The Philosophy of Literature

Four Studies

Verene

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532641756
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question forward through the humanism of thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the German Idealism of Hegel. It then treats the relation of philosophy and literature in four ways by considering philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophy in literature, and philosophy and literature. In regard to the first of these, it discusses Jorge Luis Borges's The Immortal, to the second James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, to the third Carl Sandburg's epic prose poem The People, Yes, and to the fourth, Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools. This work demonstrates that in an area of thought often dominated by fashionable doctrines of literary interpretation, the great works of literature and philosophy remain as permanent residents of our thought and imagination.

1

The Ethics of Immortality of Borges’s El inmortal

Borges and Vico

Some writers, both literary and philosophical, presume their readers to be as learned as they are themselves. Borges and Vico share this presumption. With a natural ease, Vico can refer to such figures as Diodorus Siculus, Censorinus, Livius Andronicus, and Lactantius Firmianus as though the reader had them well in mind. With the same ease, Borges can refer to the outskirts of Bulaq prison in Samarkand, Bikaner, and Kolzvar as though they could be readily recognized. In both Borges and Vico, such learned references are mixed with images of great vivacity, such as Vico’s portrait of Jove as the embodiment of thunder—Jupiter Tonans—or Borges’s City of the Immortals. They confront us as readers with a style we may call poetic learning. They are philologoi who transport us from the present into the immense sublimity of the past.

We enter the great time of origin and of the past—the time outside of the time of the ongoing present—the time from which everything comes. Reading Borges and Vico takes us out of ourselves so that we see the past as present. We see how the past is always with us. But for the mind that has never read a Borges or a Vico, the past is not simply past; the past never really was. It is not surprising, then, that Borges, in his little masterpiece El inmortal, involves his reader in Vico’s masterpiece, the Scienza nuova. Both Borges and Vico allow us to confront the seeming incomprehensibility of history; through them we glimpse the eternal in the temporal. For Borges this confrontation takes the form of questions concerning the nature of immortality and infinity. For Vico it takes the form of the presence of providence in the guise of his storia ideal eterna (ideal eternal history)—the three ages of gods, heroes, and humans that the nations undergo in their births, rises, and falls.

Borges and Vico face history as the great theater of memory that is the Theatrum mundi, on whose stage we as individuals appear briefly and then are gone—at most, perhaps, to leave a mark on collective memory. This mark can be preserved in words. Borges and Vico know the truth that all books are about other books. Through books our thoughts may remain in memory. The writings of Borges and Vico are recourses of other writings, other times.

The style of Borges and Vico is opposite to the principle of Ockham’s razor—not to multiply assertions or entities. Their principle, instead, is the magnet—to draw into any work all that the mind can attract. The whole is Vico’s flower of wisdom. Vico’s New Science is a complete speech in which all that can be said of the nature of humanity is said. For Borges, the whole that is wisdom is ideally expressed in a fiction of a few pages. Such a fiction is a microcosm, and as such, a complete thought.

The Immortal has a central place in Borges’s writings and is connected to several of his essays on infinity and the circularity of time. In his Norton lectures at Harvard, which appeared as the little volume This Craft of Verse, Borges, reflecting on how he conceived his fictions, gives The Immortal as an example. He says: “I thought of a quite good plot; then I wrote the story El Inmortal. The idea behind that story—and the idea might come as a surprise to any of you who have read the story—is that if a man were immortal, then in the long run (and the run would be long, of course), he would have said all things, written all things.”

Borges continues: “I took as my example Homer; I thought of him (if indeed he existed) as having written his Iliad. Then Homer would go on living, and he would change as the generations of men have changed. Eventually, of course, he would forget his Greek, and in due time he would forget he had been Homer.” Borges concludes: “This idea of Homer forgetting that he was Homer is hidden under many structures I wove around the book.”1

Homer would forget his Greek, as humanity itself has largely forgotten Homeric Greek. Yet Homer is the ideal figure for this story because he represents the origin of Western literature that is preserved in the Western canon. With Homer the Western literary imagination begins. To preserve the memory of Homer requires that we preserve the memory that is the Western canon. And to understand the writings of Borges and Vico we must preserve this memory, because it is from the contents of it that they, and all others like them, write.

Borges’s ficción of the immortality of Homer is not an academic commentary on Vico’s conception of the circularity of history, or Vico’s “discovery of the true Homer.” It offers us a different way than that of Benedetto Croce’s La filosofia di Giambattista Vico or Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder and the range of philosophical studies that succeed them in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish. In Borges’s literary guise, Vico appears anew. We find Vico, to use his own terms, as a “poetic character” or “imaginative universal” (universale fantastico). We find him as a figure of the fantastic imagination, of Borges’s fantastic imagination.

Borges’s fiction of The Immortal is an example of the philosophy of literature conceived in the sense of philosophy as literature—as an example of literary philosophy. On this conception literature is understood in the broadest sense, as the power of the word to embody thought. The great works of philosophy, such as those of Plato or Hegel, are seen as intellectual narratives, the self in dialogue with itself. The great works of literature, such as those of Dante or Goethe, are inherently narratives of the intellect as well as of the imagination. Great works of philosophy and great works of literature arise from the same impetus and point in the same direction—the attempt to grasp what is absolute. Both philosophy and literature, in the ultimate sense, are attempts to take language beyond itself and to allow the mind to approach the really real. Philosophy and literature seen in this way are two sides of a coin. Neither can be fully separated from the other. The philosopher becomes a literary thinker and the litterateur becomes a lover of wisdom. They are both parts of a single process of the human spirit.

The Immortal may be described as an instance of literary philosophy because in it, image and idea are bound together so as to take the reader to a glimpse of the absolute through the interconnection of memory, time, and mortality. The unseen appears in the seen, yet remains in essence unseen. A fiction, as we encounter it at the pen of Borges, is a verbal emblem in which a large and complex meaning is condensed into a particular circle of thought. A fiction is not a novelty. It brings to mind elements of other works in the way that an emblem is composed of elements derived from other emblems.

Borges says: “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”2 He says he takes this procedure of writing from other writings—from Carlyle’s Sorter Resartus and Butler’s The Fair Haven. He carries this procedure even further in some cases, by writing about imaginary books. Fiction becomes tautological—fiction about fiction.

At another place, commenting on his fictions, Borges says: “I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word on earth—for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.” All words are about other words, just as all works are about other works. Borges says, further: “But I do wish to make clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a fabulist or spinner of parables, what these days is called an auteur engagé. I do not aspire to be Æsop. My tales, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, are intended not to persuade readers, but to en...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Ethics of Immortality of Borges’s El inmortal
• Chapter 2: The Metaphysics of Finnegans Wake
• Chapter 3: The Politics of The People, Yes
• Chapter 4: The Phenomenology of The Ship of Fools
• Bibliography