The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir

Is there a way of reading philosophically without imposing a pre-existing philosophy on the literary text? Turning first to the work of Stanley Cavell, then to Simone de Beauvoir’s often neglected accounts of reading, this essay shows that such a philosophical reading can be understood as a form of aesthetic experience in which the reader lets the work teach her how to read it. The reader must be willing to let her own experience (of philosophy, of life) be educated by the work. A similar view can be found in Cora Diamond’s (and Beauvoir’s) suggestion that the reader must be open to the adventure proposed by the text. I was honoured to receive an invitation to be a keynote speaker at the 2010 Biennial Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture. I chose to speak about philosophy and literature, in the hope that the questions I raise about the relationship between literature and philosophy, and about how to read a literary text, will be relevant also for people working in the fields of religion and theology. This text is a much-revised version of the lecture I gave at the conference in Oxford in September 2010. I . THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY ‘The clash between literature and philosophy does not need to be resolved. On the contrary, only if we think of it as permanent but ever new does it guarantee us that the sclerosis of words will not close over us like a sheet of ice,’ Italo Calvino writes. He was right: the relationship between James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, Professor of English, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies, Director, Center for Philosophy, Arts and Literature (PAL), B184 Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, 1st Floor, Box 90403, 114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Durham, NC 27708, USA. Email: toril@duke.edu Literature & Theology, Vol. 25. No. 2, June 2011, pp. 125–140 doi:10.1093/litthe/frr014 Advance Access publication 10 April 2011 Literature & Theology # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com philosophy and literature is not a thing to be discovered and described once and for all, but rather a question constantly recreated by writers, critics and philosophers responding to new situations. People become interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature for different reasons at different times, and different reasons for raising the question will require different answers. Attempts to define the relationship between philosophy and literature have often been formalistic in the sense that they set out a list of binary oppositions (universal versus particular, reason versus imagination, insight versus emotion, argument versus form) intended to settle the question once and for all. Such lists often disappoint. It is easy to find exceptions on both sides of the divide, and it is only too clear that they flatter the self-image of philosophers more than the self-image of writers. To cast philosophers as the guardians of universality, reason, insight and argument is to strip literature of its ambition to provide knowledge, thought and truth. It is also to ban passion and beauty from philosophy, although I haven’t seen too many philosophers complain about that. Such lists also have an unfortunate tendency to reproduce a stereotypical gender hierarchy, in which the terms on the left get coded as masculine and superior, and those on the right as feminine and inferior. Men think, women feel; men do philosophy, women write romantic novels. Lists of features assume that the answer to the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy must take the form of a definition of the two terms. Given that philosophers have never agreed on what philosophy is, and given that even the most agile minds have failed to produce a convincing definition of literature, this is not a promising path. Moreover, most of us don’t wonder about the relationship between philosophy and literature because we have trouble telling them apart. (If we did, a checklist of features that could help us decide whether we were dealing with an instance of philosophy or literature would be quite useful.) Rather we raise the question for other reasons, reasons we often fail to make completely clear even to ourselves. No wonder we often feel that the answers we get don’t address what we really want to know. The challenge for someone who wants to think about literature and philosophy, then, is to figure out what her question actually is. Usually, the question is triggered by a sense of irritation, a conviction that someone is failing to do justice to something we care about. In the post-war era, for example, the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy often took the form of complaints about the ‘novel of ideas’ (the ‘roman a these’) or novels with a ‘message’. This reaction was triggered by the popularity of existentialism, its faith in the philosophical novel, and its call for committed literature. Fundamentally, the debate turned on aesthetic norms: adherents of 126 TORIL MOI