Directions

Literature and the Social Sciences:
Towards the Reintegration of Education*
Andrew Horn
I begin with a premise : human experience is rooted in and affected by the
material and transient reality surrounding it, Similarly, art is determined by that
objective, material, temporal reality. Therefore to respond to art fully - whether
to a given work or to a whole tradition - one must place it in that known
moment in which it was shaped. This is as true of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
as of the Tahitian religio-erotic arioi theatre. (Oliver 1974, Vol. 3, pp. 913-
64; Pearson 1984, pp. 12-13).
But, over the past four centuries of western life, the overall integration of
experience has been increasingly ignored. Human thought, like human life and
labour, have been divided and subdivided into what are now considered separate
'disciplines'.
Noting this process, Christopher Caudwell (1973s p.89) pioneering literary
critic of the 1930s, pointed out that the remarkable power of Renaissance
writing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was due to an all-embracing use
of these different spheres of thought. He argued that:
all is fluid and homogeneous. Bourgeois society has not created its
elaborate division of labour, to which the elaborate complexity of culture
corresponds. Today psychology, biology, logic, philosophy, law, poetry,
history, economics, novel-writing, the essay, are all separate spheres of
thought, each requiring specialisation for their exploration and each using a
specialised vocabulary. But men like Bacon and Galileo and da Vinci did
not specialise, and their language reflects this lack of differentiation.
Elizabethan tragedy speaks a language of great range and compass, from the
colloquial to the sublime, from the technical to the narrative, because
language itself is as yet undifferentiated.
One of the central tasks which the Third World university should set itself is the
reintegration of human experience. This can only be done by taking down the
Adapted from a lecture presented to the Social Science Seminar of the University of the
South Pacific.
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rapidly increasing number of 'fences' which have been erected around what are
claimed to be discrete areas of thought and action.
My father's studies in psychology at Columbia University in the 1920's, were
undertaken within the School of Philosophy. Forty years later, when I studied
literature at the same university, I too found myself in Philosophy Hall. But
the Department of Psychology was no longer there. It had expanded, migrated
and become both physically and intellectually distant from its former
neighbours. As a 'science', it was no longer seen to be 'speculative', as were
those apparently softer and less empirical areas of study, philosophy and
literature.1 Surprisingly, many scholars of the arts welcomed this dissociation
from what had become known, in the intervening two generations, as the social
sciences. Under the sway of the New Criticism, and especially The Principles
of Literary Criticism (LA. Richards's 1924, 1929) and Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren's later, Understanding Poetry, (Brooks and Warren, 1960,
Wellek and Warren, 1956) literary scholars had turned their backs on the critical
tradition of Mme de Stael (1800) and Hippolyte Taine (1857), who had stressed
social context as the central determinant in a work of imagination, and veered
off into the cul-de-sac of aestheticism and formalism, preoccupied with the art
object itself, isolated from the conjuncture of the personal and shared experience
which precipitated its composition. From across the barricades, the social
scientist and the literary scholar sneered disdainfully at one another. But in the
traumatic intellectual reawakening experienced by European and North American
universities in the late 1960s-and by many Third World universities shortly
thereafter--there was a reappraisal of what came to be seen as the artificial
segregation of the arts from the social sciences. Academic conferences,
university courses and degree programmes in literature became increasingly
interdisciplinary.
One of the greatest difficulties in the development of integrated cultural studies
in South Pacific education-both tertiary and secondary-has, unhappily, been a
significant neglect of these academic liasions. Most of the undergraduates
majoring in the University of the South Pacific's Department of Literature and
Language are also majoring in a social science. But one is often surprised~and
distressed--to see how few such students are able to connect the issues which
arise in their history or sociology or economics courses with the texts they
confront in the literature course which meets at the very next hour. When
students are asked, for example, to write an essay discussing Shakespeare's
Macbeth in terms of rise of individualism in the Renaissance, or to examine
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the problems of African nationalism in a novel by Sembène Ousmane, or to
trace post-World War I malaise as a source of the existentialist novel, even
history majors seem rarely able to meld effectively what they see as the two
discrete disciplines which are evoked in the assignment topics. In the end,
essays are produced on either history or the literary text, but seldom on both.
