The Most Important Idea Literature Ever Discovered

(An Ode to Reading)

I. Reading as Hallucinogenic Phenomena

'Reading is a strange thing: we’ve discovered that when we look at black marks on white paper, we can hallucinate images and scenarios that become so resonant that they can deeply move us.

Rainier Maria Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century said that “most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.” (Letters to a Young Poet).

What makes literature special to me is when a book comes around that presents a combination of words I’ve seen before but that get put into a certain order such that they describe and capture something in our lives I’ve felt before but never understood so clearly as until at that exact moment. There’s this incredible tension that as David Foster Wallace explains in his incredible speech “This is Water,” that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

For example, in a moment of my life where I felt quite lost, I remember reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and feeling so seen, and found. He writes, “Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.”

The way stories use language to represent the complex nature of human subjectivity while putting them in recognizable worlds is a certain kind of magic. And in this essay, I want to tell you about the most important idea literature ever discovered, the most important thing it brings to us, which is that some of the deepest truths cannot be fully understood when stated directly; they must be represented in order to be meaningful. If that’s true, then a great deal of what we call “knowledge” is dependent on form and perspective, on being shown rather than told. So, literature isn’t just a way of making ideas sound pretty, it’s one of the few technologies available that makes certain important experiences intelligible.

II. The Philosophical Paradox: A Simultaneous Distrust and Death-Grip

Philosophers since Plato in the 400s BCE have distrusted literature as a means of conveying truth. Plato’s protagonist Socrates famously stated his suspicion of writing as a practice for expression in the Phaedrus and his misgivings about poets and poetry in the Republic.

Similarly, in 1748 AD, in the final passage of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Scottish empiricist David Hume writes: “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning containing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (E 12.34)

Literature, he says, is not propositional knowledge like philosophy or science, so what justification does it have? If you’re interested in a deeper dive on that Hume quote, I wrote an entire essay called “Philosophy and the Loaded Gun” just about it for Book XI’s newsletter on Hume.

But, ironically, and deliciously perhaps, Plato only wrote fictionalized dialogues, not logical treatises. In the Republic, he basically calls Homer the educator of Greece and recognizes how the Iliad and the Odyssey shaped the foundational culture and ethics of ancient Greece. He also quotes or alludes to Homer in many of his dialogues, including The Apology, the Charmedies, the Ion, and the Theatetus, among others. To go a level deeper, Plato himself invented Socrates, one of the greatest fictional characters in history; obviously Socrates is based on the historical figure, but the image of Socrates we have is inseparable from Plato’s literary construction.

And Hume was a voracious reader of literature, considering a love of literature to be his “ruling passion.” In presenting his ultimately skeptical Enquiry, Hume is undeniably presenting a character Hume, too.

Wittgenstein, a philosopher of language, says Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent;” however, in that same document’s concluding lines, he succumbs to the inevitability of linguistic metaphor and obliqueness. In its (in)famous ladder metaphor that the text ends with, Wittgenstein writes, “”My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.)”

What’s telling it is that the ladder metaphor is the thing most people walk away from the Tractatus remembering, not all his other numbered and subnumbered propositions wherein he tries to explain the truth of optics, language, and perception. Notably, Wittgenstein basically recanted his philosophy of his youth and took on a whole different approach to the philosophy of language with his monumental concept of “language games.” However, the latter is out of our scope for this essay.

Wittgenstein’s last metaphor suggests that language is useless to totally uncover truth because experience lies beyond it. So, it appears that Rilke and Wittgenstein agree. However, language and, by extension literature, is the closest approximation we have. Because when we read Bertrand Russell or Kant, we observe truth operate, perhaps, but when we read [insert your favorite novels here], I’ll tell you mine: Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Williams’ Stoner, Büchner’s Lenz, or Graciliano Ramos’ Vidas Secas, we can actually get a sense of what that truth means.

To put it another way, knowing the sentence is not the same as understanding the experience.

III. “He seems to me:” The Initial Inward Shift of Meaning

In western literary history, meaning went from being contained purely in action to residing in the interiority of the subject.

I want to quickly define what I mean when I say “meaning,” because my whole argument hinges on this. It’s easy to get lost in a deep philosophical rabbit hole about this, making distinctions between synthetic and analytic answers and skirting and circling what we’re trying to say without a dangerous attempt at an answer as Dr Stephen L. Anderson does in his article “The Meaning of Meaning” and analytic philosophers do talking about propositions and objectivity and perspectives and truth-values. The way I want to define meaning in this essay is phenomenological. Following Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when I’m discussing the location of meaning, I’m discussing where literature places the emphasis on the process of how things become intelligible to us. (Now, their philosophies are a lot more complex and involved than that, and if you’re interested in an essay explaining that more, let me know).

