountering instead
an absence, a shade. But the relationship persists even when one partner
in it is gone.
Distinguishing in the Meditaciones del
‘Quijote’ between a direct mode of address in epic and tales
of adventure and an oblique derivate of it in the realistic novel, Ortega
memorably describes the representation of reality in works stemming from
the Quijote as “espejismo,” a mirage ironically presenting
drought as sheets of water and yet betraying its own trickery. Something
of this same obliquity is to be found in Robert Nozick's treatment of
epistemology in Philosophical Explanations, where knowledge is explored
not
* For A. J. Cascardi's
response to this review see “The
Bounds of Reason: Critical Response”, Cervantes
8.1 (1988): 109-14.
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| 92 | ROBERT TER HORST | Cervantes |
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as direct possession of truth but as a connection between the knower and
the known: “In knowledge, a belief is linked somehow to the fact believed;
without this linkage there may be true belief but there will not be
knowledge.” The pursuit of this linkage is what Nozick calls
“tracking” and surely has important cognates in the phenomenon
of “trace” in particle physics. But here we are once again in a
ghostly world where things are not present but do mark their passage so that
we can turn to them only when they are gone. Truth thus comes to be essentially
and complexly relational: “Knowledge is a real relationship to
the facts, subjunctively contoured” (my emphasis), as Nozick would have
it.
Anthony J. Cascardi's The Bounds of Reason
undertakes to study a series of great novels, principally the Quijote,
Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary as
epistemological exercises in which skepticism challenges the conviction that
there is a reality external to or other than the knower and that such a reality
can somehow be apprehended. Traditional philosophy obviously rests on the
assumption that it is possible to know, so that skepticism, if it cannot
be satisfactorily answered, constitutes a terrible threat to the enterprise.
The philosopher has to address the skeptic. But in addressing her,
the clever philosopher will seek rather to convince himself than her. So
Nozick: “. . . how is knowledge possible? In answering this
question, we do not seek to convince the skeptic, but rather to formulate
hypotheses about knowledge and our connection to facts that show how knowledge
can exist even given the skeptic's possibilities. These hypotheses must reconcile
our belief that we know things with our belief that the skeptical possibilities
are logical possibilities,” Yet what is clear from this exposition is
that the skeptic is not going to prevail. The philosopher will believe despite
her, after having gone around her, the oblique, the enveloping, the poetic
response.
Cascardi's skeptics are Don Quijote, Emma Bovary,
and Myshkin who challenge actuality by responding to it with preconceived
ideas: chivalric, aesthetic, and psychological. Their passions take place
when ordinary experience fails to conform to their concepts of it. However,
Cascardi's epistemology, like Descartes' cogito, puts all ontology
out of bounds. The absolute must keep out. In a revealingly bracketed statement,
Cascardi declares his major premise: “I am assuming here that the problems
of skepticism and criteria as seen in the Quijote are instructive
of general philosophical problems: we want to be able to identify the things
of our world by reference to our world alone, and not to any other; we want
to decide for ourselves what things are, not have to ask God, for instance,
about them” (p. 6). That assumption is, I would submit, simply impossible.
What is “our world?” Is it that infinitesimal microcosm where one
can get reliable results by calculating in terms of Newtonian mechanics?
I suspect that it is such a world, one apart from relativity and the quantum,
where accelerating bodies do not increase in mass and where the position
of electrically charged particles can be determined. Yet even if there is
still no theory of correspondence, although one seems likely even in my lifetime,
our Newtonian realm of experience is compenetrated by the universes of
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| 7.2 (1987) | Review | 93 |
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Einstein and Heisenberg and cannot be well understood without reference to
them. If physics is a form of reason, it does have bounds. Newton obtains
to a minus billionth of a centimeter, where Planck takes over. But the
progression from relativity to the quantum is a continuum rather than a
disjunction and to know our Newtonian world well, we must likewise know them.
It is in this sense that physics so far is limitless, infinitely vast, infinitely
small.
Thus, if physics were the metaphor, we could
see Cascardi's skeptics as, rather, misguided calculators using inappropriate
formulae, Einsteinian relativity where Newtonian mechanics would yield a
far more accurate result, yet theirs a misconceived universe in which one
nonetheless finds strange Baudelairean correspondences. My real point here
is that, even though Descartes, Nozick, and Cascardi set the ontological
aside in their epistemology, in novelistic art the ontological cannot be
ruled out. Like the skeptic, it has to be addressed, even if obliquely. Indeed,
the novel, specifically the English Victorian novel, can be fruitfully studied
as a kind of Sartrean address to the consequences of the Nietzschean death
of God, and has been so studied by Hillis Miller, ontology as defect. My
main unhappiness with Cascardi's book stems from his arbitrary omission of
God or, better, the omission of his omission. Religion is an absolutely central
concern of the Quijote, of Madame Bovary, and of The Idiot
but it makes itself felt in these works as an absence rather than a
presence.
