Literary Humanities A Critical View.pdf

R E N D E Z VO U S ______________________________________ I DA H O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y Journal of Arts & Letters ______________________________________ Rendezvous is a peer-reviewed journal Spring-Fall 2017 Volume 43, Nos. 1 & 2 This book constitutes Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 ISSN 0034-4400 RENDEZVOUS Editor: Sharon Lynn Sieber Associate Editor: Angela Petit Managing Editor: Barbara Santos Design Editor: Rochelle Tharp Editorial Board Michael Adams Kristi Austin F. Eduardo Castilla Ortiz Alan Johnson Dale Knickerbocker Linda Leeuwrik Carl A. Levenson Helen Livingston Robin McAllister Monique Manopoulos Mark Neiwirth Craig Nickisch Rendezvous is an independent journal dedicated to the encouragement of innovative, speculative, and creative works both inside and outside traditional disciplines. Its purpose is to bring together on some common human ground varying and conflicting interests and approaches. This edition of the Rendezvous Journal of Arts and Letters was made possible by a generous grant from Ms. Maria Fletcher as Director of the International Programs Office. The Editors would like to acknowledge the valuable support and sponsorship of Idaho State University Executive Vice President and Provost Dr. Laura Woodworth-Ney. The cost of this edition is $19.95 – payment to contributors in copies Please send all correspondence to: The Editor/Rendezvous, ISU 921 S. 8th Avenue, Stop 8113 Pocatello, Idaho 83209-8113 Rendezvous has first publication rights. Authors retain copyright of their materials. ©Rendezvous, Idaho State University, 2017 ISBN: 978-0-9841225-2-3 Rendezvous: The State of the Humanities Edited By Sharon Lynn Sieber and Angela Petit CONTENTS The State of the Humanities Introduction by Sharon Lynn Sieber and Angela Petit .................................... i The Artist explains by Helen Livingston ........................................................ ix Socrates’ Death and the Future of the Humanities By Carl Levenson ............................................................................................ 1 Whither the Humanities? A Humanist’s Observations by Craig Nickisch ........................................................................................... 7 Cross-cultural Humanities by Alan Johnson ............................................... 15 The Humanities at Ground Zero: How to Rebuild and Reboot in a Time of Scarce Resources by Glenda Jones, Jeffrey Sweat, and Sara Diebel ...................................................................... 25 Attacking Humanities and Losing Sight of the Human by Winter Elliott ............................................................................................ 39 Literary Humanities: A Critical View by Prakash Kona .......................... 49 Sustaining the Humanities: A Reflection on Past Disciplinary Status and Future Collaborations by Sara Pace Hillin........................ 65 The Liberal Arts M.D.– How Humanities are Changing Medical Education by Isabel Meusen ..................................................... 77 Not All Roads Lead to Rome: The State of the Humanities at Community Colleges by Joseph Donica............................................ 85 The Public Fallout of the Humanities’ Crisis: Critiquing the Public Turn in Rhetoric and Composition Studies by Mary Beth Pennington, Tonya Ritola and Belinda Walzer ................ 95 A Postcolonial Humanities Manifesto by Pramod K. Nayar ............... 111 New Frames for New Futures: Translators as Metaphor for the Value of a 21st Century Liberal Arts Education by Andrew J. Ogilvie ................................................................................... 123 In the Coming Years: The Role of Creative Writing and the Future of the Humanities by Mitchell R. James ................. 131 On Reinventing and Reinvigorating the Humanities by Writing Differently by Sarah Allen......................................................... 139 Mediating the Humanities and Sciences through Gadamer’s Visual and Auditory Dialectic by Andrew Fuyarchuk ................... 149 Why Study Literature? by Sandy Feinstein, Tiffany Wesner, Christian Brendel, Lily Cernak, Ashley Offenback, Rachel Jensen and Sean Geguera ....................................................................................... 163 A View from the Middle: Destabilizing the Humanities Today, an Object of Discourse in Flux by Lindsay S. Head ......................... 175 Analog Technologies for the Humanities Classroom: How Multimodal Play in English Composition Increases Creativity and Critical Thinking in the 21st Century by Jessica Edwards ...... 185 The War Within: The Humanities at Risk in the Composition Classroom by Lash Keith Vance ........................................................... 199 Authors/Contributors..................................................................................... 209 Literary Humanities: A Critical View PRAKASH KONA THIS IS AN ARGUMENT for the possibility of literary humanities: a literary version of humanities as well as humanities that look at literature for the human person to assert his or her selfhood. I am not merely speaking for the human aspect within the discourse of humanities but rather intend to show how the idea of the human is fundamentally rooted in a poetic sensibility that breaks through social and political barriers. Literary writing enables and sustains the possibility of the human in the face of violence unleashed by a culture industry rooted in global consumerism. Literary humanities, I believe, forms the ethical basis to rethink the role that humanities can, do, and will play in bringing about transformation. This paper also argues that scientific and technological knowledge is a cynical enterprise without literature, which plays a vital role in raising questions related to the future of humankind. Literary writing forms the basis to articulating how we think about literary humanities. Writers who use literary language specialize in the art of looking