I had the privilege of giving a talk for the William Blake Society recently, where I discussed Blake and science. My argument was that much of Blake’s work is compatible with scientific thinking, as defined and developed by scientists like Carl Sagan. During the discussion period that followed my talk, one of the attendees asked an important question pertaining to literature and knowledge: “Did Blake ever change your mind about anything?”

Always wanting to give direct answers to direct questions, I first gave a simple “No.” And then I elaborated that I don’t go to artists like Blake for facts about the world but I *do* go to them for aesthetic experiences. And then, as I yammered about that for a bit, I wandered my way into the idea that aesthetic experiences are personally rewarding and uplifting and can give me not necessarily knowledge about the world, but frameworks for engaging with that world, frameworks that make my everyday life more enriching (like Blake’s idea of a utopia called “Jerusalem”). I wish I had put all of this more succinctly and clearly in my somewhat rambling answer, but I think the gist of what I eventually got at is correct: evidence-based inquiry into the world tells us what is the case, while art and its aesthetic experiences deepen our life and can inform our values, actions, day-to-day experience and the frameworks that guide those values, actions, and experience.

With the benefit of reflection, I think this question is a profound one: what is the relationship between art and knowledge? It’s also a significant question at a time when the Humanities, as fields of study, are under attack. What is it that the Humanities teach us? What does art teach us?

I’d like to write about these question for a bit, using Joyce and this blog to provide examples. Did Joyce ever “change my mind” about anything? Read on to find out.

As it’s formulated, the question of whether Joyce (or Blake or any other artist) “changed my mind” about something can be answered simply with a “no.” That is, I have never in my life had a thought-out position about a subject and then, simply by engaging with art, changed my mind on that position.

But I fear my terse “no” might give the wrong impression, that I think art can’t teach us things or communicate important things. But I think it can, depending on exactly what we mean.

Now, obviously, an artistic work could contain facts about the world that I could first encounter in that work. Or it could contain a description of how to do something (procedural knowledge) that I could read for the first time in that work. But artistic works also contain statements that aren’t factually correct. So I’m not sure I would say an artistic work itself can “teach” me facts or methods I encounter there. I might be inspired by reading an artistic work to look up evidence that confirms for me whether some of its facts are true, or to look up and then practice the procedural knowledge to acquire it for myself. But to me, it’s the obtaining evidence and/or engaging in practice that “teaches” the knowledge in those cases.

But by studying a work of art, I *can* gain knowledge of several things. First of all, also obviously, I learn what the work of art says, but also how it says it, how the work produces meaning. Here, I am referring primarily to analysis of art, and in terms of literature, the technique known as “close reading,” careful attention to the language and literary devices employed in a work. There’s a really excellent book I just read, On Close Reading by John Guillory, that explores this subject in-depth. A very abbreviated version of its argument is that close reading is “showing the work” of reading/interpreting, demonstrating to others the textual evidence and the logical moves made during interpretation that produce one’s conclusions about the meaning generated by the text. For me, this meaning arises at the nexus of the literary devices and structure of the text, the readers’ minds, and the literary and historical context that surrounds the work and, especially, that is engaged by the work. That is to say, there are a wide range of “meanings” created by a text, but they are always contained in (and must be justified by appeal to) the actual words of the text itself and the act of reading it. One “shows the work” of reading to demonstrate that one has drawn an objectively reasonable conclusion about the text.

Such analyses could teach us new things not only about the artistic work but about the historical context, such as ways that people at the time thought about various historical events or trends and tried to respond to them. Also, it’s worth noting that the method of analysis called close reading is very helpful in training the mind to read attentively, carefully, and critically, skills that are enormously useful in other areas of life. To dust off an old chestnut, students may never in the future “need” to know what James Joyce or William Blake wrote, but the *skills* they develop in analyzing their works will help them enormously in the future, purely on the level of being able to critically examine utterances and convey interpretations clearly to others.

Moreover, the primary things that art can communicate are values, which may or may not qualify as “knowledge,” and which may or may not “change our mind,” depending exactly on how those terms are used. But the way in which art does this is not through argument or declarative statements but by providing aesthetic experience. Through this method, art can inform our values and can train our minds to engage with the world differently.

One way art informs our values is by strengthening our imaginations, and with it, our capacity to imagine the situations of others and feel with them. This idea is put very well by Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, where he writes,

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

So reading poetry, then, is like exercise for the imagination, whose function, Shelley argues, is fundamental to moral action. And more specifically, it can inspire emulation of certain virtuous attitudes and behaviors by depicting characters with which readers identify. Shelley depicts the relationship between writers and their audience by describing a poet as a “nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

Though the audience may not be able to articulate it, the reason that they are “softened” is the tendency to want to emulate the virtues communicated by the art:

The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration.