Here’s a quick example to distill what I mean that’s relevant for this essay: a home or a house is not just a physical building; it’s a place of belonging that through our time-bound existence within our world holds a meaning to us beyond a physical structure; it’s associated with freedom, comfort, rest, emotion. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, he not only defines us as “dasein,” which translates to being-in-the-world because our understandings of our existence cannot be separated from our practical and social surroundings, but also emphasizes “sinn,” an upon-which; he means that things only become intelligible to us within a pre-existing framework of purposes and possibilities. So our understanding of what ‘home,’ the meaning of ‘home’ is comes from this compilation of experiences we’ve had throughout our lives.

If we follow Heidegger, each writer came from a point of their own individual instantiations of their worlds. And meaning for us readers arises out of our interaction with those worlds, which comes from our awareness of our consciousness. When we read literature, we are engaged with an act of creation. As Robert Piercey argues in Reading as a Philosophical Practice, reading is an implicitly and profoundly philosophical activity––an ethically and ontologically vital practice––that helps us form our identities and make sense of the world. Because when we read, especially when we read carefully, we observe where the worlds these writers provide are similar to our own and where they are not, we learn what those overlaps and gaps teach us about ourselves, others, and the world we share.

So let’s start with Homer.

Although Homer presents us with very nuanced questions both in the context and characters in the Iliad, that complexity is embedded in speaking and action. Given the oral origin of Homeric plays, in order for things to be understood, they had to be said aloud. Achilles is undoubtedly a complex figure, who battles himself and others literally and figuratively as he moves through the story negotiating his identity and actions between the tension of his god-side and human-side. Albeit complex, the consciousness and perspectives of Homer’s heroes are inextricably tied to what they do or don’t do, not through extensive and abstract contemplation as in Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., for example. Consciousness, in epic poetry, lies in action. And thus meaning does as well.

About a century after Homer comes Sappho, a lyric poet who revolutionized literature by shifting the place of meaning from action to intense, first person subjective experience. Interestingly, Plato called Sappho the “10th muse,” an allusion to the nine muses that guide art and science in greek mythology in the famous epigram “Some say the Muses are nine: how careless! Look, there’s Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.” And it’s because of the shift she enacted in poetry.

Let’s look at some illustrative examples. Here’s an example of Homer’s emphasis (I’m using the Fagels translation here for its cinematic language):

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,”

Compare that with Sappho’s Fragment 31 (this is from Anne Carson’s translation)

“He seems to me equal to gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you

sits and listens close

   to your sweet speaking”

Look at that immediate difference: Homer requests action, “Goddess, sing” to tell of more action––how Achilles’ rage caused the Achaeans countless losses. Whereas Sappho starts with thought and a reference to the first-person speaker: “He seems to me.” The world we’re inhabiting is internal. In both, we are talking about a man who’s giving rise to anger, yet the results are totally different.

So, in Homer, the poet is just the vessel for conveying truth by way of his singing of the poem; in Sappho, meaning lies in the poet’s voice. And she advances the tradition by examining consciousness through interiority and subjectivity in an embodied context. Inner life contains and becomes poetry; the mind, with Sappho, becomes a place of observation, a site of action, in a way. The self is the view point.

IV. The View From Somewhere: An Epistemology of Perspective

Historically, epistemology or the theory of knowledge treated the ideal of knowledge as completely removed from the subject, as something totally objective. But as we learned in eight-grade science, there is such a thing as “the observer effect,” which entails that an act of observing or measuring a certain phenomenon inherently alters the state of the phenomenon. What that means for epistemology is that this God-like, Objective View From Nowhere is impossible. My favorite discussion on this topic is in Thomas Nagel’s A View From Nowhere. Nagel is famous for writing “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” which I’ll link below if you’re interested, where he argues that the mind-body problem Descartes established in his Meditations on First Philosophy cannot be easily resolved by reducing experience to objective physical facts. In A View From Nowhere, Nagel tries to unpack the tension that we all experience: the fact that each of us has “perspective of a particular person inside the world” and sometimes “an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.”

Because there is something it is like to be you. As Nagel says, it’s impossible to hold purely a “view from nowhere,” which is the place we like to occupy when we make scientific discoveries, for example, that try to establish truths about the world. Nagel, by the way, is not saying that objectivity doesn’t exist; in the text, he both critiques and argues in favor of objectivity. He’s saying that an inevitable part of existence is occupying a “view from somewhere,” or a “view from now here,” as well as understanding that we can reach for this view from nowhere when we discuss larger truths than those that encompass our present moments.

