Crisis 22
Unified Sensibilities
The Political Uses of Literature - The Fractured Mirror - T.S. Eliot - Koch’s Year
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The Political Uses of Literature
Literature is a profitable way of looking at complex problems — that is, problems that are intricate in terms of their political and historical dimensions as well as in their effect on individuals. There are many ways that literature can do this — by helping us understand culture, history, psychology, religion, language, narrative, rhetoric, etc, — yet one less obvious way it can do this is that it can promote what T.S. Eliot called unified sensibility. Eliot applied this concept to poetry, yet it can be applied to almost everything: just as we can unite our feelings and thoughts in a unified sensibility, so we can use new thoughts to create new feelings, and new feelings to create new thoughts. When Koch presents us with new angles, whether it be doubt (thought) or compassion (feeling), our psyches experience new ways of understanding, intuiting, sensing, etc. If thought and feeling are unified, one mode will influence the other. For instance, we may feel compassion and then think in a way that’s more charitable, giving the other side the benefit of the doubt. Giving the benefit of the doubt then may open up new ways of feeling, which will help us get over the anger or hatred we may be feeling. For example, toward Russians at the moment …
And when Koch presents us with a complex paradigm for understanding politics, with layers of meaning and layers of narrative, this may help us understand complex topics such as the Ukraine Crisis. It takes the otherwise confusing and chaotic mix of thoughts and feelings and gives them a larger structure, something to hold them all together and see each part in relation to the next. This exercise in seeing a larger framework also encourages a certain degree of philosophic or metafictional detachment. The chaos of conflict and confusion can be subsumed in larger and larger takes on the situation. This does two things: psychologically, it gives us a break from the immediate clashes; politically, it urges diplomacy, that is, the attempt to find solutions which encompass conflicts which seem intractable or irreconciliable.
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The Fractured Mirror
In Shakespeare’s famous play, Hamlet says that drama is a mirror held up to nature. Likewise, all of literature is a mirror held up to what we are. And what we are is diverse, at times even contradictory. Making matters even more tricky, these contradictions change every moment. They sometimes turn into paradox, sometimes into madness or poetry. In the 19th century, Walt Whitman wrote,
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Politics is an important part of our world, especially now. Yet still, the whole is larger than any part, whether this part be political, geographic, ethnic, or religious. Unlike these parts, literature tries to get at the whole of existence, at the intermixed fields, conjectures, and sensibilities that are often tackled in isolation.
Literature tends to articulate the flow or totality of our experience, however blocked or fractured. It explores what meanings there might be. Including within its range the chaos of experience and perception, literature nevertheless verges on the possibilities of wholeness, freedom, and religion. It urges the exploration of insight and meaning, despite the fracturing nature of contingency and chance. I’m not saying that literature is superior to politics or other fields, just that it’s more diffuse and more unifying at the same time. It’s more ambiguous, more directed toward moments of feeling, states of mind, and the meaningful relation between disparate parts. Perhaps, in these divided days, we need this connection — what T.S. Eliot calls unified sensibility, what Hindus call Yoga, and what I call poetry — more than ever.
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T.S. Eliot
In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” T.S. Eliot argues for the unification of thinking and feeling. Focusing on 17th century poets such as Donne and Marvell, Eliot champions “direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling,” as well as “transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” He suggests a historical context for our present dissociation of sensibility, one which fits with the shift from Renaissance man to Enlightenment intellectual: “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Yet he also suggests that the Romantic poets Shelley and Keats display something of the earlier unified sensibility:
In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion [by Keats], there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
Eliot stresses that unified sensibility requires an integration of heart with mind, including the physical elements of the brain, that paramount organ which is deeply, deeply integrated with the body:
Those who object to the 'artificiality' of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to 'look into our hearts and write'. But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.
The nervous, circulatory, digestive, skeletal, muscular, and exocrine systems are all parts of one human system, and separating any one of them would mean death. Likewise, to divide the intellect from the senses and emotion would mean the death of meaningful human thought.
(The paragraph above is taken from 🧩 On Nightingales & Unified Sensibility, where I discuss unified sensibility in relation to the poets John Keats and John Donne).
I think the principle of unified sensibility can be applied as widely as one might the principle of yoga. That is, it can be used to knit together everything that we are — all the currents of family history, geography, culture, art, politics, and everything else that makes us think and feel in a certain way.
Thinking and feeling themselves have often been divided, as if we can think about Ukraine in one way and feel about it another. The two are intricately intertwined. For instance, our feelings of compassion can influence our thoughts about the injustice of the war. Or we may hate Russians in our feelings yet think more deeply about Russian culture and art and all the ordinary Russians who exist, and then start to feel differently.
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Koch’s Year
When it comes to the present crisis I try to see it as widely as possible, even to the point of comparing it to a novel about an Australian journalist covering the Indonesian crisis of 1965. A historian on the other hand might compare the Russian invasion of Ukraine to Germany in Poland during WW II, or China in Tibet during the 18th century. Likewise, I compare Putin’s initial attack on Kiev not to Napoleon’s march on Moscow or to Hitler’s march on Stalingrad, but rather to the journey the vain and greedy character Chichikov makes in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls.
I don’t do this because mine is a better comparative method — although it may have the value of what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky called defamiliarization, that is, the salutary shock of seeing one thing in the light of something apparently quite different. An examination of Nazi Germany’s lebensraum or East European living space would be far more helpful to those who want a more immediate or clear understanding of the present crisis. Yet I don’t have the expertise in history to make an insightful Germany-Russia comparison. I can, however, explore how the present crisis might be contextualized and in this sense understood by looking at a novelistic treatment of a previous Cold War crisis, even if that crisis seems so different from the one at present.
This can be illuminating, for beneath the initial alienation of defamiliarization lies a manner of seeing things anew and of making connections. In this case looking at The Year of Living Dangerously might allow us to connect personally with a political crisis, because we are privy to the thoughts and feelings of realistic characters in a crisis. In these characters we see, and see into, the interplay of ideals & ideologies, resolve & regret, belief & disbelief, reason & illogic, revenge & forgiveness that people deal with in times of crisis.
Also, Koch’s literary skill teaches us ways to make our world cohere in times of chaos and crisis. For instance, he suggests ways of framing our situation: his use of holistic structuring devices drawn from the Wayang puppet theatre helps us see new ways of perceiving the complexity and subtlety of power struggles; his use of meta-narrative helps us distinguish sources of information and levels of authority; his unveiling of political rhetoric & propaganda warn us about the distortions of media and dictators. All of these help us see the Ukraine War in a comparative way, so that a crisis in the past and on the other side of the world becomes relevant and instructive, on the personal level of characters, on the philosophic or epistemological level of finding truth and meaning, and on the historical and political level of the Cold War.
By seeing politics through literature I hope to reduce time spent on polemics and increase time spent on interpreting and applying what the Ukraine conflict might mean in terms of human nature, psychology, human relations, global culture, belief systems, etc. Another way to put this is that I aim to explore a wide range of literary and cultural scenarios which I hope will also 1. contextualize and illuminate the present situation, and 2. help us to cope with a war that is otherwise relentlessly brutal and depressing.
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Next: ⚔️ The Dangerous Years