Proust and the squid

In a post from about a year ago, Jerry Coyne provided a useful set of links to the main pro and con arguments in the science-religion-compatibility argument of recent times. No doubt more arguments have been put forward since then, but I suspect all the philosophical issues have already been thoroughly covered. So I'll read through these arguments and add my own amateur piece to them in due course.

Last night I was watching Doctor Who [which I rarely do] and it featured a dyslexic lad who the Doctor encouraged with a reference to dyslexic geniuses such as Einstein and Da Vinci. 'Ahh', thinks I, 'the show's writers have been reading Proust and the Squid.'


Proust and the Squid, written by Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, and director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, is my own most recent venture into book-learnin. I have to admit that, having read it, I feel I should read it again, it's so rich in knowledge and speculation about the process of reading, and the future challenges to reading in our electronic, visual, sound-bitey age. It touches, and often more than touches, on such matters as the origin of writing, the different types of writing systems, the history of the teaching of writing, the way reading and writing affects the brain, and how problems in learning how to read and write [what is dyslexia exactly?] have taught us so much about how the brain functions and adapts.

Reading is a relatively new invention, but very important for the development of civilization and modern humanity, because the human brain was considerably altered by it - not in a basic anatomical way, but certainly in terms of information processing and organisation, and this in turn has affected our social development quite substantially. Just think, we divide history from prehistory on the basis of this single transformative invention. Reading combines vision and spoken language in revolutionary ways, and it has involved the adaptation of much older and slowly evolved circuitry for the acquisition of new tasks. Wolf refers to the 'open architecture' of the brain, a computing term, and the brain's plasticity and versatility is such that a Chinese child will learn to read her native language using quite different neural connections and pathways than those of an Australian child learning to read English.

Wolf chose this title because, first, the squid was a creature used in the fifties to study brain processes and brain repair. The squid's long central axon made it an ideal subject for these early studies, and now the 'reading brain' is offering a similarly ideal subject for more advanced work in cognitive neuroscience. The reference to Proust is one more obviously apposite to someone like me, as, in his book On Reading, he describes that inner sanctuary of the mind as it communes with a writer and follows and further elaborates upon a narrative; a precious place, a storehouse of unique memories, emotions, revelations. Wolf is especially alive to this ineffable impact of reading upon the psyche. She describes Machiavelli, who 'would sometimes prepare to read by dressing up in the period of the writer he was reading and then setting a table for the two of them'. Okay, I'm a bit sceptical of the story, but it evokes a period when reading, far from a universally acquired skill, was something precious, almost sanctified. Nowadays, it is virtually regarded as a sin not to be able to read; hence the stigma associated with dyslexia.

So what happens when we read? How are we enabled to do so? There's no easy answer. For a start, as mentioned, reading is a different process in different cultures with different writing systems. Our modern alphabet has twenty-six letters, compared with 900 or so cuneiform characters [used in the Akkadian and Sumerian writing systems], and thousands of hieroglyphs [the Egyptian writing system]. This suggests an increase in efficiency, and many scholars have argued that the development of an alphabetic writing system [probably by the Greeks in around the eighth century BCE] not only made writing easier to learn, but much more flexible and able to express novel and complex ideas. Yet brain scans have shown that people can master more complex syllabary writing systems, such as Chinese, which has thousands of characters, quite proficiently, and though these things are difficult to measure, there's no obvious reason to suppose that the Chinese are any less novel and complex thinkers than users of the 26-letter alphabet.

I could write much more about this book - in fact every page raises a multitude of questions and sets the mind off on a wondering journey. I'll definitely read it again, and I'll examine and reflect on more material from it from time to time. An endless sort of book.