at truth from the perspective of illusion. In the process of using an illusion to depict reality, they politicize writing by portraying societies not as static entities but dynamic forces constantly in motion. Such politicization happens through an insight into the illusory and fluid character of social reality. My paper argues for literary humanities as the meta-language in which the humanities speak of and for themselves, enabling the possibility of a human person that defies any simple generalization based on external parameters. Literariness in Literature To attempt to talk about the literariness of literature would demand that one, first and foremost, speak of what non-literariness might be. Though nonliterariness is popularly viewed as defining the scientific temperament, we have to admit that even in science it is not completely possible to ignore the fact that words retain a sense of ambiguity and cannot be strait-jacketed to imply one and only one thing. To begin with, are we speaking of literature or literary 2 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 writing? Literature is an abstract concept that includes spoken and written statements aimed at producing pleasure in the mind of the listener and reader. Literary writing is one of the countless means employed towards the primary end which is pleasure. In the essay “The Intellectuals: Role, Function and Paradox,” Hobsbawm asks the question: “Could the social function for intellectuals—that is to say, could intellectuals—have existed before the invention of writing?” (194). While Hobsbawm notes that there is a “social function” for “artists,” he adds that it is not possible for intellectuals to have existed before writing. If literature as art form and literary men or women as artists existed before writing, literary writers can safely be assumed to be artistically inclined “intellectuals” in a broad sense. The social function of literary writers is primarily attained through “words on paper” (116), to borrow a phrase from I.A. Richards. The understanding of “paper” can of course be extended to include countless internet “pages” filled with literary work of some kind or the other. If we are going to speak of a literature-based humanities, it should include the performance of “words” as well, by which I mean, not having to rely on “paper” but purely on memory and one’s ability to play with words. Oral historians have engaged something close to such an activity for generations. Grandmothers did it until very recently: the narration was adapted and customized to suit an immediate requirement like having to feed a kid or put her to bed. Poems and stories, the warp and woof of literary existence, were interwoven with common lives since the time people came together to form a social order. The point is not to restrict the use of “literary” to “writing” but rather to emphasize the fact that writing has to a great extent come to dominate how we think about the literary. When we talk of the literary, are we specifically referring to figurative writing or to any writing that self-consciously poses before a mirror called style? A judge in a court takes his words seriously enough to pronounce a sentence. A surgeon uses words with the same accuracy that he or she maintains with the scalpel. A literary artist, which includes the song-writer, is the only creature who uses words with the playfulness of children using building blocks to make things. The constructed character, as in the creative use of words to talk about things, defines literary art. A literary artist makes and remakes the world around him or her. It is through literary art that the illusory character of the “real” world is brought to light. When we talk of literary humanities, the idea is to place the humanities at the center of literary discourse and argue that it is impossible to conceive of the humanities in the absence of literary language as a tool in the process of definition. I use the word “tool” in the sense in which Wittgenstein characterizes it: Language is like a collection of very various tools. In the tool box there is a hammer, a saw, a rule, a lead, a glue pot and glue. Many of the tools are akin to each other in form and use, and the tools can be roughly divided into groups according to their relationships; but the boundaries Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 3 between these groups will often be more or less arbitrary and there are various types of relationship that cut across one another. (Philosophical Grammar 67) At a more specific level, literary language is a “collection” of tools employed by the humanities to pursue the possibility of a truthful description of the world. If the humanities as a discourse reflecting on social relations ought to acquire a grasp of how and why these relations come into existence and to what purpose, it must also have an insight into the language(s) that people use in “real” life. What are the tools required to penetrate the ambivalent zone, where a variable called life is attributed a permanent feature called “reality,” with multiple signposts pointing in almost every possible direction? Literary language enables one to enter the ambivalent zone where truth reveals itself as a work of fiction primarily through the prism of writing. Not only is it important to inquire into the literariness of the language used in the various disciplines of the humanities, but one must also look at how the very discourse of the humanities is shaped through literary writing. The literariness, which is the essence of literature, as in thinking about objects in imaginative ways through language, throws light on how we look at the humanities. In the absence of literariness, what we have in the humanities, in the effort to be loyal to an objective description of reality, is an attempt to resemble science as closely as possible by reducing the meanings of words to the concrete and the particular. The non-literariness that the humanities strive for is where words seek a perfect match both with thoughts and things. The objectivity pursued by