Moreover, there is in novelistic art a fundamental
factor undreamt of in philosophy, or, if dreamt of, then loathed. In most
philosophy, until Derrida, there inheres a longing for the lost original
plenitude that makes separation from the source of being an intellectual
sorrow that engenders philosophy itself. Until yesterday, then, nearly all
philosophy was a philosophy of return, of closing the distance that keeps
the soul from merging again with its source. Art, however, conceived of as
imitation, requires a distance between numinous original and nominalistic
copy. When Plato denounces poetry in the tenth book of The Republic,
he attacks art for extending a distance that already obtains between Forms
and nature. Nature is a copy of these which art in turn itself copies,
lengthening the human distance from truth.
Still worse, the novel addresses ontology in
terms of an even greater extension of imitatio, an oblique lengthening
of it that we call parody. I believe that Ortega, in the Meditaciones,
persuasively shows how the so-called realistic novel, beginning at least
in the Quijote, emerges as an indirect mode of irony, as parody, as
distance that deconstructs the original for the benefit of the copy, reversing
their relative strengths, resolving the quarrel between poetry and philosophy
in favor of the novel. Cascardi's second important oversight, after his decision
not to address at least the ghost of ontology, is his failure to reckon with
the parodic. Completely untrained as a philosopher, I myself have no notion
as to how to deal with that mode in philosophic terms. There is, I fear,
an ingenuousness in most philosophic investigations that immunizes them against
the artistic diseases of indirection such as wit, humor, and irony. Most
philosophers would, I regret to say, understand works founded on irony as
misrepresentations, and
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| 94 | ROBERT TER HORST | Cervantes |
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Cascardi is no exception as he comes to judge Don Quijote, Emma, and Myshkin
as errant epistemologists whose mistakes in method come at last to overwhelm
them and their ill-conceived systems, systems which he understands as kinds
of a skepticism that finally yields to the reality of sense data, the body.
It would of course be superfluous in me to
point out that there neither is nor can be any kind of body in the novel,
where all souls are necessarily disincarnate. Don Quijote is to Dulcinea,
Emma to Rodolphe, Myshkin to Nastasya as “shade to shade.” Their
connection to the incarnate world is relational and theoretical rather than
representational. In other words, I don't think that Cascardi has, in The
Bounds of Reason, even begun “to reformulate some of the questions
conventionally associated with the novelistic representation of reality”
(p. xi). That daunting task will have to deal with the novel as a mode of
misrepresentation. Cascardi, I believe, has failed to see his protagonists
as ontological intoxicates —not skeptics— who rather parody absolute
idea than question actuality. Don Quijote's chivalry is an ironic surrogate
of the faith to which it submits in the work of imitatio but with
which it competes and over which it triumphs in the Persiles. In
Madame Bovary parody takes the well-known Flaubertian form of “la
religion de l'art.” In the struggle between faith and form, intellection
is crowded out as art and belief incredulously draw together. Art and religion
come for Flaubert to be the only ways of knowing. Epistemology is for him
the ultimate form of sottise, and in the progress to real knowledge
(that magnificently ironic movement out of mind in Félicité
in Un coeur simple, for example) reason vanishes: credo quia
absurdum. With Dostoevsky, parody no longer operates through surrogates.
On the model of Ivan's “Grand-Inquisitor” vision in The Brothers
Karamazov religion comes to be its own parody, the misrepresentation
of itself.
Despite what I take to be some really serious
flaws, The Bounds of Reason often is a rewarding book. Cascardi has
some good things to say about each of his authors. His approach does not
prevent him from engaging his texts. Reason is not a mere academic
exercise. It is a genuine critical study, but not, I suspect, in the terms
it proposes for itself. Cascardi does not yet fully understand his own
sensibility, which is the most promising element in this work, in which even
so, there are some annoying lapses, the vacillation between “different
from” and “different than” to name one. Another error is truly
dysfunctional. In the discussion of Camus' protagonist's engagement with
death as an epistemological experience (pp. 100-105), Cascardi misspells
the beautifully resonant Meursault as Mersault no fewer than twenty-four
times. That's the kind of mistake that no comparatist can afford to make.
| ROBERT TER HORST |
| University of Arizona |
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Digitized with the help of Kendall Sydnor |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articf87/terhorst.htm | ||