Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
_______________________________________________________________
William S. Haney, II Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. pp. 197. ISBN 0-8387-5529-1. Hbk, $ 39.50
Reviewed by
College of Marin, USA
William
S. Haney’s new work of literary criticism, Culture
and Consciousness:
Literature Regained, gives us a much needed
new critical language
in which we can actually think. Haney¹s approach comes to us out of the
tradition of the ancient mystic philosophers, such as Plotinus and Shankara, and
of the great American poets of transcendental insight—Walt Whitman, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Mary Oliver. His book is
solidly in the forefront of the new interdisciplinary field of consciousness
studies.
What
Haney has really accomplished, then, is to have given us a new tool for
understanding cultural and literary studies by giving us a new language in which
to grasp and articulate the experience of literature. This is the
experience of the protagonists as well as the experience in the minds of the
readers themselves.
Haney’s
new language combines ancient Indian literary theory and postmodernism. He
suggests that what Western literature and theory has been pointing to all along
is “what Indian aesthetics describes as the transpersonal, transcultural
state” (8). This in itself is a bold and fresh enough angle to make this
book worth reading. Critics have exhausted all the deconstructionist and
postmodernist terms, and we have seen them applied over and over, and to what
effect? Ultimately to devalue literature, one could say, to deconstruct it
until it is so relative or so subjective that it could mean anything or nothing.
Haney says that in postmodernity “all values are replaced by interpretation,
which becomes the foundation or essential feature of the universe” (24).
As
Haney’s subtitle implies, he is working to “regain literature” by forging
a new approach that values consciousness itself, the underlying basis of the
literature and the underlying basis of thought for the writer, for the
protagonist, and for the reader. Haney’s book also “regains
literature” by heightening an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness
of being, to which the interconnectedness of the work of art gives access.
What
are some of Haney’s terms, then, his new language to approach literature?
Of course it is not new at all, but is ancient terms reapplied. Haney’s
audacious angle is to take us to the earliest philosophical
terms--Vedic/Indian--and to use them as a universal basis to gain insight into
modern literature. Haney is as at home quoting from the Mandukya
Upanishad, the Rig Veda, or the Yoga Sutras as he is in quoting from Derrida,
Kant, or William James.
In
Chapter One Haney takes our mind in a new critical direction by using the
“Indian theory of rasadhvani, the flavor of the subtle sentiments leading
toward liberation or moksha” to explain the literary phenomenon of “the
timeless present” or “a moment of eternity” (22).
He
defines consciousness in terms of “purusha or consciousness itself,” as
distinguished from “prakriti or matter, which includes all psychological
faculties: intellect, ego, mind, sense capacities...” and tells us that “the
mistake of the intellect is to identify the intellect, ego, and mind with
consciousness” (43). The moment of moksha, then, or “the timeless
present” is a moment lifted out of the flux, when the protagonist in
literature or the reader--sometimes through the style and structure of the
literature itself, as Haney argues is the case in Beckett and in Pinter--is
brought to the liberating awareness of identifying itself with the transpersonal
prakriti
or consciousness.
Haney
points out that Atman or self is actually this transpersonal pure consciousness,
separate from all the aspects of prakriti or matter. This reminds us of
Whitman’s lines
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary...
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
(“Song of Myself,” part 4)
Haney,
using Indian poetics, would call this “the transpersonal state of witnessing
awareness” (8). His Vedic explanation of the self chimes also with
Whitman’s notion of the universal self. The “mistake of the
intellect,” or sometimes of the literary critic, would be to identify this
notion of Whitman’s self with the ego rather than with the all embracing
cosmic self.
One
place Haney’s discussion can take us is to issues of identity in literature.
An early premise in the book is that “basic
questions about identity and truth...cannot be resolved solely on the basis of
the mind or reason,” (7) but on a larger perspective of consciousness studies.
According
to Haney, the nature of the self as separate from matter is only part of the
story, though. He explains in Chapter Two how, “ironically, the
hybridity and supermodernity of the world, instead of merely producing ever
greater complexity, may also be taking us toward the realization of simplicity:
that of a nonpluralistic phenomenon--open not only to the individual but also
collectively to the intersubject” (66). This “nonpluralistic
phenomenon” is the non-dualistic nature of consciousness itself, or what
Haney, quoting from the Indian mystic Shankara, refers to in Chapter Three as
“qualityless, without parts” (81). In other words, pure consciousness
or purusha is ultimately also matter, prakriti.
This
realization of non-duality of spirit and matter and of self and transcendental
absolute Whitman expresses as
I have said that the soul is not more than the body
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one¹s self is...
(“Song of Myself” part 48)
Haney
leads us to an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things
through swinging us back and forth from deconstruction to Sanskrit poetics.
The style and scope of the book itself is an interconnecting, a non-dualism
between the thought and poetics of East and West.
Haney’s
breadth and documentation is impressive, both in his theory and in application.
I, myself, think that Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five is one the great, original works of he twentieth century, so I very
much enjoyed Haney elucidating it as “shaking up or unsettling memory and
thereby driving the individual toward an experience of the interstices of light,
or the flashes of being underlying the social construction of the self”
(133).
In
Haney’s last chapter he takes us to new, but related territory—that of the
ethical challenge regarding the postmodern “man machine” as indicated in
fiction—“the relation between ethics, free will, and consciousness” (160).
He argues that “any insentient (or nonconscious) being--robots, androids, and
finally perhaps posthumans” lack “a true intersubjectivity based on the
experience of nonphysical presence” (163). Or, to use his earlier terms,
since they do not have access to pure consciousness and an ability to realize their
connection with it, if we were to rely on them we would “rely on the intellect
at the expense of feelings and the capacity for pure experience” and we would
“undermine the holistic field of human experience” (173). Haney, in a
short book, has gone from Plotinus and nondualism to science fiction and the
posthuman, amazingly using Sanskrit and deconstructionist terms throughout.
What
I have done a few times with Haney’s terms and Walt Whitman is what I think
Haney¹s book encourages readers, critics, and teachers to do—to take these
ancient, fundamental terms of Sanskrit poetics, which he concretely explains and
applies, and expand our appreciation of literature, or “regain literature,”
by using them ourselves. As such, his book serves as the basis for many
more like it, in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies.