Feeling a Story 4 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Two weekends ago, I learned something about a friend that took me by surprise and helped me to understand stories and novels in a different way. I discovered that, way back before he was married and graduated from law school, my friend had been a graduate student. Not only that, but he had taken a course co-taught by Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow.

Bellow is one of my favorite writers, so I immediately asked my friend a lot of questions about what the Chicago novelist was like in the classroom. After obliging me with some descriptions of Bellow’s mannerisms, my friend confessed that, while he hadn’t read all of Bellow’s novels, the ones he had read did not impress.

“But,” he added, “I read them back when I was in graduate school. I was reading them looking for ideas, and I wasn’t too impressed by Bellow’s philosophical formation. But I think that now, I would perhaps have a better appreciation of them.”

What is different about now?

My friend is now religious, or more so than he was back then. This, he says, has given him a sensibility for human life, for the peaks and valleys of human experience. This helps him to see the novel not as a collection of ideas, but as a record of something that someone has lived through and thought about—something more than the ideas that Bellow may more may not have had.

That “something more” is a slippery phrase, because it denotes an experience, not an idea. Perhaps a metaphor would help to define it: My family dines on a hand-carved dinner table that was passed down from my grandmother, who had purchased the table in Argentina decades ago. The wood is a type that isn’t found in the States; the corners of the tables bear woodcut designs of leaves and berries and other ornamentation.

One can ask where the table has come from. One could ask how old it is. One could inquire about the techniques of carpentry used to make it. But one can also get to know the table in a more sensual way, but running one’s hand across its surfaces, feeling the smooth tabletop and the carved ornamentation along the corners and edges of the table.

I think that one should approach a novel in this latter, sensuous, way.

What religion gave my friend is, I think, a way of feeling human life in a way, instead of thinking about it in terms of ideas. The religious sense helps us to see life as a striving for an ultimate meaning to life, or as a striving to understand the ultimate meaning to life.

It is a struggle to make sense of the finite world which we inhabit, all the while carrying a seemingly bottomless, infinite desire. This is different than the dramatic illustration of various philosophical problems, or, as Camus put it, than “philosophy put into images.” To have a sense for another person’s life and striving, it is necessary to understand ideas, but it is also crucial to empathize. The novel is a medium for empathy; it allows us to run our hands across the contours of human experience.

This empathy that I speak about is not necessarily sympathy. If it were, I would be committing something close to the affective fallacy in literature, and raising my feelings about a work as the main criterion by which to judge it.

Rather, what I am merely saying is that there is a certain experience encapsulated in a novel that we can only feel in a sense that is not completely conceptual, or philosophical. (And it is, in its way, pleasurable.)

This isn’t to say that one must be religious in order to have a sense for human experience. But perhaps it is necessary to be able to feel religious yearning, even within a state of unbelief, in order to understand human experience, since it is a psychological, not theological fact that that the religious sense is central to it.

James Wood is an agnostic, but he can still write a moving line like this one: "humans always flow over their targets; their souls are gratuitous and busy, congested with aspiration and desire." Camille Paglia is an atheist, but she can still recognize the importance of the religious drive in literature, even if she has channeled her own drive into a sort of neo-Freudian orthodoxy.

I am trying to figure out all of this for personal reasons. Since I have started my own graduate studies in philosophy, I have feared losing this ability to feel a work of literature, and instead to adopt a habit of forcing stories into the shapes of abstract problems. My friend helped me to hone in on something that Plato had already hinted at in his Protagoras:

(Socrates) But what would you like? Shall I, as an elder, speak to you as younger men in an apologue or myth, or shall I argue out the question?

To this several of the company answered that he should choose for himself.

Well, then, he said, I think that the myth will be more interesting.

Whatever one may say about Plato’s qualms with poetry, there is something to this “more interesting” that must be felt before it is understood.