Being in earnest with reality: seriousness and embodied materialism
[A] touchstone of the highest or most living art is seriousness; not gravity but the being in earnest with your subject—reality.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
‘Letter cxxxiii - 1 June 1886’ The Letters ed. Claude Golleer Abbott
(London: OUP, 1935:225)
These are serious times. With death visibly stalking the world, a sombreness has enveloped us. The foundational political question—always urgent, but submerged beneath a carapace of seemingly inevitable capitalist realism—‘what is to be done?’ has taken on a new, desperate urgency. Over the last decade, as formal politics have become more aesthetically demonstrative and alarming, a moralistic earnestness has returned at the margins, often tipping into persecutory crusade and performative preening, but underscoring a pendulum swing from the frivolous, the unreal, and the ironised. If that new po-faced seriousness represents an often impotent desperation to ‘be in earnest with reality’ the sickly irony with which it wrestles represents an embrace of that powerlessness, a breeding of stories of the ephemeral and the inconsequential as a tacit claim that the answer to Lenin’s question could only be ‘nothing—there is no alternative’.
The tasks with which many are grappling coalesce around the following questions: what becomes possible in this new world which was previously unimaginable? Which concerns with which we have busied ourselves, pretending they were emancipatory, appear now as by turns frivolous, marginal, and technologies of ruling class power? How do we resist the siren song of the ironic and fatalistic in the face of such collective horror, and become a 4-chan like polity, ready to embrace the next loser-in-chief as an ever darker political master?
In a highly ironised society, there is a familiar kind of sickness that comes from eating too many sweets, too much artificial flavouring. It leaves you feeling full, but full of emptiness. Full of nothing. However enticing a bag of fizzy coke-bottles is, though it might elicit a short-lived illusory sugar high, it will not sustain you over the course of the day. And in the end, like Russell Hoban’s children’s character Francis, in Bread and Jam for Francis (1964) you will find that after nothing but jam and bread for days on end, you ends up knowing how a jam jar feels – full of jam. Stretching this metaphor further than its sticky confines allow, there is a widespread craving for experience with a lower cultural glycemic index. This is the cultural turn into which narrative optimism must lean.
That craving is a hunger that Larkin describes in Church Going, a poem which is a narrative account of an unbelieving speaker stopping in to an unremarkable church, and a passionate defence of the idea of a church and the need for such places. It ends:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.— Philip Larkin
‘Church Going’ Collected Poems
(London: Faber & Faber, 2003:58)
It is a need for something more, something deeper, than the surface sparkle of the endlessly referential postmodern text (that is, each narrative ‘world’), where nothing is simply what it is, and everything alludes, coyly, to something else, but is only ever partially discernable. What begins as a thrilling insight – that language and meaning, and hence the world as we understand it, is made only of difference, is empty of essence – can end up inducing a state of uncertain, uncanny nausea that bars us from serious engagement with reality, being in earnest with our subject. If we are not careful, this smugness, this refusal to take ourselves, the world, or anything in it, seriously, can result in a deathly endgame that keeps us emotionally stunted, ironically untouchable. From these all-too-serious times, this more than half-a-century of postmodern irony appears double-edged: enviably frivolous on the one hand, and cavalier on the other, either way, leaving us unprepared for times which call for the collective, the numinous, even the sacred.
We understand this ‘hunger’ as a creative option, a way of being, and a useful and hopeful one. It is not an essential need. If we do not cultivate and protect it, it will shrivel and die. We can create space for such mystery and wonder in an age after god, without regressing to superstition, is a well-trodden path serious, sceptical, and self-aware scientists such as Carl Sagan who wrote:
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
—Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
(New York: Random House, 1994:159)
Even when convinced by our insistence on the un-reality of everything, we are confronted with the blunt insistence of Samuel Johnson’s famous response to Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialist philosophy, in which he kicked a nearby boulder and proclaimed ‘I refute it thus!’