lawyers, judges, or for that matter doctors in their attempts to be factual and non-literary through a suppression of the figurative aspect of human languages, is fraught with problems where one kind of meaning is privileged over another. Neither can anything be literally true nor so obvious that there is no space for doubt at all. The very nature of literariness is that it is rooted in a politics of uncertainty. Through the literariness of literature, we encounter the fact that there is always enough uncertainty left to prevent any absolute notion of the truth. When we speak of non-literariness, we are actually speaking of nothing if we go by the assumption that all language is literary by virtue of the fact that it is figurative, which it necessarily is because it is impossible to control the flow of meaning(s). If we take non-literariness as another way of being literary, it just means that an objective description of the world does indeed have an implicit figurative quality about it. Historians, economists, sociologists, or social scientists can only make spurious claims to knowledge unless they accept the fact that the way language is used to approach reality will play a role in what that reality is all about. The argument central to this paper is not only that literariness is a feature of human languages, but that it is not possible to think of the humanities without admitting that the language used in the humanities-based disciplines revolves around a certain kind of literariness. The project of literary humanities is not merely to uncover the clandestine relationship between the literary and 4 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 humanities but to argue that the humanities are rooted in literary language and they exist as two sides of the same leaf of paper. It is through literary language that the humanities invent and reinvent themselves in the depiction of social and political reality. Is literary language a tool in the “collection” of tools called “language” or something common to all the tools of language? I believe that language is intrinsically literary once we recognize the constructed character of the manner in which sentences (whether complete or incomplete) are made to describe thoughts. The literariness of literature is the literariness of language, and literary writers make readers aware of the quality of literariness that in essence defines our use of language. When we speak of literary humanities, we speak of the literariness of humanities as well as how and why this literariness serves as a meta-language commenting on what the humanities are all about. In the absence of literariness, the humanities are controlled by the same forces of reaction that operate at the political realm that resist change and disallow criticism of entrenched social behavior manifested in classism, sexism, and racism. In its ability to problematize extremes and reject absolute positions of any kind, literary language expands the scope for further debate and investigation within the humanities. Scientific logic can be dangerously close to a monolithic truth that is presumed to be obvious to believers and nonbelievers alike. The anti-dogmatic character of literary language prevents the humanities from turning into a discourse of power. The Literary “Human” in the Humanities The use of the word “human” with its thousand and more years of connotations is intrinsically bound up with the history of humanism. Both in popular usage and from a political and historical perspective, the word “human” challenges the imagination in terms of the parameters we need to associate with what it means to be human. The word “humanity,” for instance, is as taken for granted as the human in the humanities. If the humanities are about humanity and by extension the “human,” what kind of humanity are we talking about? Are we talking about humankind or humanity as in making a humanitarian gesture indicating some kind of a goodwill or act of kindness? To specify what it means to be human is to include as many parameters as is humanly possible within the limits of definition. In the process, we have to identify what it means to be non-human or inhuman – though again both are two different conceptualizations. They should contain parameters that are not included in what we considered as human in the first place. If I have to say benevolence is a human trait, it ought to follow that not being benevolent makes me close to inhuman. Likewise, we cannot think of the humanities, which include a set of disciplines with individual characteristics, without thinking of what those disciplines are that do not come under the humanities. Of course, it does not end with that because each discipline has a history of imagining the human in the light of its requirements. An ideal definition of the humanities must include how each discipline Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 5 perceives its importance in relation to the human person. It should carry within it something of the essence of each discipline while it must also have an essential trait that is common to all disciplines. The question is not about who bells the cat, but where exactly do we locate the cat that needs to be belled. Once we are able to find an ideal framework to describe the humanities, then, perhaps, like belling the cat in the idiom, not without enormous risks, we might actually be able to arrive at a definition that gives us enough warning to indicate where we are missing the point. The point is missed, however, because the cat is elusive and belling an elusive cat adds to the difficulties in defining the standpoint of the humanities through a set of traits. We can go back to the language of the humanities as a collection of tools, each discipline having another set of tools for its own specific ends. Wittgenstein recognizes the complications that result from any attempt to define without first clarifying the basis of the definition: Regard the word “to think” as an instrument! The chair is thinking to itself . . . Where? In one of its parts? Or outside its body; in the air around it? Or not anywhere at all? But then what is the difference between this chair’s talking silently to itself and another one’s doing so, next to it? —But then how is it with man: where does he talk to himself? How come that this question seems senseless; and that no specification of a place is necessary, except just that this man is talking silently to himself? Whereas the question of where the chair talks silently to itself seems to demand an answer.