Literature: Escape & Critique

J. Derbyshire draws our attention to his review of John Berger's new book.He has a nice phrase for Berger's signature clarity: 'Berger’s prose is a stealthy miracle of precision. His painterly eye for sensuous particularity has often been remarked on and it is on frequently thrilling display here: the “right” temperature for greengages is said to be the “temperature of a small boy’s fist”'

Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?

To quote an earlier post:

[In the epic world] a distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.

What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.

Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)