Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov by Anthony Uhlmann (review)

Scholars and educators in the ever-beleaguered humanities are often asked to justify their continued existence in terms of real-world "deliverables." Literary studies, perhaps the most insecure of all disciplines, has long rested on the nebulous claim that it provides "critical thinking tools" to students who presumably would not learn to think properly without struggling their way through Beowulf. Yet it's difficult to argue that there are any uniquely critical tools that one acquires from studying Milton that one couldn't otherwise acquire through studying history, philosophy, or political science. Cornering the educational marketplace on "thought" may be a losing game. What if, however, one could establish that there is a type of thinking that is unique to literature or that literature affords a perspective on the way thought works that is not available elsewhere? Such indeed is the ambitious claim of the eminent Beckett scholar Anthony Uhlmann in his new book, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov. Drawing upon and carefully explicating some fairly dense philosophical material by Spinoza and Leibniz by way of Gilles Deleuze, Uhlmann makes the claim that there is a "kind of thinking that is proper to the arts" and that literature itself "might be understood to be thought," a grandiose claim that Uhlmann anchors to skillful close readings of the three modernist authors in his subtitle.

Making the connection between modernism and thought might seem to be a return to a fairly old-fashioned reading of high modernism that conceptualized it as an art of psychological interiority and solipsistic insularity. Yet Ulhmann is careful to explain that what he means by thought is not individual "consciousness" but a much more complexly interwoven mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, sensation and rationality. The old modernist "stream of consciousness" model has "atrophied over the years," Uhlmann observes, but early critics who spoke in terms of a stream of consciousness were "responding to a genuine tendency" in modernist works. Mislabelling that tendency "consciousness," critics missed that the literature of Joyce and Faulkner was not offering "an analogue of consciousness" but rather "an analogue of thought itself," which "exceed[s] the representation of consciousness" and offers "a surface that is folded so that the internal and external become complex, or inter-involved." Spinoza and Leibniz both offer useful models of reality that collapse the abstract and the particular, the subjective and the objective, into one complexly inter-folded substance. For Spinoza, Thought and Extension were simply two different attributes of the single immanent substance of God or Nature while Leibniz conceptualized the thinking subject as a monad which reflects, even in its solitude, the primary or originary monad: God. For both Spinoza and Leibniz, thought involves an attempt to bridge the synaptic and sensory gaps between the individual and the universal. Thought, for Spinoza, is a relation or ratio between elements that seem mutually exclusive or unrelated. "Ratio," Uhlmann reminds us, "literally means 'to think'," a process that occurs at the level of sensory experience itself and which is thus decidedly non-or extra-linguistic, requiring us "to understand what is not present in, or goes beyond the linguistic signifier, what is in the idea rather than the word."

Seeking a univocal compositional whole within artistic "works" (these are decidedly not Barthesian "texts"), Uhlmann never directly wrestles with the fact that what philosophically justifies the complex inter-folding of external and internal in the work of both Spinoza and Leibniz is the greatest transcendental signified of them all: God (or Nature, which amounts to the same thing in the seventeenth century). Take away that transcendental anchor and what remains, as Hamlet would say, is "words, words, words." Ulhmann is conceptualizing a return to aesthetic categories and modes of analysis that have been largely out of favor since the linguistic turn of the late 1960s, including the recuperation of authorial intent in his implicit praise of Samuel Beckett's dictatorial and litigious control over productions of his plays. Indeed, Uhlmann begins his argument by asserting...