—The reason is: we want to know how the chair is supposed to be like a human being; whether, for instance, its head is at the top of the back, and so on. (Philosophical Investigations 121e) If the human person is a thinking animal, how and where exactly does the thinking take place? How does this make the person different from a chair? Can we think of a chair as having all human characteristics except breathing? What about thinking? Can we say that a chair is human in everything else except for thinking? Why do we associate so much of our humanness with thinking rather than with being or living? Is it merely to reinforce our difference from the animal world and the universe of objects? The best way to eliminate misunderstandings is to be able to look at contradictions in the eye. Contradictions breed inconsistencies and the latter inhibit any attempt to think clearly. It is possible to write about writing, but can we think about thinking likewise? If we recognize the difficulties in providing a list of characteristics that satisfy what it means to be human, we also create the conditions for the humanities to be studied without any reference to the language. But, if literature is the language through which the humanities speak, it means that at any point contradictions and paradoxes threaten to undermine a stable, objective, and neutral relationship that this language might enjoy with reality. This is not to state that no interpersonal 6 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 communication is possible because of the instability produced through a literary intervention: this is to state that the literary intervention not only breaks the barriers between different disciplines within the humanities but also between the humanities, the social sciences, and the pure sciences. Central to the literary intervention is the human person as an unstable and ambiguous terrain similar to the process used to locate the person. The presence of the person is disruptive because any attempt to limit the person to a particular frame of analysis is bound to collapse in the face of the fluidity of the language that speaks about the person. Whether in the sciences or in the humanities, one’s own relation to reality is the space where literary language intervenes to assure one of the “truth” in one’s feelings. Literary language does not only refuse to conform to the objective world before our eyes, but it also works on the assumption that the use of the language in some ways determines the nature of perception. Perceptions might be limited, but the ability of a language to work on the limited space of perception is infinite. In his short story “The Book of Sand,” which is a short story about writing a short story, Borges plays on the “infinity” of literary writing. The opening lines of the short story make claims to infiniteness: The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes. . . . No, unquestionably this is not—more geometrico—the best way of beginning my story. To claim that is it true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true. The paradoxical and constructed quality of the line as made up of “infinite points” can hardly be overstated. Other stories might be made up and might emphasize as is the convention that they are true, but this story is true. By emphasizing the “truthfulness” of the story, Borges makes us aware of how the language used to tell a story exists in its own right. The autonomy that literary language enjoys invests it with a certain power to throw down the gauntlet to absolute notions of the truth. Zeno’s paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles has the same literary quality to it in endowing the line with infinite points. The point at which the tortoise starts, despite its perceptible slowness, puts it ahead of the warrior Achilles, because by the time he reaches that point, the tortoise will have moved to another point. The tortoise will disclose to Achilles: “And so you see, in each moment you must be catching up the distance between us, and yet I—at the same time—will be adding a new distance, however small, for you to catch up again.” Infinite points in time and space have to be covered for Achilles to reach the tortoise. In Borges’ story, the book given by one stranger to another to finally come to the narrator “was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.” Borges’ story plays on the idea of imagining the infinite. To be able to imagine the infinite is to imagine every permutation and combination possible of how words can be used within a Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 7 language. That’s precisely what literary language will introduce to the humanities: a sense of infinity. To think in “infinite” terms serves an important function, which is to recognize the limitations inherent in any method or methodology when it comes to studying human condition. In imagining the “human” as infinite, an epistemological and ethical purpose is served. Interestingly, in the “book” which stands for anything and everything, a source of both knowledge and what cannot be known, “The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last.” The enigmatic character of the book does not end with that. As the stranger, “as if he were thinking aloud,” informs the narrator, “If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.” To look at time and space as infinite frees us of the burden of being “human” because, as social beings, we are locked within the constraints imposed upon us by the language we are born into and its everyday usage, which is a barometer of how we define our selfhood. Borges plays on the idea of an infinite time outside us which operates in the frame of the “rest of the universe” that is not “me” who, as a bearer of a name, occupies a specific social context. Thus, we are freed of the burden of constantly having to submit to the demands of social life simply by virtue of the space we occupy within an order. The idea of an infinite time that liberates is deeper than the existentialist discussion of responsibility in relation to free choice. It is looking at a philosophical and psychological rather than a political way out of the predicament of being “human” where one acts to fulfill certain criteria within a given set of choices. The human predicament, to the extent that it is existential and political, lies in the fact that one constantly has to respond to the incessant demands of daily life without always having the option to work things out completely to one’s own satisfaction. At the epistemological level, the guiding principle of social life is for social groups to create rituals and forms of behavior through a language of coming together in the face of external danger. If social life is intrinsically a discourse of togetherness, the knowledge created is bound to reflect on how as members of a group we look at those who do not belong to the group. I am not suggesting that a social group can actually exist without outsiders. Socrates, Rumi, Saint Francis, and Spinoza effectively demonstrate that every group is bound to have its share of outsiders who might be using the same language but with combinations of words that break that sense of bonding that brings a group together and reveal it to be a mere construct. The infinitely human person, which is a literary construct, resolves the epistemological crisis of the outside versus the inside. Through an exploration of the minoritarian character within a language, the language that outsiders use to talk about the so-called “insiders,” through an introduction of that sense of being outside what is seen as “normal” from the point of view of common sense, it is possible for users of a language to break through the idea of language as a mirror of reality. What makes it minoritarian is the fact that it is the language used by the one who is perceived 8 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 as strange and therefore does not “know,” the emotional misfit, the one who does not belong, the one who is looked at with suspicion and the one who refuses to conform to a dominant mode of thinking. Intellectually, it is the minority of strangers who make the ownership of words a completely meaningless activity. We cannot think of everyday language without thinking of what it is that belongs to us and what it is that does not. If a good part of identity revolves around property claims, what the book of sand will do is to show that all these claims are built around a finite view of language in its relation to reality. From an infinite perspective, I could have been at any point in time or space. If I occupy this particular point in time and space as the author of this article, it is obligatory that as a human person, I need to work in the direction of shedding the finiteness of identity and allow the infinity of past and future to enter the doors of my immediate present. The literary “human” is not obsessed with the idea of the human, though as a discourse and language, literariness is about cultivating and nurturing the notion of humanity or humankind for reasons that transcend the political. Despite the fact that it is not feasible to separate the intellectual from the ethical except for heuristic purposes, it is only on ethical grounds that one can find space for the human to include the person who does not belong to one’s own group. Literariness from an aesthetic perspective is not an exploration of the sublime. Precisely because it looks into the quotidian and the slice of life, literariness has an anti-sublime quality to it. An emotionally-driven, imagined portrayal of reality can afford to look into the erratic and unpredictable ways in which what we call human nature unfolds itself on the stages of everyday life. It is not an idealized picture of the world but a deeply personal observation transmuted into a living experience enabling the reader and listener to reflect on one’s own personhood. If the goal of the humanities is to aspire to come as close as possible to the truth, literariness intervenes by taking into consideration what the humanities has not taken into account. Euripides gives us a description of the lives of women and slaves in the ancient world and what they feel about their own personhood, throwing light on a social condition that historians and philosophers perhaps did not consider worth the recounting. Of course, it would be simplistic to say that literariness contributes an ethical sense coming out of marginality to the discourse of humanities. Literary writing even at its most political is never a discourse in politics. Its appeal is emotional and its inspiration is existential. The poet is an organic intellectual who feels with the collective needs of a social group. That does not reduce the poet to a mere spokesperson of power but someone who is able to look at power with a necessary degree of skepticism, as for instance in the way Shakespeare looks at the ambitions and follies of kings in his history plays as what happens to men in pursuit of power. Thus, in Shakespeare’s King John, at the end of his life, King John (who is offered the distinction of being one of the most evil people in history by a 2001 TV miniseries) will say, “all this thou seest is but a clod / And module of confounded royalty” (V, vii). What Shakespeare sees as a literary artist is a dying man reflecting on his body; he cannot just be a Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 9 historian making a cold and objective analysis of King John’s blunders. Being the most evil man in history does not deprive King John of the sympathy to be be given to any dying person. In fact, power adds to the pathos of the dying in a subtle way mocking the inflated illusions of the powerful. However, going by the argument that the meanings of words are relative to specific contexts, both “literariness” and “human” must suffer the same destiny of being context-specific and not neutral or objective in order for them to qualify as useful ways of arriving at a definition. The argument for a literary “human” meant to enrich the humanities by rendering as many social voices as possible has inbuilt problems. In viewing “words” as “tools,” Wittgenstein resolves the problem of using terms for a definition with the awareness of the role contexts play in modifying meanings: “Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects (And in both cases there are similarities.)” (Philosophical Investigations 9e). The function of words is more important than the meanings because the latter is indefinite while the former does justice to the context by restricting meaning to usage. Words ought to serve the same purpose as tools because they eliminate misunderstandings that stem from the wrong notion that what they mean corresponds to objects in the world. Wittgenstein adds: “It is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are used, the diversity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language (This includes the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)” (Philosophical Investigations 15e). If the humanities must take the direction of “what logicians have said about the structure of language,” they will move towards a finite though perfect system of words and meanings where communication is a logical activity and people interact with one another in perfectly logical terms based on logical expectations and logical conclusions. This view of language is disastrously close to a utopia where all misunderstandings are overcome and human beings have arrived at a perfect means of self-realization. Since, however, that is never the case, the literary “human” in the humanities is meant to challenge any such project that veers towards absolute recipes of any kind of truth, including the most tempting ones offered by logicians, that carry the illusion of perfection. The Politics of Literary Humanities Contesting Thomas Mann’s statement, “In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms,” in his poem “Politics,” Yeats writes: “How can I, that girl standing there,/ My attention fix/ On Roman or on Russian/ Or on Spanish politics…” Yeats mocks the idea that politics could be the “destiny of man” while normal individuals are compelled by emotional realities that are of a more immediate nature such as “that girl standing there.” Yeats’ distrust of radical political changes bereft of emotional and spiritual content can be seen in the poem “The Great Day,” which is a stringent attack 10 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 on ideologies that profess a violent overhaul of an entire system to make way for another: Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on. The argument behind both poems is that social and political changes can replace one form of oppression with another. The point is to change how people think about themselves and the world around them. A change in attitude has profound implications for a social order rather than external changes that might provide greater scope for the marginalized without any alteration in outlook. Interestingly, Orwell says the exact opposite of what Yeats has to say in his 1946 essay “Why I Write”: “And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” While Yeats is undoubtedly critical of what revolutions presume to stand for, Orwell concentrates on the writing that has no “political purpose.” Of course, we have to look at “political” in the broad sense of the term and not reduce it to politics as in the day-to-day usage of the term referring to current events, which includes elections and the functioning of governments. The word “political” has to indicate larger questions of justice in relation to the making of an egalitarian society. It is hard to deny the point that Orwell makes, which is that apolitical writing, as in much of popular writing or culture, takes a simplistic view of people as having choices and motives without reference to their social and economic background. At the heart of both positions, one which is critical of a politics without an individual person in view, and another which sees the political as the essence of serious writing, is what it means to be human. The “human” is neither completely about individuals without reference to their social circumstances nor social circumstances where individuals are merely puppets dancing to the tune set by a preexisting order. Being human is more about becoming human through an insight into the social and political conditions of one’s birth while at the same time observing how individuals modify those conditions to suit their interests. If becoming human or humanizing is a process, what are the characteristics that we attribute humanness with? How is political humanity different from the complex feelings that an individual person experiences on a day-to-day level? In what way is literary humanities reflective of both the motives behind human actions as well as how and why people consciously espouse certain positions on public platforms? A related question would be: can literature through literary writing replace both religion as well as the branch of philosophy called ethics, to raise serious moral issues, especially those surrounding the distinctions to be made between the point(s) where the Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 11 private ends and the public emerges? Are literary writers averse to political and moral questions or is it possible to be distant from those questions? More importantly, should literary writing distance itself from political debates and restrict itself to creatively reflecting upon larger questions in relation to how people live? If power is never neutral and permeates every aspect of social and political life, isn’t it impossible to imagine how literature