Canto and Jacinta ponder Simon Schama's take on religion in the USA

Canto: In The Future of America: A history, Simon Schama, a self-confessed secular humanist and an Ashkenazi Jew, who has spent a large part of his life in the USA, offers some speculation on why the yanks are, by and large, so religious, and on the costs and benefits of such religiosity.
Jacinta: Yes, Schama's book, published on the eve of the election that swept Barak Obama to the presidency, and full of a sense of the momentousness of that possibility, commandingly sweeps through American history to examine past views of the nation's future, a retrospective intended to inform us of the issues at stake for the likes of Obama. For example, by fleshing out for us the figure of Montgomery Meigs, architect, organiser supreme, and energetic and principled quartermaster-general for the Union during the civil war, he examines the arguments between North and South, such as centralist federalism versus states rights, and, of course, half-hidden in the depths of southern resentment, the slavery issue. He also, albeit more briefly, looks at imperialist versus anti-imperialist visions at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the clash between Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain on the US treatment of the Phillipines.
Canto: Yes, and he skilfully explores other clashes and splits in the American psyche through dominant if little-known [at least to me] protagonists in, for example, the issue of proper treatment of the indigenous population, most notably the Cherokee, and in 'right' relations with Mexico, going back to the battle over Texas. All of this makes for a lively, dynamic work by a writer who cares most of all for the two things I most care about, language and human character.
Jacinta: And narrative, don't forget narrative.
Canto: Well, narrative, that goes without saying I hope, it combines those interests in the most dynamic form. But I want to focus on the role he finds for religion in the shaping of America's past and future. The African-American community of course has utilized the dignified fervency and the rhetorical tricks of the preacher from the earliest slave days through the civil rights movement to the present day. Right from the ante-bellum years the black church was a force in the land, a force almost unknown to the city-bound whites. Schama quotes at length from the writings of the indefatigable Jarena Lee, one of the country's first female black preachers, who so conspicuously contributed to the energetic spirit of black southern baptism at its outset. Schama thus builds a case, not through direct argument, but through the eloquence of historical personages and writings, that without the moralizing and communitarian force of black Christianity and churchdom, the path from slavery through civil rights to the advent of Obama could not have been carved out.
Jacinta: So much for our hopes for an atheist prez - but there was Jefferson, there was Washington, maybe Lincoln...
Canto: As we know, Jefferson was no atheist, but he was accused of being one, and John Adams was happy to smear him as one during the presidential campaign of 1800, producing flyers like 'God, or Jefferson and no God!'...
Jacinta: Today of course, you'll be unlikely to see anything like that. Nobody would believe a godless individual would run for president.
Canto: Oh ye of little faith. The times are a-changing.
Jacinta: So the absolutist fervour of Christianity lent its force to the abolitionist movement. But the US bible belt more or less corresponds to the ante-bellum slave-owning region. How do you explain that?
Canto: It can only be explained, really, by steeping yourself in American history and feeling how it expresses itself in a diverse religiosity. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival in the early twentieth century largely due to the hugely popular novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon Jr, a baptist minister.
Jacinta: From which came the D W Griffiths movie The Birth of a Nation.
Canto: Right. The story involved a Presbyterian preacher who whipped up Klan support to protect Christian white civilisation from black savagery. America's white supremacist movement and its black freedom movement were both driven by a protestant fervour unknown in Europe since the Thirty Years War.
Jacinta: But they had no Catholics to fight against, only differently striped protestants.
