What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored by Bernard Harrison (review)

One is faced with a complex task when asked to review such a massive and learned work as Bernard Harrison’s What Is Fiction For? The challenge is that of doing justice to the sheer amount of knowledge and insight the author presents in a book that is so sharp and penetrating — and at the same time so vast and multilayered.

Harrison is a philosopher, and this book constitutes a philosophical defense of the importance of literature and literary humanism. For Harrison, these concepts are intrinsically connected with a redefinition of the philosophy of language (especially Wittgenstein’s) and a redefinition of the task of the literary critic.

Harrison’s major claim in What Is Fiction For? is that “literature — serious literature … — teaches the reader what words mean, and how things look through the prism of those meanings” (246); or, in other words, that fiction “makes comprehensively visible deep features of our use of language of which we are normally only fragmentarily aware” (228).

This is, the book states, the very specific cognitive gain that only literature can offer: it can teach the reader what words mean, and since words are related to human practices, it can teach the reader to re-question meanings in the human world. It is a peculiar type of knowledge, which Harrison calls “dangerous knowledge” — dangerous “because it possesses the power to change its possessor by destabilizing his view both of the world he inhabits and of his own place in it” (xii).

This is also associated with the reason why Harrison’s argument targets much of the critical practice of the last decades. Many current academic approaches treat major works of literature as “quasi-scientific specimens nailed to a board for dissection in the interests of one or another brand of ‘theory,’” and in doing so “they encourage kinds of uninvolved scrutiny that are capable of yielding every kind of cognitive gain except the one kind that literature exists to provide” (xii). In other words, objectivity, the notion of the detached observer, when associated with literary criticism, is fundamentally wrong (Harrison produces an example of an alternative type of criticism in chapter 11, titled “Houyhnhnm Virtue,” in which he analyzes Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, to then show, in Chapter 12, “Sterne and Sentimentalism,” how Sterne’s Tristram Shandy constitutes an inquiry into Hobbes’s psychological egoism and Butler’s deliberative individualism).

What makes this book so valuable is that it inserts itself into historical conversation with theorists and philosophers; in other words, it is specifically designed to attack (and to defend itself against attacks from) philosophers and theorists who hold opposite positions. Consequently, Harrison’s prose is detailed, pointed, and requires high degrees of attention from the reader.

The book highlights sundry attacks made against literary humanism. It first asks whether — according to the demands made on literary humanism by “theory” under the influence of the physical and social sciences — the study of literature can contribute kinds of understanding that satisfy the criteria of “logical rigor” and “fidelity to the facts.” The negative answer to this question, based on the divide between a fictional world and objective extra-fictional reality, is then traced back to Marxist criticism which, Harrison states, is grounded in the belief that “the primary function of culture, including literary culture, … is to disseminate false but persuasive visions of the human condition whose function is to promote belief in the legitimacy of one or another form of class exploitation” (20).

The book then proceeds to delineate the aspects of philosophical and critical thought — in deconstruction, analytic philosophy, and Continental philosophy — that demote the cognitive value of literature and literary humanism. These, Harrison argues, find their roots in Cartesian individualism, which splits, with no hesitancy, mind and matter and which claims that everything nonmaterial must be subjective, private, strictly “internal to the mind,” and, therefore, devoid of objective, communal, cognitive value. Cartesian individualism, Harrison claims, has permeated all subsequent philosophical and critical thought and has given rise...