Louis MacNeice expresses the tragic impotence of the endless denial of reality, in the face of a material world indifferent to such denial, in his poem Leaving Barra:
For all religions are alien
That allege that life is a fiction
And when we agree in denial
The cock crows in the morning
—Louis MacNeice
’Leaving Barra’ I Crossed the Minch (1938)
How then, after the promptings of both MacNeice and Hopkins, do we live “in earnest with reality”, without losing sight of the ‘anti-real’ nature of any given story or web of stories? What does such a negotiation look like? In the age of memetic self-reference and a cynical politics of untruth, even in a pandemic, there are many sects advocating for ‘alien religion’. We need to be antirealist, rather than post-truth.
To remain actively engaged in the antirealist project, we need ensure we attend to both horns of our existential dilemma: not only can we not know perfectly, but also that, however perspectivally and partially, we can still experience knowing and possess knowledge and the power that attends it. It matters what we know, as well as how we apprehend and reckon with our knowledge. J.M. Coetzee’s novels are passionately engaged with these questions. Writing from the context of South Africa, even after his self-imposed exile to Australia, Coetzee is concerned with finding meaningful expression for his characters who, on the one hand, inheritors of a culture – webs of stories within our terms – and on the other, resist becoming representative tropes: the black man, the white woman. Coetzee’s stories, rather scattered with characters fully alive and conscious storytelling animals, resisting the discourse that would name and tame them: they declare their worth in positively animalistic ways, by their very being. Michael K in The Life and Times of Michael K, the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians, and Friday in Foe, among others do not seem less human by their bodily ‘animal mimicry’ but more fully so.
Outside of his fictional storytelling, Coetzee poses the problem of being ‘in earnest with your subject’ and battling ‘alien religion’ as
“a debate… between cynicism and grace. Cynicism: the denial of any ultimate basis for values. Grace: a condition in which the truth can be told clearly, without blindness”
—J.M. Coetzee
'Retrospect' Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992:392)
In navigating and mediating between ‘cynicism’ and ‘grace’, Coetzee offers a useful standard:
[T]he body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trails of doubt [...] it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons […] but for political reasons, for reasons of power […] it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable.
—J.M. Coetzee
ibid. 248
For Coetzee, there is something solid, beyond narratives, on which we can build an ethical framework. The body. This offers the narrative antirealist foothold; building away from suffering and toward creativity. Judith Butler opened Gender Trouble with the question as to whether the body could become a site of concrete struggle. We find that the ethics and the methodology of narrative optimism, leads us to answer, yes, but at a more base and animalisticly material level than the identitarian proliferation she has, perhaps unwittingly spawned.
We are massing our storying ranks against the reduction of the mystery of consciousness into an object. An object is acted upon. However complicated, unnerving and disorienting this journey has been, it delivers, once again, an ethical imperative to act. From here, practically at least, we can set aside many scepticisms and commit ourselves to the protection and furthering of the human capacity for agency, and specifically, meaning-making choices which cannot be made by the purely ‘objective’ or ‘rational’. Whatever human consciousness, human subjectivity, the human species is or could be, it has a material capacity for creativity and for suffering that is not found in objects.
In her reading of the epic Greek poem The Iliad, Simone Weil describes it as ‘the poem of force’. She defined ‘force’ as,
that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in most literal sense: it makes a corpse of him. Somebody was here and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is the spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.
—Simone Weil,
‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ Chicago Review, 18:2 (1965):6
The Iliad is, first and foremost, a relentless portrayal of pitiless warfare in which former warriors lie dead, “dearer to the vultures than to their wives” and dramatises the way that people are ‘filled’ with thought, feeling, virtue, vice, action and courage and then are turned ‘by force’ into bodies alone, stripped of personhood and then stripped of life, and therefore the ability to choose or act.
We will all be objects eventually by force of nature. In the meantime, we are transcendent, encultured, collective beings. As such, there are stories to tell.
