Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005

Special Issue: Literary Universals

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Fisher, Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1998.191 pages.  ISBN 0-674-95562-5 paper, $17.95 USD; £ 11.95; e16.60. ISBN 0-674-95561-7 cloth $40.00 USD; £25.94; e36.90.

 

Reviewed by

 

Gloria B. Clark

Pennsylvania State University

 

Philip Fisher, in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, takes on a philosophical argument which illuminates the dichotomy of wonder and science.  He pursues the overriding question: Do scientific discovery and quantitative research diminish the human capacity for wonder?  Fisher reveals his deeper purpose early in Chapter One, when he says: “How we think and how we are drawn to think about just this, rather than just that, will be the subject of this book” (1).  He returns to this subject in the last chapter, delineating what he calls a “middle zone,” or the “poetics of wonder,” a space that lies between the “familiar and uninteresting,” and the “unknowable or unthinkable” (180). Fisher uses the term “poetics of wonder” to express that situation of intelligibility experienced at some juncture by all human beings.

In this interdisciplinary study of wonder, Philip Fisher, Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University, has combined a number of his great interests: literature, cultural theory, art and philosophy.  This book takes an important place alongside his other books, which include: The Vehement Passions (2002); Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (1998-99); Making and Effacing Art (1991); (ed.) New American Studies (1991); Hard Facts (1986); Making Up Society (1981). He received the Truman Capote Prize, with Elaine Scarry, for Dreaming by the Book in 2000, a book which explores how literature enables us to sense what it describes.

The beginning chapter of Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences probes the nuances of the word “wonder,” and its connection to the process of investigation, concluding that, “The mind says ‘Aha!’ in the aesthetic moment when the spirit says ‘Ah!’(31). Fisher uses the rainbow as an important example of a rare phenomenon that elicits a sense of wonder, and explores the history of explanations for the existence of rainbows, including those of Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, as well as mythological and religious sources.  Using Descartes’ analysis of wonder as a starting point, Fisher explores the relationship between wonder and learning.  Descartes considered wonder the first passion, because “…it is by wonder that man learns” (57).  Fisher concludes that it is the history of the science of the rainbow that makes a real connection between aesthetic appreciation and human thought (85). 

Fisher then considers how certain lines from Keats’ poem, “Lamia” had a great influence on the division between poetics and science.  Not only are these lines an expression of the distance between these two worlds, but Fisher uses them to underscore the thought of sociologist Max Weber in relation to modernity and a certain “disenchantment with the world,” which Weber calls Entzauberung (88).  Weber characterized the world’s increasing reliance on the rational thought of science as world-weariness.  Fisher counters this very argument by laying the science of the rainbow out for the reader, using the theories of Theodoric of Freiberg, Descartes and Newton, among others, and coming to the conclusion that, although in many ways the elements of wonder have been undone, not all is lost. 

Indeed, Fisher finds a new type of wonder replaces the old, “equally sensory, but now also intellectual,” which brings the extraordinary back to what has become the ordinary, on account of explanation (100).  It is just this borderland, the space between the ordinary and the extraordinary, that interests Philip Fisher, because the essence of wonder lies within it.  This borderland is inhabited by pure experience or the perception of a rare occurrence, such as a rainbow.  This pure experience is so present and overwhelming, that it does not even allow for memory or the imagination.  Fisher says that “we find ourselves delayed in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.” (131).   There is a moment of seeing and understanding the whole.  Fisher notes that the disciplines of mathematics, art and architecture alone present that whole to the human consciousness in a way that narration, ever bounded by progression, cannot.  That moment of understanding the scope of something instantaneously was described by Jorge Luis Borges, the venerable Argentinean writer in his short story, “The Aleph.”  In this case, the Aleph is a shining sphere that contains all of universal space.  The observer can see all things in the universe at once, with total clarity and lack of confusion. Gazing into the Aleph means instant understanding of the full scope of the natural world and human endeavor, however, the understanding is only for the moment, as memory cannot contain and recall the total experience.  Fisher does not step back and spin the Aleph before us, to consider and observe.  He does not probe the very center or depths of that shining orb, but steps into the visual realm of art, where the sense of wonder leads to “curiosity, prolonged attention, [and] satisfaction” (148).

Fisher inverts the argument at this point.  Earlier in the book, he argued that thought, science and investigation can lead to wonder, as in the explanations of mathematical principles and the rainbow.  Now, he explores how art can start with wonder and lead the mind to an ordered series of questions.   Two works by Cy Twombly; 1970 Untitled, and Il Parnasso 1964, serve as examples of such visual art, which first elicit a sense of wonder, and then lead us to question.  Fisher notes that Twombly’s “blackboard painting,” a large 13’x 21’ canvas in shades of black and white, immediately arrests our attention as something that we have experienced.  It is familiar, and yet, a sense of wonder comes from its sheer size and the mystery of the secret language written upon it.  This huge palimpsest both takes us back to, perhaps, childhood experiences, and yet leads us forward to bigger questions, such as the impermanence of art, as Fisher notes, “. . . a transience that Keats called ‘fast-fading violets covered up with leaves’” (158).

The second work by Twombly begins from a different place, instead of evoking a memory, Il Parnasso is not immediately accessible to viewers.  A quick glance will not yield an overall impression which leads to a sense of wonder; its cipher is more difficult to decode.  Fisher discusses all of the subplots visible in this work and then relates it to Raphael’s  Parnassus, which situates Twombly’s painting in the historical trajectory of artistic expression.  Here again Fisher notes that art leads us through a process of “intelligibility,” as Twombly shows “. . . that the idiom of abstract art is itself the spiritualization, the etherealization of earlier realistic idioms. . .” (179).

Overall, this book by Philip Fisher holds up “wonder” as a goal that can be reached by one of two paths; through scientific investigation and theory or as a human reaction to an event that quickly progresses to questioning and investigation.  As Fisher says: “The idea, in either case, of an explanation that dispels wonder or curiosity is the wrong model to carry into the situation, with the rainbow and the doubled square no less than the Twombly painting” (180).  This discussion is very timely in our contemporary world, which understands nearly everything through a scientific lens.  Fisher gives us language to express how wonder works in this complex age.  What is missing, however, is what is at the center of that sense of wonder.  Returning to Borges’ “Aleph,” which draws the viewer to question the center, while experiencing the simultaneous and instantaneous view, the “getting it” that Fisher describes.  Fisher stays on the surface of this discussion and is content to describe the feeling, but not to question its very essence, this book stays with the “how” of the experience, and misses the “why.”

Finally, the reader closes this book with the certainty that both science and art are  the handmaidens of the aesthetic experience of wonder.  All of the investigation, and quantification so integral to the scientific method only serves to enhance the experience of the natural world.  Art, on the other hand provides an experience that begins with wonder and leads to questioning.  Fisher rightly places wonder as a “boundary line between the obvious, the ordinary, and the everyday on the one hand, and the unknowable, the inexpressible, the unformulated, on the other” (12)