the phenomenology of literary experience

a perennial and foundational question in literary studies asks: what, if anything, distinguishes the ‘literary’ from other modes of speech and writing? the appeal of an answer to this question is in fact hardly limited to literary scholars or theorists; since nietzsche¹ (and his suspiciously literary style of philosophizing), this desire to understand “the ontology of literary form” has found a more systematic place in all kinds of philosophical investigation — ranging from metaphysics, even to ethics and politics — and together with many of its closely associated forms, it constitutes the centerpiece of twentieth-century debate about the boundary between literature and philosophy. all strains of literary theory propose or imply some kind of answer to this question, and typically revolve around an axis pitting intratextual concerns against extratextual, with the formalists (aestheticists, new critics, structuralists) on one side, and what i call the extra-textualists (cultural critics, marxist and freudian critics, deconstructionists, post-structuralists, historicists, reader-response critics) on the other.

paul fry’s a defense of poetry: reflections on the occasion of writing takes up this age-old question and offers an attractive but problematic answer i’m still trying to understand:

The argument of this book can be summarized as follows: that which is specifically “literary” in texts of all kinds is neither the mimetic object of historiography nor the linguistic object of poetics nor the resolution of the “paradox” — as Michael Riffaterre calls it — dividing the two. The literary is precisely that which is none of these and which implicitly challenges their claim, separately or in combination, to exclusive priority in hermeneutics. It is that property of texts which cannot be consumed as documentary evidence by the historian or the semiotician because it is at most only marginally cultural. Even though it is produced, that is, a part of a culture-specific artifact, it differs from the mimetic and the semiotic in that it is not constructed. As a sign of the preconceptual, it bears (in the language of the American semioticians) neither a symbolic relation to a referential register nor an iconic analogy to the existing world, but is merely indicial, disclosing neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but only existence itself. Henceforth for the most part I shall call it the ostensive moment of literature.

a first reaction to this, and not the one i want to focus on, is wonder at the extent to which this position is made available precisely by the interpretative frameworks it repudiates — and therefore at the extent to which this kind of claim implies the uselessness of creating such a framework (which this has to be) in the first place. fry isn’t aloof to this problem: “[my argument] will be misread and will misread itself — perhaps inevitably in both cases — whenever it comes to function as a poetics.”

but perhaps more paradoxically, it is fry’s identification of the “literary” with the preconceptual that gives me the most trouble here: such an identification seems to unjustly de-emphasize what any writer would argue is the most important component of his work, the particular (not arbitrary or interchangeable or disposable) words that are actually on the page. now i’m hardly a strict formalist, but in locating the explicitly “literary” in a pre-verbal “intentionality” — a project which grows, i should add, out of claims for a phenomenology² of literary experience — fry seems to be disowning the very essence of literary experience (the words and texts themselves). the paradox that falls out of his case is the self-annihilating one of a writer wanting to transcend his medium, to “release consciousness from its dependence on the signifying process” by nevertheless engaging that imprisoning process, using symbols (words) that inevitably signify.

in fact, this position seems to imply that there’s nothing very different, in the end, about my (phenomenological) experience of, say, a stone, from that of a literary text, since fry’s “ostensive moment of literature” really has nothing to do with words, but rather the pre-conceptual final experience of them: it “[discloses] neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but only existence itself [my italics].” it seems to me there is a deeper metaphysical problem here, that of ‘within’ and ‘without’ — and whether we have to locate the meaning of the “literary” in a kind of phenomenological experience of it.

for what it’s worth, this metaphysical maneuvering between ‘within’ and ‘without’ seems to underlie not only the possibility of fry’s argument, but also many of the major questions we have about literature and the world in general, especially in the context of competing literary and philosophical frameworks: for example, formalist/autotelic critics try to explain texts from within, while historicist critics try from without; idealists work from within, materialists from without. rorty would probably shoot me for reviving an interest in this dialectic.

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1. though once the problem is brought into focus, we can clearly trace it back all the way to plato, who — for all his condemnation of the (mimetic) arts — was a master of drama and allegory.

2. murdoch provides a working definition of “phenomenology” as i mean it here in her essay “the novelist as metaphysician”: “the phenomenologist does not regard meaning only as a function of our language; nor does he, on the other hand, take it, with the aristotelians, to be somehow inherent in things themselves, nor with the platonists, as residing in a transcendent intelligible world. he regards it as dependent upon the activity of the subject.”