As an aside, if you’re wondering how Shelley squares this belief in the “ideal perfections” embodied by these characters with the horrifying violence they commit in the Homeric poems, which was often remarked upon by other writers of Shelley’s day, he addresses this in the same paragraph: “a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed.” A Defence of Poetry is a fascinating essay that deserves a read.

But I think art does more than just exercise the imagination or provide models to inspire people to emulate them. Art can generate experience that approximates what is known in some spiritual traditions as “selflessness,” a dissolving of the sense of a “self” separate from the world around it and from the flow of consciousness.

Normally, we think of the self as something “in here” (a stable essence of what “I am,” a presence that we typically feel as sitting behind the eyes). Meanwhile, we think of our life, and the world, as something “out there.” Our normal impression is that the self has experiences but is distinct from those experiences. Selflessness erodes that sensation, which is hard to describe but very possible to perceive directly.

There’s nothing remotely “supernatural” about the experience called “selflessness,” nor does it lend the slightest credence to dubious metaphysical ideas. Selflessness merely entails directly beholding something that has been revealed by neuroscience: that there is no place in the brain, or anywhere else in the body or the world, for a stable “self” to reside. We are all constantly changing, an endless flux (or “riverrun,” to use the opening word of Finnegans Wake). There is no self, no soul, no stability. There are stories about the flux, some closer and some farther from accurate. All of my experiences are generated in my brain, as we “live within a dream,” as it were.

Reading and studying and reflecting on literature — or at least certain kinds of literature, like Finnegans Wake — can help the mind get hold of this experience, much as meditation can. It can help us realize how faulty some of our stories about ourselves and the world are.

Are these sorts of revelations an example of literature “teaching” us something? If we use literature as a basis of reflection and then discover that we had been telling ourselves a faulty or limiting story about ourselves, is that an example of literature “changing our mind”?

Eh, depends on what we mean. I’d say it’s different than the way that my science textbook teaches me things or changes my mind about the world around me.

I’m reminded that the literary school of New Criticism, a group of American literary scholars in the mid-twentieth century, argued that literature was a different mode of language than our usual, denotative ways of speaking. Through techniques like irony, contradiction, and defamiliarization of reality, literary works, they believed, could communicate truths that cannot be conveyed by discursive statements or scientific thinking.

Again, whether literature reveals these sorts of “truths” depends on what we mean by “truths.”

Consider some of the insights I’ve gleaned from reading Finnegans Wake, as documented on this blog:

Finnegans Wake might teach us that we’re all a collection of stories, but it also cautions us against taking as accurate all of the stories we hear. This lesson might especially be true of the stories we want to believe about ourselves. If wisdom entails seeing ourselves not as a stable essence but a collection of stories that can be narrated differently, it also entails puncturing our faulty fantasies about ourselves and bringing those stories more into line with the bare facts. (“On the Limits of Storytelling”)

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The Prankquean’s riddle, if we allow it to work on us — and, more broadly, if we allow the whole of Finnegans Wake or literature or art to work on us — may begin the process of shaking us out of these “states.” Like the Prankquean at Van Hoother’s door, art like the Wake comes to us to disturb our peace and equilibrium, our naïve Innocence. It confuses and threatens us, dares to suggest that we are not our stories of ourselves. It dares to suggest that our normal, everyday consciousness is a kind of dream. And it can initiates a Fall that is also a Rise into new understandings (“Doing, Being, Seeming: The Prankquean and Identity”)

*

The Wake suggests that, in a sense, fiction is “truer” than fact, for art contains the patterns that repeat with variations in life, the same anew. […] This conception of writing as the mere record of inspiration is analogous to the idea of each of us continually constructing narratives of the self. Each of our stories about the self is an artistic creation that we are always in danger of mistaking for an essence (“Clothing in Finnegans Wake (Part 3): Scaldbrother”)

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the same cycle [of continual desires and/or of generations] that is unsatisfying when seen from one perspective can be infinitely satisfying if we accept that everything in it is impermanent; if we accept that there are no eternal things, or stable “things” at all; if we stop insisting that things in it “have to” be a certain way for us to be happy ; if we stop insisting that certain things “shouldn’t be” (since every part of reality depends on the rest of it); if we start embracing the nature of things as change, without grasping onto part of it and trying to insist that it never change or go.