Therefore, following Nagel, we need subjective perspective as an epistemic condition––as a necessary, foundational aspect required to access, evaluate, and formulate any objective truth. And in literature, we see how meaning must be constructed between views from somewhere.

V. The Many Somewheres: Responses in Form to Epistemic Pluralism

Once perspective becomes unavoidable, literature ceases to present experience directly and instead develops forms capable of holding multiple partial viewpoints without reducing them to a single truth. I’m going to typify the varying stages, forms, and capacities of these responses by way of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Faulkner before going into where literature encounters the profound instability of representation itself.

With any of Shakespeare’s plays, you’re going to get multiple epistemic positions coexisting within the same world––as we experience in our own world. In Othello, for example, we get multiple perspectives on who is wronging whom; throughout the play there isn’t a single epistemic authority, they co-exist. Although in the end there is a resolution, the ‘truth of the matter,’ in this case being Desdemona’s innocence, emerges through collision in action. The perspectives are co-present in the dramatic space, embodied by different characters, expressed through direct speech and action. While perhaps you could understand that “jealousy can bring people to ruin,” reading Othello shows you much more profoundly how deeply the troubling grooves of misunderstanding can run. The stage creates embodiments of characters who go through the experience of these realizations, the dramatic representation shows us that in a peerless way.

And it compounds every time with the lessons Shakespeare is showing. In Othello, for example, throughout the whole play we have people showing and hiding their characters and experiencing or manipulating how actions can make truths intelligible. For example, the strawberry handkerchief that’s in Cassio’s room that Iago uses to––falsely––show Othello that Desdemona is betraying him. The power of the physical symbol of the handkerchief underscores the importance of action demonstrating character, and it functions on two levels because of the nature of the play. Within the level of the diegesis or the plot, the handkerchief’s presence reveals one thing, but to the viewers, as a result of dramatic irony where the audience knows something essential that one of the characters doesn’t, we see how Iago’s manipulation of the handkerchief shows his true character: a manipulating liar. Thus, across these two levels, we also can view the nuance contained within action’s relationship to meaning. But again, this is all through a symbol, not a direct statement, which demonstrates the power of meaning through representation.

And as the readers/spectators, we get to safely adopt a view from nowhere, not being involved in the play. In a way we watch like Gods in classical mythology with the Globe Theatre or whatever venue we’re in serving for Olympus. We see the truth of the matter and how it gets resolved in a world similar and resonant to our own, but separate; an artificial laboratory of human interaction that helps us more productively conceive of ourselves and our worlds…

Which contrasts to the Victorian era novel Great Expectations. Pip serves as our first-person narrator, and we have a unified epistemic center who organizes one voice over the entire story. Although his experiences are messy and complex, the truth in Great Expectations is synthesized into a single interpretative frame. Another great example of this is Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. In both novels, the narrators conveys a plurality of experiences but through a single explanation. Dickens typifies a lived Nagelian perspective still capable of coherence. He’s not taking a view from nowhere, but the ‘somewhere’ is a later temporal position, meaning that there’s a retrospective coherence––such that prior confusions are reorganized into meaningful instances and contradictions are narratively resolved. The Victorian novel demonstrates the essential nature that narratives play in coming to understand the meaning of our experiences. We have that saying “hindsight is 2020,” because to make experiences intelligible, we often embed them within a narrative context that accounts for causality and randomness simultaneously. Watching Pip recount the series of his life, through his ups and his downs and how they lead to the moment of narration, we get to watch that in practice. Thus, literature gives us practice, in a way, to deal with situations and our feelings about them. Because we’re understanding meaning to only become intelligible to us within a pre-existing framework of purposes and possibilities, with literature we get to expand that framework by second-handedly experiencing Pip’s struggles and Othello’s mistakes.

But the sense of resolution that we experienced before breaks when we get to the modernist novel.

By the way, I’m not reducing all pieces of all literature of these moments to just doing these things; Wuthering Heights is a Victorian era novel that is very proto-modernistic in its layered tellings and retellings, for example. And I actually wrote my entire literature thesis on how 1883 Georg Büchner’s Lenz is anti-romantic and anticipates the questions of modernism. If you haven’t read Lenz, I’ll link my favorite translation in the description––it is one of my favorite pieces of writing; and if you want to hear more about that argument, let me know in the comments.

