The Humanist (Re)Turn: Reclaiming the Self in Literature

Michael Bryson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000606508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls "the anti-humanism" of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential struggles—not struggles of competition, but of connection, the struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity.

1 Reclaiming the Self

Transcending Postmodern Fragmentation

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

—William Blake

The Fragmentation of the Individual Subject

You and I have disappeared. Perhaps we were never here except as a forgery of words, both written and removed, now read, unread, elided like the secret passions their erasure hides and locks away. You and I, and all of us, have no selves, are not selves. We are absences shaped from material deceit, fragments, illusions, our names spread out upon the thinning air, invisible.

Or so we are often told.

The unified self—the thinking subject who can, with Descartes, declare cogito ergo sum, or Je pense, donc je suis¹ [I think, therefore I am]—is a notion many scoff at now. We follow the sentiments of Nietzsche, declaring that “We are unknown, we knowers, we selves, our selves.”² The hope of Paul, “then, I will know, even as I have been known,”³ has been dashed in a post-Freudian world where “psychological research has discovered that the Ego is not even master in his own house,”⁴ and where a “genetic structuralism” now “rejects in the historical dimension and in the cultural dimension which is part of it, the individual subject [and] replaces the individual subject with the trans-individual subject.”⁵

“God is dead,” Nietzsche tells us.⁶ “God is dead; God died of his pity for man.”⁷ Foucault goes even further: “God and man died a conjoined death.”⁸ Humanism—defined as a centering of humanity’s experience of, and in, the cosmos, a placing of “Man” at the ontological and epistemological “center” of the knowable universe—has been under attack since the end of the ninteenth century. The French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, captures the spirit of this decentering attack in literary terms, through his insistence on a pure form of poetry from which the author would disappear entirely:

The pure work implies the disappearance of the speaker of poetry, who yields the initiative to words, mobilized by the clash of their own inequality; they illuminate each other’s reflections, passing like a virtual trail of fire on precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical verse or the enthusiastic personality that directed the phrase. The structure of a book of verse must be everywhere its own, innate, eliminating chance; still, the author must be omitted.⁹

Over eighty years later, the French duo Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari work similar territory, claiming that while writing, chacun de nous était plusieurs¹⁰ [each of us was several], and arguing for such heady notions as books without authors or subjects, bodies without organs, subjects without identity, all through the concept of agencement (arrangement, assemblage, or piecing together):

A book has no object or subject, it is made of various materials, of very different dates and speeds. As soon as one assigns the book to a subject, one neglects this work of subjects, and the externality of their relations. […] In a book as in everything, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata, territorialities; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. […] All this […] is an arrangement. A book is such an arrangement, as such unattributable. It is a multiplicity […]. We will never ask what a book means, signified or signifier, we will not seek anything to understand in a book, we will wonder what it functions with, in connection with what it does or does not do to pass intensities, in what multiplicities it introduces and metamorphoses its own, with which bodies without organs it converges its own.¹¹

But long before the developments in French thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the old structures of meaning (and meaning-making) were being swept away: the power of the Church to center life in a common spiritual vision, fractures in the sixteenth century, and is now all but gone. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which has roots in the Wycliffite movement of the late fourteenth century,¹² and possibly the arguments of Pelagius in the fourth and fifth centuries,¹³ replaces the doctrinal authority of the Church with the faith of the individual (sole fide) and the individual’s reading of scripture (sola scriptura). At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant goes radically further—not only do institutions like the Church have no privileged access to knowledge or truth, but individuals have no unmediated access to the world around them: “objects in themselves are not known, and what we call external objects are nothing more than mere conceptions of our senses.”¹⁴ In this view, our senses can only tell us a tale about their own limits, and our “knowledge” is always, already, and permanently disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live.¹⁵

