All is Song

And philosophy was the pure song, the purest of songs, heard only with training, and hanging at a pitch outside of the common range. Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey invites a reader to consider several issues throughout her philosophical novel, All is Song—the power of brotherly love, the choice between questioning and conforming, and the pervasiveness of anti-intellectualism in society.

Not everyone likes this kind of novel. One reviewer found the writing “labored.” Another commented on the “overwhelming beauty of the prose.” So much for critical reviews.

Leonard Deppling returns to London after the end of his marriage and caring for his dying father. He has come to join his brother, William, a former lecturer and activist. Leonard seeks to understand why William never visited his ailing father or attended his funeral. He moves in with William’s wife and three children.

William is a thoroughly unconventional man, unworldly, and forever questioning. What? How? Why? He is a modern version of Socrates, walking about the neighborhoods of London, talking informally with young people, and gathering quite a dedicated group of followers. He says,

…to my mind, far from being arrogant, asking questions is the most humble thing a person can do. And my freedom isn’t a reward if it’s at the expense of reason and honesty.

Imagine being with such a person, a person who never ceases to question what you say never assuming he understands what you said, or that you understood it either. He takes the simplest thing you say and breaks it down into little linguistic puzzles. What do you mean by this? The word has several meanings. I am not sure what you meant by this. William says,

“The problem is that you’ve used a lot of ideas in that sentence I can’t even begin to understand. The just, the good, the natural.” Leonard gathers himself together and says, “Allow me a sentence free of charge sometimes; allow me that, yes? William replies, “I won’t do anything without proper thought.”

Finally, one of William’s young followers, Stephen, commits a crime that for any serious reader is one of the worst imaginable. Stephen flees the country and because of the close association of the two men, William is implicated in the crime.

Recall what happened to Socrates when he was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. William acts similarly during his trial as an accessory to the crime. He says, “I’d rather share below room in a prison cells than give away a millimeter of space in my mind.”

Harvey’s novel is a philosophical work of fiction par excellence. If you like reading novels of ideas that probe relentlessly into debate about morality, religion, existence, friendship and obligations to the persons you love, you’ll enjoy All is Song.

In spite of William’s questioning and the spiraling inquiry this usually led to, nothing he could say or do had slightest effect on the deep bond between the two brothers. The kindness and love between them remained in tact.

I see kindness at times among all the bullshit, and I see love.

The Missing Shade of Blue

Suppose there that a person…to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kind, excepting one particular shade of blue…Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be placed before him…Now I ask, whether it is possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses.
David Hume

We are in Edinburgh. Edgar Logan, a young man from Paris, arrives to translate the essays of David Hume. “…most of my life has been spent in books, reading other people’s stories, living vicariously through characters that don’t exist.”

Early on he meets the, bitter, physically crumbling, soon-to-be-dismissed-philosophy professor, Harry Sanderson and his enigmatic wife, Carrie. “Up until then I lacked the talent for friendship. Later I would sometimes wonder what it was about the Sandersons that made the difference, what it was the sucked me in…”

This is how Jennie Erdal begins her novel, The Missing Shade of Blue. It engrossed me from the first page. Several threads are interlaced throughout her tale.

On David Hume: Hume had not set out with the intention of being an unbeliever. Rather he had followed the arguments for religion and them wanting. He was a man primarily interested in explaining our place in the world so that we might live better lives; and the art of living well, he soon discovered did not sit happily with clinging on to illusions.

On philosophy: The unexamined life is much despised. According to Socrates, it is not worth living. But actually, the examined life can get you into all sorts of trouble.

On painting: At that point the language to interpret a painting was simply not available to me. Later Carrie would tell me this was an advantage. My eyes were innocent like those of a child, though to me they were simply crude and ignorant.

On vicarious experience: Nearly all of my experience of life—the highs and lows, the hopes and disappointments, the chaotic entanglements—everything that matters in fact—all of this has been mediated through the written word. With the result that novels have given me the sense—the illusion perhaps—of a connection with others, with the texture of real lives.

On marriage: My close reading of fiction had taught me that nearly all marriages occupied strange territory. But it was more vivid and startling to see it with you own eyes.

On happiness: …happiness often reveals itself as counterpoint. It is edged about with things that are opposite to it.

On novels: …a good novel was like a small miracle…fiction allowed us to live lives of other than our own….And every so often, I said, something emerged from a novel that could only be called truth—there was no other name for it. Which has a paradoxical ring to it, since of course, fiction is made up, full of lies.

These are but a fraction of the passages I noted in The Missing Shade of Blue. Is there a story along with Erdal’s philosophical ruminations? Yes, but on my reading, it plays a minor role. There is the tragic deterioration of a once fine philosopher and an emerging relationship between the Edgar, the translator and Carrie, the painter.