could be apolitical? Can humanizing be possible without a system based on power in place? What kind of humanness will literature enable one to practice in the face of inhumaneness as manifested in the opportunism that politics tends to make its baseline? How will literature respond to the anti-intellectualism of the culture industry? How will literature respond to being an expression of popular culture and at the same time retain its individual character through the accomplishments of writers who work within a tradition of writing that allows for experimentation in both style and content? The questions that literature will ask of itself as a discipline will throw light on what contribution it could make to the process of humanizing that forms the basis for the humanities. The human as depicted in the literary imagination is portrayed as being vulnerable to time as mortality and the presence of others in one’s life. The portrayal of a human being does not make writers independent actors privileged to be indifferent to what is happening around them. The creative function is connected to the banality of the “real” world in which the writer exists as a person and allows the free play of the imagination to recreate the real as daydream. If the daydream is at the center of creative life, as Freud notes, it is imperative that daydreaming be preserved as a source of creative life. It is in daydreams that technology, science, and the world of ideas will have their fantastic origins. The idea of humanness is a daydream and has all the characteristics of a fantasy. The politics of literary humanities will revolve around keeping the daydream alive through literary writing. The political importance of daydreams can hardly be overstated. Daydreams are repressed in the attempts to espouse specific political brands. In mocking politics, Yeats’s poem intends to show that an ordinary feeling such as being aroused watching a girl and wishing to be young and in her arms is of much more profound significance than global politics with the pretentious air of rising above those basic feelings. Politics is about institutional activity and should not be allowed to color human feelings to take on a sinister character. The subtext to Yeats’ poem is that the ability of individuals and groups to turn personal crises in the form of unhappiness into political causes poses a tremendous danger to the social order. In Orwell’s use of the word “political,” the refusal of creative writing to see through how ideology functions in everyday life leads to a falsified view of the world where people are oblivious to the various kinds of repression around them. Political leaders and party spokespersons, in democracies as well as in other forms of government, work on appealing to the basest of human tendencies and the morbid insecurities of the masses. A language filled with euphemisms becomes the best possible way of looking at “outsiders” or “those who are not with us.” To be politically aware is to be able to see and 12 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 state the truth as plainly as possible. As Orwell notes in “Politics and the English Language”: What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them…Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. While noting that “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” Orwell further adds, “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Though literariness, strictly from an artistic perspective, is about innovating with language, on the “political front” it sensitizes users of language to meanings and contexts, with the intention of showing how ordinary language is anything but innocent of class, gender, and other biases. The power of sensitizing users of language to the multiple subtexts that form the basis of discourse analysis lies in/with literary writing. The objectivity or neutrality of the historian, the philosopher, or the sociologist lies in having an attitude of respectfulness towards the truth. A critique of the truth and the objectivity will emerge from an insight into the literariness of research in humanities and social sciences. Does this mean that we can never come close to making assertions of any kind and end up with as many critiques as responses to serious research instead? The pursuit of what we understand by humanness is an ongoing project. The aesthetics of the humanities lie in the recognition of the openendedness of the project of arriving at an epistemology of the human person. What literary writing will do is ensure that an alternate way of looking at things does not descend into another hegemony of holding on to institutional power and refusing to allow for diverse platforms for the expression of the truth. Any knowledge is bound to pose the danger of making claims to absolute certainty. This does not mean that we eliminate the need for certainty. After all, knowledge is presumed to offer emotional security to the one who accepts it. A knowledge of medicine makes the doctor someone in whose hands we can place our bodies without the feeling that we might be at risk as would be the case if the doctor were not a doctor but a carpenter. To that extent, what the humanities will aspire to is knowledge without the promise of certainty. Despite the absence of certainty, there is still the possibility that the humanities provide us with a description of the human that fits in with our preconceptions based on personal experiences. What literary humanities or an Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 13 appreciation of it will do is not merely celebrate the absence of certainty. It uses the absence of absolute certainty to show how people function within their cultural contexts and feel that they belong to those contexts. If literature is a domain of human feelings working through a sea of chaos to seem stable, literary writing is about language struggling with feelings as with the words used to speak the feelings. How people feel is as unpredictable as nature itself. Literary humanities keep that element of unpredictability in human