Canto: Differently forged protestants. The only thing they had in common was a sense of being disenfranchised and beleaguered. Schama finds that the history of the emancipation movement is thoroughly inspired by preachers. Nat Turner, leader of a ferocious slave rebellion in 1831, was known as 'the Prophet'. He dreamed of the great struggle to come between Christ and Anti-Christ, and was intensely pious. Denmark Vesey, a less successful rebel leader in 1822, was a founder of the African Episcopal Methodist Church. David Walker, black author of the 1829 revolutionary tract 'One Universal Cry', charged America with the heinous crime of being godless and unchristian. Others include Beriah Green, Charles Grandison Finney, John Rankin, Theodore Weld, James Dickey, William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, all of them righteous preachers against the sin of slavery, just as Martin Luther King, Jeremiah Wright and Raphael Warnock, in more recent times up to the present, have religiously railed against racism.
Jacinta: So are we meant to admire the power of American evangelism? Is the god question ever really addressed?
Canto: No, not really, and Schama is perhaps a little defensive about it all, but he's simply pointing out that you can't avoid the religious cast of American striving and struggle, and that to ignore it would be intellectually dishonest. We cringe at the God Bless America stuff, and wouldn't accept it from our politicians, But Americans are different, though of course also diverse - with plenty of them quite militantly against the 'under God' message.
Jacinta: I was reading those passages from the journal of Jarena Lee, and it seemed so ringingly clear to me that her god, her Jesus, these characters were personifications of what Freud called the superego, and what others have called conscience, or the moral principle that resides in us all, though it's a slightly different moral principle in each of us, like fingerprints or our DNA signature - recognisably human but also recognisably unique. If only we could get people to realize this, to proudly own their consciences and moral ruminations instead of attributing them to some fantasised external voice, to whom they choose to be grovelling but proud servants...
Canto: Is it choice, though? Lee's description of moral voices and dreams from her god are in fact the products of social pressure, she has surely cast her moral understandings in a way that will be acceptable but also impressive to her peers, all of whom appear to take heavenly messages as a given, and wouldn't accept any merely Socratically analysed moral conceptualisation as having anywhere near the same value. And so you have a snowball effect, in which everyone's moral understanding comes directly and personally as a message from their god [who of course is the same god for all of them].But to return to Schama's treatment - he seems to want not only to justify but to vindicate American religiosity, and in doing so, becomes almost incoherent.
Jacinta: I suspect American religiosity is itself incoherent, but large. And its largeness is like a whale, you can't help but deal with it respectfully. You even feel awed by it, against your better judgment.
Canto: Well let's not get carried away. Schama is first and foremost keen to point out that 'America's institutions are designed to protect citizens from religious coercion rather than enable it'. He's referring in particular to the first amendment of the US constitution which begins: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free expression thereof' [these two clauses are known as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause]. This is all fine in terms of keeping the state separate from religion, but the free exercise clause leaves things wide open for every dog and her cult.
Jacinta: And what if free expression involves coercion - which it so often does where religion is concerned?
Canto: Schama writes of the 'donnish bafflement' of secular Europe when confronted with this religiosity, which I think goes a bit far, especially when you consider the robust secularism of this country, Australia, which is hardly donnish, and then he tries to suggest that there's a double standard operating when these 'dons' consider Islamic ayatollahs as 'misunderstood traditionalists'. Somehow, I don't think Pat Condell would agree...
Jacinta: Yes, I don't think he gets that right at all, all of us are appalled at religious states and want to keep religious organisations or denominations as far from political power as possible.
Canto: Here are his concluding remarks about the subject anyway, and I might ask you to make some final comments about them yourself Jacinta:

It's elsewhere in the world that dogma chokes on pluralism - the co-existence of conflicting versions of the best way to redemption - and uses state power to wipe it out. In the United States the Founding Fathers believed instead that religious truth would best be served by keeping the state out of the business of its propagation; that the power of religious engagement would not just survive freedom of conscience, but be its noblest consequence. It was a daring bet: that faith and freedom were mutually nourishing. But it paid off and it has made America uniquely qualified to fight the only battle that matters, not General Boykin's quixotic re-enactment of the true god against the false idol, but the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty. That, actually, turns out to be the big American story.

Jacinta: I certainly agree that those two opening clauses of the first amendment are admirable and positive, though the phrase 'one nation under God' in the pledge of allegiance tends to dilute the much-vaunted pluralism more than a bit.
Canto: The 'under God' bit was added only in 1954. What were they thinking?
Jacinta: Still when Schama claims that due to state non-interference, the dogma is, in some sense, broken up by pluralism, he fails to recognize that a pluralism of dogmas or faiths may not add up to much. It's of course true that a single dogma with state political power, as in Iran, or in the non-religious USSR, or when the RCC ran roughshod over most of Europe, is generally horrific, while a plurality of relatively powerless dogmas is merely irritating...
Canto: More than irritating... or, rather, 'merely irritating' from a whole-of-state perspective, but sometimes devastating for individuals trapped in or victimised by those dogmas.
Jacinta: Quite right Canto, but where everyone seems caught up in some dogma or other, best to have a faith that promotes freedom. In any case, Schama only partly acknowledges that the American constitution was a post-Enlightenment document, heavily influenced by the citizen's rights euphoria that had begun to grip Europe, and from which established churches throughout the west have never really recovered. In defending American religiosity from his European and secularized colleagues, he points to Europe's bloody religious past, which doesn't go very far in explaining America's belligerent if not quite so bloody religious present.
Canto: Perhaps we're too impatient. Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years time, America will be seen to be travelling a clear path towards secularization of the population, regardless of the state.
Jacinta: I won't make predictions about that, but it's interesting that, without going into the philosophical implications of belief and non-belief, Schama suggests that the real issue is why Europeans have stopped believing, not why so many Americans continue to believe. In this he agrees with Lois Lee, founder-director of the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network, who believes research into the minority [but growing] phenomenon of atheism is essential and overdue.
Since the eighteenth century, most western countries have dealt pretty well with the issue - still ongoing, as attempts to disestablish the Anglican church in Britain indicate - of separating church and state, and keeping the major religions and denominations muzzled politically. But I don't think the state's institutions have had much effect on the nature or intensity of religious belief, unless you consider liberal education a state institution.  Maybe the real issue isn't so much why people are or are not religious, but what the costs and benefits are for religious belief in a rapidly evolving society. Evolution again. That's for the future though, which is perhaps why such questions don't seem to concern Schama, who's a historian after all.

on books, subjectivity and the world

I haven’t been reviewing books much lately, so now I’ll get back into it. First, an insightful little book with a misleadingly whimsical title, How to talk about books you haven’t read, by Pierre Bayard. It points out that many of us, if not all of us, talk ‘expertly’ about books we haven’t read, or have read but forgotten, or that we’re really not sure if we’ve read or not. This is particularly true of books that have become key cultural works, such as certain plays of Shakespeare [read but forgotten, in the main, at least in detail], Moby Dick [half-read], The Odyssey [unread], Ulysses [read, but I wouldn’t want to be tested on it] and so forth.

With a fine sense of irony and a sympathetic sense of the enormity of the task before anyone wishing to form an overview of western, or world, literature, Bayard picks out examples from the work of, inter alia, Robert Musil, Umberto Eco, Paul Valery, Graham Greene, Pierre Siniac, Honore de Balzac and Oscar Wilde, not so much to illustrate particular points, but to enter into speculation about the whole field of reading and non-reading. For reading a book is somewhat similar to witnessing an accident – no two accounts are the same, and the differences are often so great as to make you wonder if your co-witness hasn’t replaced the ‘real accident’ with an elaborate fantasy. And Bayard has an almost ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude towards these divergences. His attitude is, don’t be hesitant in imposing yourself, even on texts you haven’t read, or are barely familiar with. In a world compiled of texts, the key is to be able to negotiate your way through them in an expert fashion. And via these labyrinthine intertextual travels, to make your way out to the top of the heap, looking down, master of all you survey.

Not that Bayard takes this all too seriously. The book has an appealing lightness of touch, and is full of recognisable moments for those who choose to engage in the cultural campaign of reading, for self-improvement or for kudos – if there’s a difference. For example, after commenting on Montaigne’s notes about writers, which Montaigne himself stumbles upon, having forgotten both the notes and the writers, he makes this obvious but nonetheless telling point:

What we preserve of the books we read – whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully – is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.