The student of literature is, or should be, a student of culture and society, of
history and economics, of psychology and even biology, as well as of
aesthetics. He or she should be able to discuss not only the formal elements of
a given text, but the relationships between that text and both the author's
original readership and that audience which the text addresses today; must be
able to tease out the mediating factors which transmute reality into art and art
into the responses of the receiver. The student must be able to analyse not only
the technical devices of Pope's Augustan sat8ire, but the continuity of thought
which connects the heroic couplet and the debate over the Corn Laws; not only
the image of fog, but also the fundamental causes of urban poverty in Dickens's
Bleak House; not only the realistic stage conventions employed by Chekhov,
but the foreshadowing of the 1905 revolution in The Cherry Orchard; not only
the use of phatic statements in Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena, but the
psychological distortions created by South African apartheid; not only the
traditional Samoan symbolism, but the roles of gender and social hierarchy in
the novels of Albert Wendt.
And the problem is not one which faces the student and teacher of literature
alone. How often will a secondary school student of social studies use a literary
text to explore a theme in geography or history? How many novels, plays or
poems appear in the reading lists of Pacific university courses on contemporary,
regional or world history; development; nationalism; or women's studies? They
do elsewhere, in increasing numbers.2
Why, then, has an effective integration of social science and arts studies failed to
occur both at the University of the South Pacific and in the region's secondary
schools? The reasons for the present situation are various, but probably the
strongest--and the least acknowledged--is the dead hand of an approach to the
arts, mentioned earlier, which dominated Western academic life for several
generations. It is a view with its origins in the late nineteenth-century reaction
against what was seen as the positivism, materialism' and commercialism of the
industrialised world. It came to be known as aestheticism and its rallying cry
was L'Art pour I'art, or, Art for Art's Sake. It argues that the sole role of the
artist is to create beauty, itself seen in fundamentally Platonic idealist terms, as
spiritual, mystical and detached from the concerns of the world (except,
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interestingly, for a neo-classical concern for moral values [Leavis 1948]). It
also puts forward a view of the history of the arts which prizes only the
products of social elites--the so called 'high art' (Michaelangelo, Beethoven,
Milton, the Japanese No theatre, Indian classical music)--and holds in disdain
the work of artists whose appeal is more popular. Thus, not only have popular
music and popular painting been scorned as unworthy of serious study, but even
a writer as insightful and influential as Dickens has been dismissed by this
school as a mere commercial best-seller. Indeed, Leavis pointedly omits
Dickens from The Great Tradition with this patronising assessment: That
Dickens was a great genius and is permanently among the classics is certain.
But the genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no
profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description
suggests....The adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an
unusual and sustained seriousness.' (Leavis 1948, p.19).
This approach, in its several manifestations, led to a widespread perception of
literature as little more than a leisure pastime, essentially escapist in its appeal
and largely unrelated to the more valuable academic tasks involved in natural and
social scientific scholarship. As if to encourage this perception, courses in
literature, even when I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
were preoccupied with the technical machinery--the formal qualities~of writing
(the rhythms and rhyme schemes of poetry, the image and symbol patterns of
fiction, the architecture and linguistic varieties of drama), and actively concerned
to dissociate the content of any text from its historical moment. One should, I
was told, be able intelligently to respond to a text without knowing anything at
all about the circumstances of its author, the time or place of its composition,
or the social forces which engendered it. Indeed, it was argued, it is immaterial
whether The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) was actually written by Richard
Barnfield or, as had been supposed by some, Shakespeare.
And so, for the natural and social scientists, literature came to be seen (as it had
not until our century) as a 'soft' study, inferior in its achievements to the 'hard'
quantitative methodologies which were quickly developing in the areas of social
enquiry. It is this tradition which has dominated thinking in Pacific education.
But there is another tradition--indeed, a longer tradition~in literary studies which
argues that all the activities of mankind follow the same fundamental laws and
patterns; that the production of a poem is, in fact, very similar to the production
of a table or a motor car or, indeed, of a book on crustaceans; and that all of
these productive activities are determined, in important ways, by the specific
situation of both the maker and the reciever of the product.