Ok, back to the modernist novel. The modernist novel As I Lay Dying shows what happens where “somewhere” collapses entirely into fragmented perspectives. In this and other modernist novels, there is no single unifying center. While that coexistence of perspectives may on the surface seem like Shakespeare––and in a way the parody of drama is present there––the important difference is that in Shakespeare there’s conflict over a stable world whereas in Faulkner the world itself exists only insofar as it is fragmented. And reality is only accessible as discontiguous interior accounts. The many narrators we get in As I Lay Dying is how Faulkner represents the breakdown of the assumption that perspectives converge on a single underlying world. The breakdown of a single authoritative account cannot be meaningfully understood as a claim; it must be experienced as a structure that refuses synthesis while still producing partial intelligibility.

Each of these forms reveals something that cannot be captured in direct statement. They show that lots of instances of profound meaning and important opportunities for meaning-making are not contained in propositions about the world, but arise from the way perspectives are arranged, mediated, and fragmented in representation itself. Furthermore, if that’s true, then a great deal of what we call knowledge is not something we state, but something we are shown and are allowed to experience.

Postmodernism is relevant here because after perspectives fragment in modernism, post-modernism comes in and queries into the moment representation seems to stop functioning as a stabilizer of meaning at all.

VI. The Limit Condition: Instability of Representation Itself

In As I Lay Dying, we experience fragmented perspectives that put together a broken unity and we as readers reconstruct meaning that leads us to an incomplete but coherent synthesis that mirrors the moment in which the modernists were writing. Even in the fragmentation, there is a world that can, in principle, be reconstructed, interpreted, and pieced together in a meaningful way. But with postmodernism, we start encroaching on the idea that representation can exceed the capacity for meaning-making. Let’s look at David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I’ve read it twice and am preparing myself for a third reading––let me know if you’re interested in an essay about Infinite Jest.

One way it often gets put is that modernism emphasizes subjectivity while postmodernism subverts that by saying everything, including subjectivity, is relative. But I don’t want to take the argument in its weakest form. In Infinite Jest, literature no longer offers fragments of a recoverable whole, but systems of meaning that expand faster than any attempt to totalize them. It’s like the assembly of meaning never finishes; which the title, of course, alludes to in its invocation of the infinite. The title is an allusion to a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wherein Prince Hamlet is holding his court jester’s skull, and calls him “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and says “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”

The idea of the recall of thousands of times, how many times Yorick brought joy, jest, and meaning to Hamlet coming to an abhorrent end, with Hamlet just staring at the jester’s muddied skull. It’s presciently representative of how postmodernism asks about the extent to which any representation can ever escape the systems that produce it. Because while Yorick brought Hamlet joy and meaning in the past, now his existence is inherently tied to this unsettling image of his physical death, which basically makes Hamlet say he wants to throw up: “my gorge rises at it,” he says directly following that scene.

Without spoiling it, I use Infinite Jest as an example that shows how, its most extreme modern form, representation ceases to function as a puzzle whose pieces can be arranged into a single image, and becomes instead a structure that proliferates faster than any attempt to stabilize it. So, let’s look at my own argument: that some truths cannot be directly stated.

A postmodernist would then inquire: “but how do you know representation isn’t itself another kind of interpretation?” And “How do you know that that interpretation isn’t produced by another framework?” which causes interpretation to become recursive. Every representation is an act of interpretation, and interpretation is a part of reality. What postmodernism actually does is present a new epistemological problem.

And the postmodernist conclusion does not mean that representation fails. It actually shifts the burden; instead of representation being seen as the vehicle of meaning, representation becomes part of meaning.

It means that meaning was never something delivered in finished form to begin with. Which is exactly why a propositional presentation of knowledge like we get in analytic philosophy or symbolic logic cannot be the end all be all of knowledge acquisition.

VII. Conclusion: Literature is a Mother

Every major transformation in literary form is an attempt to solve a problem of knowledge related to perspective. Because once literature recognizes that knowledge is always perspectival, every advance in representation eventually reveals another layer of mediation.

And how to parse those? Reading. Reading is the answer. Because reading is the only form of cognition that does not erase perspective, but enacts it. While science takes towards abstraction and objectivity and our lived life is locked into one standpoint, literature lets us enter a standpoint without being confined to it.

It is the only practice that allows us to temporarily inhabit perspectives we do not possess; reading is the structured experience of translating between forms of subjectivity without collapsing them into one truth. It, then, is not the passive reception of completed meaning, but the lived experience of navigating a system of perspectives that never fully closes. It is the only form of understanding that does not reduce perspective in order to grasp truth, but moves through perspective as the very condition of truth.

So read on!