 This observation occurs quite early in the book, and Bayard, arguably in post-modernist fashion, tries to make the case that we should turn our failings into advantages. It’s a variation on the death of the author and the birth of the reader [or non-reader], though less strident and virulent than the usual variations.  Or maybe just more beguiling.

In fact, though I enjoyed the book well enough, my own memory has reduced it to the fragments above-mentioned, though I read it only months ago. So, to refresh myself, I reread the epilogue, a matter of a few pages, and found myself, less beguiled by the mildness of style, disagreeing quite strongly in places. Let me put some pressure on a few quotes from this epilogue.

Encouraged from our school years onwards to think of books as untouchable objects, we feel guilty at the very thought of subjecting them to transformation.

I’m sympathetic to this, for I’ve always disliked the idea of books as sacred objects, and of writers, especially Great Writers, as sacrosanct. I recall some thirty years ago approvingly quoting something from Sartre, to the effect of ‘don’t expect me to handle your fine authors with kid gloves’, and I fondly remember shocking an older head, at about the same period, with some scathing and probably unfair comments on D H Lawrence. But the point is that I still worry over the fairness or unfairness of my comments. Don’t be worshipful or subservient, sure, but don’t be unfair either. You have to be true to texts, or they become meaningless. Transformation has its limits.

It is necessary to lift these taboos to begin to truly listen to the infinitely mobile object that is a literary text.

Here we have ye old post-modernist agenda of the world as a ‘sum of subjectivities’, raised as a value. The text is infinitely mobile, we each read it differently, we may as well be reading different things, so that as a referent, a ding an sich, it more or less evaporates, and what we must ‘truly listen to’ is this sum total. Hence it isn’t necessary to read the text, we can just add our [creatively] subjective interpretation to the sum of ideas about it, responses to it, discourses on it. Note also the word taboo here. Remember the taboo is against not treating the text as a text, fashioned by a particular person at a particular time. But if you don’t treat it that way, what is it? An infinitely mobile object, a blur, out of which you can fashion any shape you fancy. Is this really about taboos, or is it about something else?

The text’s mobility is enhanced whenever it participates in a conversation or a written exchange, where it is animated by the subjectivity of each reader and his dialogues with others, and to genuinely listen to it implies developing a particular sensitivity to all the possibilities that the book takes on in such circumstances.

This sounds so delightfully enriching and inclusive that it seems mean-spirited to object, but I’m just not sure that dissolving the text in a soup [however tasty] of possibilities, or subjectivities [however animated] equates to ‘genuinely listening to it’. By all means we should be alive to the personalized nature of engagement with a text, but the text isn’t the world, the text is the text. And Bayard really does seem to be confusing the two. It seems to me that he really wants us to be particularly sensitive to the world [of all possible subjectivities], to genuinely listen to it. So what then is the use of the text? A jumping-off point, the merest touchstone? Would a gesture, a facial expression, or an infinitely suggestible blankness, do just as well? To put it another, more tin-tacks way, is the text enhanced by the richness and diversity of the conversations around it, or is it that our conversations are enhanced by the richness of our texts? I’d put my money on the latter.

The encounter with unread books will be more enriching – and sharable with others – if the person undergoing it draws inspiration from deep within himself.

Again here, we’re beguiled by such affirmative terms as ‘enriching’ and ‘inspiration’. We’re almost enticed into disregarding the hole in the middle of this doughnut-shaped claim. What Bayard is saying, simply, is that your encounter with an unread book will have to rely on you for its richness, since nothing much will come from the other side of the equation/encounter, namely the unread book. He’s advising us to be more interesting [about the books we haven’t read, or anything else], for then we’ll assuredly be more interesting, to ourselves, in an encounter more or less entirely with ourselves. Others will no doubt be inspired, too, on hearing of this encounter.

