SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 53-56

Downsizing

Michel Pierssens

What I wanted to know has continued to change over time, even though neither the desire to know nor my fascination for Change and Time has ever become weaker. Quite to the contrary. It is only the naïve belief that I might at some point get a glimpse of what rules those deepest of all mysteries that has dimmed, to an extent. I hoped once that the conceptual tools would soon become available that would help us grasp something of the grand operatic design of things that defies our limited intelligence. "Theory" was the arrogant name of the illusion I shared with my entire generation. Philosophy had a part in it, but it was Science that held the most promise, even as philosophers seemed to ignore the advances it had made after 1800 (they still do). I had become an avid reader of scientists of all stripes, from mathematicians to anthropologists, from linguists to physicists, fully immersing myself in the dizzying discourses emanating from the brightest geniuses of the age. I expected to be able to connect whatever language and literature were able to produce with the inner workings of matter itself, as it [End Page 53] was being redescribed using the new concepts of order and disorder, complexity, self-organization and the like—all intellectual convolutions of the most exalted nature.

I had fallen prey to scientism, the modern avatar of "pensée magique," in a manner similar to what happened to our forefathers in the heady days of the 19th century. They, too, thought the Unknown would not long remain untouched by the human mind, now rid of any remaining superstitions, thanks to the unprecedented breakthroughs carried out by Western Civilization. We know better, of course (or think we do), and we now tend to believe that there is no limit to Man's ability to fool himself—so much so that many good minds have fully surrendered to a perverse form of nihilistic relativism, no less arrogant than triumphant rationalism used to be.

My own form of hybris was entirely focused on Literature. I wanted to understand how literature makes sense of things for its readers. What is it in any great work that renders the world more intelligible? That is precisely the question that caused those great works exist, and that they try to solve. Proust, Joyce, Musil: who can deny that what they each built is both a scale model of the Unknown and a bold hypothesis as to its nature? This is not restricted to large novelistic endeavours. A similar effort reveals itself in seemingly more modest poetic works as well: a sonnet of Baudelaire, a fragment of Rimbaud, a paragraph by Ponge hold as much cognitive value as a huge construction by Zola. Something is changed by the very fact that such works exist, large or small. I become something else every time I read. But how can that be? Having accepted, however reluctantly, that no universal answer will be accessible any time soon, I can but limit the scope of my ambitions and try to concentrate on more manageable puzzles. If literature possesses any sort of cognitive power, isn't it because it itself resorts to using available cognitive tools, what it can find in its environment as it undergoes elaboration? This would make any literary work a cognitive mediator, and its author an epistemic agent—quite different from a scientist, but no less effective, operating with imagination rather than (or as much as) with reason.

On that path, my former struggle with all-encompassing views gave way to much more manageable research programs. Instead of asking myself how Literature produces new knowledge on a par with other cognitive activities, I could restrict my inquiry to more easily describable targets. Having noticed, for example, that optical metaphors are everywhere in A la recherche du temps perdu, I could try to discover where Proust's information about microscopes and telescopes came from, how he put it to work in key scenes of his novel, and what new understanding of things material and [End...