Another way to put this is that this same world of cycling and recycling generations that is “suffering” from one perspective becomes joyful if we can figure out how to regard it differetly (to “read” it from another perspective). Finnegans Wake — which trains us to read in ways we have never read a text before — can also train us to “read” life and history in new ways, drawing connections that can induce a direct perception of the interdwelling of all “things,” the ultimate emptiness of all “things,” which are impermanent and in flux. The only stable thing is the flux, the riverrun. You cannot step into the same river twice. (“Feeling and Falling”)

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In our own lives, we inhabit the affirmative perspective indicated by the phrase “Am liking it” by making contact with the inner light (ild) in all things, by shifting our perspective to see all things as connected to each other in a way suggested by the Wake’s mixing of words. The perception of such interconnection allows someone to open themselves up to the dynamic interplay of contrary forces and, ultimately, the realization that not only do all things participate in each other but all “things” (including the self) are ultimately narratives in the mind.

Perhaps the previous paragraph sounds like the ravings of a madman. All I can say is that years of careful study of the Wake and years of mindfulness practice have enabled me to enter modes of perception toward which I can only gesture with words. (“Solving and Salving Life’s Robulous Rebus”)

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Okay, that’s enough. I could go on.

Did Joyce “teach” me those things or “change my mind” about those things?

My answer: eh.

I’m not sure I’d formulate these ideas in the same way without Joyce and Blake and others, but the groundwork for understanding these things was laid by my reading philosophers and scientists, and by reasoning about what I can learn of the world, including reasoning about my own experiences of selflessness in meditation.

The important thing is that I privilege evidence and reason as means of revealing truth (that is, accurate statements about the world) because I have a lot of good reason to think that’s an excellent hermeneutic practice when dealing with reality. If something an artist wrote conflicted with what evidence revealed about the world, my beliefs would go where the evidence pointed. [see the comments below for my pedantic aside about what science is and where it comes from]

I’m convinced that selflessness is true as an accurate description of consciousness when one pays attention to it sufficiently closely. And I’m convinced that selflessness is true as a description of the objective state of things from a neuroscientific perspective (there is no place for a stable “self” to reside). Reading artists didn’t teach me any of this. But reading them did help me to experience (and to deepen my experience of) selflessness firsthand, teach me to value close attention to consciousness and to value a mindful life, and to value a number of other things, including collaboration and artistic creation. And it encouraged me to regard living well and loving others as a kind of art. I could have, and probably would have, developed those ideas — or ideas like those — without the influence of art, but both those concepts and (especially) my experiences are richer for having engaged with art.

The richness of subjective, personal experience cannot be quantified (at least, not yet), but it remains of vital importance for humanity. Our experience is mediated by our consciousness, and the quality of our consciousness is directly related to the quality of our experience. For sure our material conditions are of incredible significance, and can only be ignored or downplayed at our peril, but our attitude toward those conditions is paramount in terms of our personal experience. As Milton wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” And, as countless stories remind us — from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s classic poem “Richard Cory” to many lives of the rich and famous — material wealth and success is no sure guard against the worst of depression. To say this is not to assert that “Wealth doesn’t matter” or that “Money doesn’t produce happiness” (it indeed alleviates many of the most common forms of unnecessary suffering); it’s merely to say that wealth is not a cure-all, and nothing insulates us from the sorrow we’re sure to experience if we cling in attachment to the impermanent “things” around us. A satisfying life is first and foremost a product of our attitude and attention.

Did I “learn” this from literature? Eh. Depends on what you mean.

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I’m imagining a reader who pushes back against me. Someone could easily accuse me of reading whatever I like into artists like Joyce or Blake. That is, one could make some sort of argument against me along these lines: if artists like Joyce and Blake are not “changing my mind” about things, if I already have ideas about the world that I’ve formed by looking at evidence, then perhaps I’m selectively reading their works to confirm what I already think about the world, or interpreting them in ways that essentially make them into my own image.

But I don’t think I’m doing that. I don’t go to artists to confirm things about the world, nor do I claim that all of my interpretations are necessarily what these writers themselves consciously intended. I try to confine myself to the text and its contexts, the literary devices and structure of the texts in relation to its readers and its historical moment.

In the end, though, perhaps all critics necessarily, to some degree, misread or reinvent great artists. And we critics are, in turn, misread and reinvented by our audiences. And on it goes. I can see no better way to proceed than to engage in what Blake calls “Intellectual Battle” about our ideas by means of evidence and reasoned argument.