To become a creator yourself: this is the project to which we have been brought by the observations drawn from our series of examples, and it is a project accessible only to those whose inner evolution has freed them from guilt completely.

These people know that talking about books you haven’t read is an authentically creative activity, as worthy – even if it takes place more discreetly – as those that are more socially acknowledged.

We don’t have to be taught or encouraged to be creative. Creativity is child’s play – watch any child. I have a seven-year-old friend who, at ages three and four, created wonderful, rambling narratives at the slightest suggestion. We passed by a house in the country, and she told us that she used to live there, years ago, with her boyfriend Michael who had a big blue car and they drove together all around the island and had picnics and visited their friends and it was great fun. On another occasion, when I was carrying her on a path by the seashore, she told me that she’d once been shipwrecked on these rocks, and she had to swim out and save her Nan who’d been carried away by the waves, and it was stormy and there were sharks in the water, and she wasn’t a very good swimmer, but she got her Nan to safety but then a shark bit her leg but it didn’t hurt very much but she had to go to hospital…

These delicious tales were of course free from guilt, and suggested to me that story-telling comes earlier in our development than truth-telling, and is probably more vital to us. We don’t learn to free ourselves from guilt, we learn to feel guilty – it comes as one of the responsibilities of socialization. Vital though story-telling is, truth-telling, the ability and the need to separate fact from fiction, and the sense of guilt related to telling porkies, are also pretty important qualities to develop. Obviously, a witness to a murder shouldn’t be encouraged to cover the bare bones of what she has witnessed with the rich draperies of subjective, guiltless inspiration. In the case of fictional texts, we naturally allow people more room for such inspiration. There’s less at stake, viz-a-vis story-telling and truth-telling.

Still, we do get annoyed, surely with some justification, when we hear a writer or a text traduced by someone we strongly suspect hasn’t read much more than a page or two of author or work. One of Bayard’s ‘examples’ intended to inspire us is Paul Valery, whose work was hitherto unfamiliar to me apart from a few memorable lines. Bayard describes three pieces of writing by Valery – ‘appreciations’  of three other writers; Marcel Proust, Anatole France and the philosopher Henri Bergson. We are primed, before being invited to reflect on Valery’s reflections, with the knowledge that Valery reads very little, as a general rule. Insofar as he has read his three subjects, he has probably only done so in order to ‘glean their worth’ [whether in terms of the fashion of the time, or for all time, is hard to say]. Nonetheless, according to Bayard, he still has valuable things to say, positively or negatively, about each writer.

Bayard calls this a ‘poetics of distance’, and, really, we only object to such poetics if the writer being treated is misrepresented, according to our lights. We want confirmation of our views, but we also want a deepening of our insight. That’s to say, we want ‘right judgment’ but also rich speculation and analysis. We want ‘truths’, but not necessarily about the writer, her work and her time; above all, they should be about something that relates to us, something we can benefit from, a take-home message from another instance of the conversation of humanity. And of course, in poo-pooing slavish devotion, or adherence, to texts, Bayard does make an important point about self-development and self-respect. There is an important sense in which we should read, or simply acknowledge, texts as a contribution to our story, our enrichment and growth. As such, we shouldn’t allow them to overwhelm us. Our main project is ourselves, and our struggle to keep afloat in the swamp of influences, and to move forward, or at least to be able to convince ourselves that we’re moving, in a forward direction.

To talk about books we haven’t read always will entail elements of guilt. It’s not so much that we should remain guilt-free when we engage in such talk, rather we should acknowledge what our talk is really about, whether it’s about thoughts that have emerged from our understanding of the writer’s standing, or thoughts about the subject of the text, or some celebrated incident within it. If someone who really has read the text contradicts you about it, then you can bow to their superior knowledge, or explain that, really, that isn’t what you want to talk about, you’re more interested in what you thought the text was about. Or whatever. The key is to know what you’re talking about, and what you want to talk about, to explore. To know yourself, to know what you’re doing with yourself.