A Philosophical Adventure is the subtitle of The Missing Shade of Blue. That it is, the kind of book I am forever searching for. I found it one of those “small miracles.” For a philosopher, it will be a fictional treat. For a translator or painter, it is an endless debate. For any reader, it is a rich dialogue on Hume, happiness, friendship, language, and should you be the least bit interested, fly-fishing.

Novels of Ideas

What is a novel of ideas? In the March 6th Wall Street Journal Rebecca Goldstein writes briefly about five examples that she admires—Herzog, Middlemarch, The Holy Sinner, The Black Prince and Einstein’s Dreams. How are these novels distinguished from those that are not?

In writing about Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince she says, “Like all the novels of ideas I admire, this one hides its high purpose under well-developed characters and an organic plot.” She notes that Mann’s The Holy Sinner “buries its seriousness beneath the seductions of story telling.” Hides its high purpose? Buries its seriousness? I think she can be more explicit than that, although in fairness I am sure that was not her purpose in compiling this list.

She says Herzog blends “high-mindedness and low farce” and that George Eliot’s Middlemarch is “imprinted with many of Spinoza’s ideas. Finally she notes that Einstein’s Dreams concerns the nature of time “The play of ideas is heady as Alan Lightman wrests irony, pathos and poetry out of the abstractions of physics…”

On my understanding, a novel of ideas is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the issues normally considered by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of where issues are raised and questions asked. You reflect on the problems it poses, stop in mid-sentence or at the end of a paragraph to ponder something the author has written or you make a note in the margin or discuss the book’s concerns with another individual. And you do all these things and more with a really notable novel of ideas.

Goldstein’s characterization of Lightman’s novel comes closest to this conception. Yet she never frames her discussion of this novel or any of the four others in terms of how the reader might respond to the ideas or questions in the various ways I’ve indicated. Time. What is time? The abstractions of physics. What are they and is there any hope that I can understand them? Where can I learn more out about them?

Ideas and problems abound in Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and it is why I liked the novel so much. There is very little narrative in this novel and but there are a great many questions, most of them unanswered. In my view this is a novel of ideas at its best and is the heart of the reading experience for me.

In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#192) Ray Bradbury expresses a rather different and to me unusual view. “Science fiction is the fiction of ideas... Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”

Bradbury wonders why this type of novel is so neglected and he gives an example his Fahrenheit 451, a novel I never read but a story I remember vividly in its film version. In talking about the novel he says:

“Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires…and you start him on the adventure of discovery…. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.”

Bradbury’s interview opened my eyes to broader conception of the novel of ideas, one that also includes utopian and dystopian fiction, and to a view of science fiction that I’ve not taken seriously before. In their own way they are just as much novels of ideas as those Goldstein mentions or, indeed, that she writes.

Personal Identity

On my understanding, a philosophical novel is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the kinds of questions normally posed by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of ideas and questions that generate ideas worthy of consideration. Such a novel is the heart of the reading experience for me.

Is it any wonder then why I liked Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon so much? Ideas and problems abound within this tale, one with a very limited narrative and a great many questions, most of them unanswered. One of the central issues of Night Train to Lisbon concerns how one comes to know another person, including oneself. Within philosophy this is sometimes known as the problem of personal identity and in psychology as the nature of self-perception or self-knowledge.

Consider these questions that are either raised by the Portuguese physician Amadeau Prado or the Swiss linguist, Raimund Gregorious, who goes in search of the individuals who are the central players in Prado’s fictional, masterpiece A Goldsmith of Words:

How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?

The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?

In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false?

What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

What difficult questions. Who has not wondered about them at one time or another? How complicated and unknowable we are. How then can we ever expect to know another person? Mercier writes: We are in the dark about so many of our wishes and thoughts, and others sometimes know more about them than we do. And, as if to take issue with current empirical research on person perception, he proclaims: Inside a person it is much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.

In a similar vein, Mercier by way of Prado wonders a great deal about the problem of identity. Who are we anyway? Are we the same person today that we were 40 years ago? If so, what is it that constitutes our core or does that concept mean anything at all? Prado inquires:

When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?

Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?

Does it make any sense to say that a person has a central self, a distinctive identity that lies hidden behind most of the actions that constitute daily life? I sometimes find myself in the presence of another person who for entirely unknown reasons calls forth expressions that somehow seem far more myself than is usually the case. How does that happen? Who is the me that appears in such situations and how does it differ from my other self or selves? Nothing that I have been able to detect in the other person seems responsible. But what I am on those rare occasions is instantaneous and continuous and thoroughly exhilarating. It seems entirely natural and I have no idea what to make of it.

Consider the following passages recorded from Mercier’s novel which also touch on these two questions:

Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?

We humans: what do we know of one another?

…our outside form doesn’t appear to others as to our own eyes.

Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?

How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?

The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?

…that the body is less corrupt than the mind. The mind is a charming area of self-deception, woven of beautiful, soothing words that give us the illusion that we have an unerring familiarity with ourselves.

Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.

But when [do] we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends?

Inside a person it was much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.

When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?