feelings alive to prevent intellectual stagnation and to challenge assertions of power based on false claims that offer a knowledge of the past free of generalizations of any sort. Poetics of Evocation The question that remains is: what is it that gives a sense of unpredictability to human feelings? Does literary writing offer a frame of reference within which the unpredictability operates in relation to the world outside the text? What is it that makes feelings difficult to predict in relation to the social and political order? If the human person exists in the non-rational realm at the level of motives, the role of the social order will only be to reinforce mechanisms of control over the flood of feelings that constantly defy control. Literariness is not merely the story of pleasure but a defiant kind of pleasure that refuses to recognize the bounds placed on the sovereignty of the imagination. Literariness relies on the poetics of evocation to produce the defiant pleasure. If the pleasure is not defiant, it perhaps might not qualify for literariness either. It is a pleasure that does not separate aesthetics from politics. It is a pleasure that refuses to go by simple dichotomies. In its ability to evoke pleasure, literariness recreates the world around and makes it more human than it otherwise would be. The poetics of evocation enables one to feel with the world. In the absence of the ability to feel with the world in imaginative ways, reality as reality cynically encroaches upon the spaces of the imagination, refusing to allow for alternative paradigms. Unless we revolutionize how we think in language, the revolution in the real world will end up being a replay of the politics of an older world. Rumi thus talks about a marriage that connects the self with the universe in his poem “This Marriage”: May these vows and this marriage be blessed. May it be sweet milk, this marriage, like wine and halvah. May this marriage offer fruit and shade like the date palm. May this marriage be full of laughter, our every day a day in paradise. May this marriage be a sign of compassion, a seal of happiness here and hereafter. May this marriage have a fair face and a good name, 14 Rendezvous Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2 an omen as welcomes the moon in a clear blue sky. I am out of words to describe how spirit mingles in this marriage. It is an exuberant poem that celebrates a marriage, and not any marriage, but this marriage. Rumi not only creates the atmosphere for the marriage but gives it a dimension greater than any marriage. He endows the marriage with qualities it might not have erstwhile possessed. It is not a patriarchal marriage rooted in the violence and appropriation of the other person. It is not a marriage imposed on somebody whose ability to make a choice has been taken away. Engels says: “If only marriages that are based on love are moral, then, also, those are moral in which love continues” (Tucker 751). Such a marriage, Engels points out, is only possible in a “generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with money or any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love” (Tucker 751). This marriage has to transcend the marriages of the world because “spirit mingles in this marriage.” The mystical marriage free of the contradictions of a consumerist society celebrates the joys of coming together that are ideally possible outside the capitalist mode of production. The aesthetics of the ideal marriage are created through evocation. From “sweet milk” to “wine,” “halvah” and “date palm” and finally being “out of words,” everything from the ordinary is brought into the realm of the poetic to give it the touch of immortality. The notion of permanence in the humanities is restricted to the here and the now. A study of marriages in the city of Kathmandu and the impact of urbanization on how couples relate to one another can be an interesting sociological study. The notion of time that guides this study is limited to a particular period frozen in space along with the attitudes and everything else involved to give us an idea of the state of marriage at this point in history and in this particular city. Of course, the assumption is that any study is bound to be “historical” for no other reason except that it relies on a retrospective view of how things happened and perhaps continue to do so. History derives its permanence in how it blocks an event in both time and space. The historian has to freeze the past in order to get a view of things with almost photographic perfection. This, however, is never the case because the very nature of the language involved is bound to transform how we look at the study itself in the first place. The permanence in literariness is that it leaves open the space of words to infinite other possibilities. Evocation is followed by revocation. The language adapts and readapts itself to interpretations. Literariness relies on the power of reinterpretation to look at a work in the new light of fresh discoveries in other areas of knowledge. It does not mean that it takes human nature for a constant. On the contrary, literariness married to humanities enables us to tread cautiously in our judgements of what constitutes human nature or humanity as a whole. In taking the middle way between a political view of the world where human action plays an important role in changing the Literary Humanities: A Critical View Prakash Kona 15 world and an artistic view where people are guided by feelings, literary humanities strive to look at the past without repeating or endorsing unforgivable acts of inhumanity as excuse or reason for crimes in the present. Through literariness, the humanities create bridges between reality as it is and the possibility of other worlds in the making. 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Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print. Yeats, William Butler. “The Great Day.” Web. 15 Feb. 2016. ---. “Politics.” Web. 15 Feb. 2016. Zeno. “Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles.” Web. 15 Feb. 2016.