Wisdom requires perspective and open-mindedness. We can enhance both when we approach literature with a sense of curious engagement. Literature provides us the unique opportunity for contextual learning. When we recognize the multifaceted realities and persons depicted, we are participating in other ways of being, and through empathy, we resonate and appropriate for ourselves these expanded points of view.
Use of the novel for developing wisdom and increasing our empathy and contextual awareness is distinct from reading books as relaxation or escape. Although such a reading does impart to the reader increased experience in worlds not his or her own, reading through the lens of contextual perspectivism enhances the consciousness expanding impact a novel may have on us.
Topics below:
Novel Truth
Language as Metaphor
As individuals, we can use the novel to explore new contexts from which we see ourselves and the world. Our evolving consciousness can be cultivated in the novel. We can roam through the cannon of literature seeking context that approximates our next perspective. Consciousness expands from seeing things differently, but with a sufficient recognition and resonance that allows us to internalize fully our new awareness.
The imaginative literature of the novel contains subjective truths that reflect how others have managed the events of life. Our resonance with these truths creates in us a literary empathy, an empathy for our self.
Novel Truth
The contextual nature of truth makes literature, especially the novel, a type of pragmatic philosophy where we can participate in other truths. Pragmatic humanism is a philosophical stance that accepts that truth is a lived phenomenon. Truth is what is accurate and adaptive as determined within a given culture or for a particular individual. Literature provides a view onto other ways of holding truths. Through understanding the place of the novel in the overall cannon of literature, and reflecting our resonance and dissonance while being the reader participant, we can see where our current thinking lies on a continuum of contextual-wisdom.
The need for a part of our human nature to grasp a singular truth or answer is attenuated through the novel. Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel talks about how Husserl and his pupil Heidegger both saw a reduction of lived experience and an over-valuing of discovering what something means. What the underlying Truth is can become more important than the lived experience. Heidegger called this process a “forgetting of being.” Kundera adds that current globalized hegemony is a manifestation of “the termites of reduction.” These termites of reduction have always existed in reducing even the most complex aspects of our conflicted human nature to hegemonic pulp. For Kundera, the spirit of the novel is complexity and is telling the reader that things are not as simple as the reader may think.
Pragmatic humanism represents a decrease in trusting essentialism and theory as providing help in understanding the complexities of sociology, history, and anthropology. Richard Rorty holds that the novel enacts this through multiple narratives eschewing discovery of ultimate truths. We can then utilize and alternate between these perspectives rather than seeking one primary truth. For example, the complexity of human nature is manifested in the characters of literature who are not reduced to attributes such as virtuous or villainous, but who are in their totality emblematic of the complexity of human nature.
Fully engaging with the novel requires a suspension of our biases and historical cultural prejudices that would, unabated, result in gaining only a slice of the novel. Harold Bloom encourages us to “misread” the novel. This is a manner of opening our mind to the multiple realities enacted in the novel in order to obtain the most it has to offer. According to Bloom, imaginative literature is figurative and metaphoric, so we must create our own interpretive stance to extract meaning and purpose out of the novel. As we read the figurative and the metaphorical, we are creating our own mental language, a new mental construction evoked by the newness of what we are taking in.
Language as Metaphor
Language is complex. A compelling pragmatic understanding of the development and evolution of language is through an understanding of metaphor. Words are born as a metaphor that orients another person to something that the originator of the metaphor feels important. Over cultural time, the metaphor can come to take on the appearance of representation; however, this is the end of the metaphoric creation. When we participate in the figurative metaphoric dialogue with the novel, we are in the process of actively creating new metaphors for our Self. This is not a process of extracting information or subtle nuance from a book, but an active parallel mental creation.
Through literature, we as individuals and as a culture are given an opportunity to create new metaphors to answer possibly unformulated questions that address the needs we face, here and now.
“One of the reasons to read is to prepare us for change, and the final change alas is universal,” says Harold Bloom in Why We Read.