By the time we return to the late-nineteenth century, Nietzsche is cultivating the ground for later challenges to the unified self or subject when he characterizes Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum as “a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed,”¹⁶ and suggests that “[t]he acceptance of the single subject may not be necessary; perhaps it is equally permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle are at the foundation of our thinking and of our consciousness in general.”¹⁷ Foucault goes further, seeking “to remove the subject (or its substitute) from its role of original foundation, and to analyze it as a variable and complex function of discourse.”¹⁸ As a discursively maintained and constituted phenomenon, the subject is studied in order to understand its “insertion points, modes of operation and dependencies.”¹⁹ “Man,” the individual subject, is reified, turned from “thou” to “it,” and defined as a function of the discourse it inhabits at any given moment. Foucault asks: “under what conditions and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of speech? What place can it occupy in each type of speech, which functions does it exercise, and obeying which rules?”²⁰

In this context, the Foucauldian “death of Man” is perhaps best understood as a rejection of the Cartesian cogito. For Foucault, Man—who did not exist “before the end of the eighteenth century”²¹—is not the disembodied thinking subject of Descartes, but a space of knowledge, a set of relations between knowledges or discursive practices. The Foucauldian “Man” is by definition a fragmented subject: it is a concept, or a conceptual space, determined and subjected by the discursive practices of the “human sciences”—psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, economics. Defining “Man” as both subject and object of knowledge in the wake of the decentering of a previously theocentric cosmos, these sciences put this “Man” in the now-empty center.

By the mid- to late twentieth century, Jacques Derrida is capturing and building on the essence of these radically decentralizing changes, rejecting metaphysics, rejecting the idea that the reading of a sacred text (or any text) could somehow fix or establish meaning, and specifically rejecting the concept of a “center” to any experience, discourse, or structure. As Derrida explains it, the concept of a center, of a centrally determinative and constitutive reality, has been long conceived of as a presence. Here the theological and mythological concepts he contests are clear:

the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we speak, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, a sequence of determinations of the center. The center receives, successively and in a regulated manner, different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, would be the story of these metaphors and metonymies. The matrix form would be […] the determination of Being as presence in all the senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names of the foundation, principle, or center have always designated an unvarying presence (eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, etc.).²²

Derrida writes of a “rupture,” an end to “totalization,” an end to the idea that we can contain the entire sensuous manifold in our conceptual frameworks, or structures. “If totalization then no longer makes sense, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite look or speech, but because the nature of the field—namely language and a finite language—excludes totalization.”²³ Why does this field exclude totalization? Because “it lacks something, namely a center that stops and provides a foundation for the game of substitutions.”²⁴ If the infinite sensuous manifold is not the field, but the finitude of language is the field, then play, substitution, supplementarity, and differance necessarily preclude a center to the field. Why? For precisely the reason that Derrida earlier denied applicability in the realm of language—infiniteness. No language can contain within itself the infinite richness of the sensuous phenomena available all around each one of us. No language can completely structure sensuous reality; therefore, no language is, on those terms, capable of having a center which is necessarily, transcendently, and—in its most complete sense—ontologically present.

The “rupture” of which Derrida speaks, came about “at the moment when the structurality of the structure had to begin to be thought.”²⁵ It is, among other things, a part of the long process of losing faith in the traditional moralities, images of the Divine, and conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the universe which marked the transition from Romanticism to Modernism. A universe which had seemed ordered, cared for, and maintained by some transcendent figure or principle, no longer seemed so. What had once seemed a “total” experience of the cosmos now seemed fragmentary, incomplete, and fictional. The human subjects who experience this fragmentary world are themselves, in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Reclaiming the Self: Transcending Postmodern Fragmentation
• 2 Transcendence Through Participation and Action in the Bhagavad Gita
• 3 The Binding of Criseyde and Troilus: Success and Failure in the Attempt to Transcend the “love of kynde” in Troilus and Criseyde
• 4 Success and Failure of Transcendence in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queene of Carthage and William Shakespeare’s Othello
• 5 Transcendence as Disobedience and Choice in Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre
• 6 Transcendence as Participation: The Union of Masculine and Feminine in Goethe’s Faust
• 7 Reclaiming a Solemn Bequest: Transcending Fragmentation, Recovering Trust, and Returning from Exile in Silas Marner
• 8 Transcendence Through Transgression and Kenosis: Sin as Salvation and Self-Emptying in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
• Epilogue: What Is to Come?
• Bibliography
• Index