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Georgei Plekhanov, the late nineteenth-century Russian theorist, for example,
turned his attention to the cave paintings of the so-called 'Bushmen', the Khoi-
Khoi and San of southern Africa, and asked why they only showed people and
animals but almost never plants. Several mystical and aestheticist
interpretations had been offered regarding the nature of these aminal images; yet
little had been said about the absence of vegetative images. Plekhanov looked
carefully at the material reality of the Khoi-Khoi/San, nomadic hunter-gatherers,
for whom the pursuit of game was the primary individual and collective activity
and cultivation simply did not exist. It is hardly surprising, he argued, that the
predominant concern--the experience of hunting and all the beliefs and
community patterns which grow out of this activity--would dominate the art of
the Khio-Khoi/San: 'The state of his productive forces, his hunter's mode of
life,... leads to his acquiring particular aesthetic tastes and concepts, and not
others' (Plekhanov 1981, Vol. 5, p.285). 'Thus', Plekhanov concluded, 'in
different periods of social development man receives different impressions from
nature, because he looks at it from different viewpoints' (1981, p.283). In this
way, Plekhanov went beyond the artificially imposed confines of art criticism,
into history, economics and anthropology, to find both richer and more accurate
methods with which to approach the interpretation of art.
When it came to the concept of beauty, so pivotal in the aestheticists' argument
and so often put forward as an absolute, Plekhanov noted that it was so heavily
contingent on other temporal conditions that it could not be valuably employed
as a universal measure: 'The ideal of beauty prevailing at any time in any
society or class of society is rooted partly in the biological conditions of
mankind's development...and partly in the historical conditions in which the
given society or class arose and exists'. (Plekhanov 1981, p. 651).
So, while literature may be seen to have its own semi-autonomous history~a
history of forms and techniques-it is firmly situated within the same set of
material conditions that determines any phenomenon in human life and, thus,
needs to be studied within an understanding of those formative variables.
What, then, about the student of the social sciences? In what way can literature
be seen not only as an adjunct but as a central body of information of value to
social enquiry? One quality of literature, or at least of effective literature, which
is absent from most empirical studies is a vividness, a sense of felt reality, a
roundness of representation. The literary text--and related theatre genres3---offers
a wholly different set of experiences from those presented by sociological,
econometric, human-geographical or even historiographical accounts of human
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conditions in any given place or period. What these latter texts rarely provide is
the texture, the sense of life as it is actually confronted in the environments and
times discussed. It is this simulation--and, thus, generation-of active
experience4 which is what the writers of fiction, poetry and drama are mandated
to provide. Because literature, as a consequence of its being a perceived
recreation of segments of the human condition, is able to deal with the abstract
and the concrete simultaneously, it can, using its unique qualities of implication
and indirection (often misconstrued as obscurity), give both a luminous
impression of life as lived (physically, intellectually, emotionally) and, at the
same time, imply broader patterns. It is this conjunction of the particular and
the general, the experiential and the metaphysical, which attracts the layman to
read a novel about the past in preference to a study of history, or a novel about
the workings of the stock exchange rather than the findings of economic
research. It is the reason for the immense and lucrative popularity of such
contemporary documentary fictionalists as James Michener, Auther Hailey,
Alex Haley and Paul Erdman.
Some examples here should serve to animate this point:-
I have read dozens of books~by policitcal scientists and journalists--
about the war in Vietnam. But my felt, experienced images of that
war come entirely from art--from the films Apocalypse Now, The
Deer Hunter and Platoon. Similarly, I have read numerous accounts
of life in General Pinochet's Chile, but none so enduring as that of
Missing.
Tales of the Tikongs (Hau'ofa 1983) tells me things about the Pacific
which no scholarly work of the finest quality could provide.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1600) contains insights into and
warnings about the psychological and political complexities of
personal ambition which the admirable work Coup d'Etat (Luttwak
1969) with all its charts, diagrams and maps cannot approach.
Kongi's Harvest (Soyinka, 1974) is invaluable to the study not only
of dictatorships in the Third World but of autocracies in those other
two worlds as well. For Kongi (and his followers) resembles not
only Idi Amin, General Stroessner, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and Kim II
Sung, but also Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the Greek Colonels and the
thousands of proto-demagogues who at this moment aspire to the
kind of power which these people have held.
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But, one may reply, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now may be valid and
valuable figurations of the Vietnam war, but what about Sylvester Stallone's
Rambo series or Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propoganda films of the 1930s? What
about the portraits of Pacific islanders in the stories of Jack London, or of
Africans in the novels of Robert Ruark, or of American Indians in the cowboy
stories of Louis L'Amour, or of women in Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers?
Is all art reliable? Indeed, is art reliable at all? Or is it, as Plato argued, a
process of distortion so dangerous that the poet must be banished from the ideal
republic (1941, pp. 68-85,324-40)?
The reply is fairly simple. Art is as reliable as any other form of human
reporting~as reliable as a sociologist's research findings, or an economist's data
analysis, or a demographer's survey, or a journalist's investigation-no more, no
less. The degree of reliability depends upon the qualities of perception of The
observer and commentator, on the conscious and unconscious biases which have
been conditioned into that observer, on the complex matrix of self- and social-
interests which shape any reporter's account of anything. The scientist, like the
journalist and the novelist, selects elements out of the infinite variety of
phenomena in the universe and identifies patterns within that selection. The
results of an enquiry are determined as much by the questions which are asked
(and those which are not asked), by the areas about which they are asked (and the
areas which are ignored) and by the manner in which the questions are posed as
upon the sector of experience which they are intended to test. In other words,
the reliability of any narrative depends on how much that account is founded in
objective reality-however subjectively received--and how much it is functioning
as ideology, here used in the Althusserian sense of a misrepresentation-
intentional or not--of reality. (Althusser 1969, 252; Rancière 1955; and
Williams 1976, pp. 126-30).
But how does one distinguish the ideological from the reliable, or what Lukàcs
(1937) calls the 'realistic'? One of the measures which Lukàcs offers is what he
terms 'totality'. 'The true artistic totality of a literary work', says Lukàcs,
'depends on the completeness of the picture it presents of the essential social
factors that determine the world depicted' (1950, p. 217). Pierre Macherey
(1978), in his Theory of Literary Production, extends Luckacs point and
suggests that the literary text is characterized as much by what it omits as by
what it includes. He builds up a typography of a work in which the absences
and the presences cohere into a profile of the author's response to experience.
Rambo, in other words, leaves out a great deal. Primarily, it leaves out those
'essential social factors' which Lukàcs maintains are requisite for any text to be
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valid (1950, p.218). It is, in short, ideological, a distortion of reality which
promotes in its audience the adoption of a set of invalid conclusions. Such art,
like the comparable journalism or academic scholarship, may even be quite
destructive, the more persuasive it is. Certainly a great deal of the popular art
naively consumed by millions around the world as 'only entertainment' may be
seen as very effective ideological vehicles (see Dorfman and Mattlehart 1975):
the Mills and Boon romances (and those of Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer,
Danielle Steele and Barbara Cartland), which sustain a fiercely patriarchal
construct of the world while appearing to be no more than idle, escapist
daydreams; the songs of Madonna ('Material Girl') and those of most country-
and-western singers; and the social Darwinism of Clint Eastwood and Arnold
Swartzenegger films. Myriad additional examples may easily be identified in
both the 'high art' of the west and the traditional arts of the Third World.
These comments may seem to be reducing literature to nothing more than
research data, to be ignoring the aesthetic questions of beauty and pleasure and
those forceful attractions which draw people to the arts. If I have done this it is
only in order to compensate for what I see as an imbalance in the response to
literature in South Pacific formal education. What I would wish to establish is
a sense of literature--and art in general~as one of the central manifestations of
human experience; one of the fundamental ways in which people attempt to sort
out the real form the illusory, to identify the causal structure of their lives, to
probe the significance of both the everyday and the extraordinary. In this way,
literature is, like the other social studies, an investigation into the nature of
human reality, one which provides material virtually unavailable through any
other source.
Notes
1 As late as 1903, the word 'science' was 'applied to the portions of ancient and modem
philosophy, logic, etc. included in the course of study for a degree in the School of
Literae Humaniores' at Oxford University. C.T. Onions, ed., The Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 3rd ed. rev., 2 vols, (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1973) 2: 1904.
2 Several accessible examples may be found amongst Foundation courses published by
Britain's Open University.
3 Theatrical enactments--including those on stage, film, video/television and radio--are
not strictly literary, as their primary manifestation is not in print but in performance.
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4 Note that the response to art is here characterised as an active, rather than a passive,
process. Even the most undemanding art--the soap opera, the advertising jingle, the
primitive anatomical graffito scrawled on the wall of a public toilet-does require the
active involvement of the reciever's faculties. This process is better explained by the
Gestalt theories of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler than by the
notion of 'hot' and 'cool' media put forward by Marshall McLuhan. See McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1964).
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