7 - Fictional Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
When it comes to the internal consciousness of time, the novel picks up where philosophy leaves off. But does the novel therefore know something about time which is beyond the reach of philosophy? Perhaps knowledge of time is in some way the domain of philosophy, so that wherever it is that the novel goes with time, by being beyond the limits of philosophy, it cannot be an adventure in knowledge as such. There are two intimately related questions about knowledge involved in this. The first is the oldest question of all, the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature, and of the special kind of knowledge, if that is the right word, that literature might possess. The second is probably no younger, but has a more urgent contemporary application, and is the question of what use or value fictional narrative might hold for a philosophical understanding of time.
The idea that fiction might know something, perhaps something more than philosophy, has come back into focus recently in literary studies in a number of ways. An interesting case, particularly in relation to fictional knowledge, is Michael Wood's Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005). Wood's discussion of knowledge begins from Peter de Bolla's ‘brilliant brief statement’ of the question of knowledge in art:
De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean?, what is it trying to say? – are the wrong ones. He offers one or two not all that appealing alternatives (‘how does this painting determine my address to it?, how does it make me feel?, what does it make me feel?’) and says that ‘beyond these questions lies the insistent murmur of great art, the nagging thought that the work holds something to itself, contains something that, in the final analysis remains untouchable, unknowable’. Then de Bolla arrives at what I find the truly haunting question: ‘What does this painting know?’
(2005: 8)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- About TimeNarrative Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, pp. 107 - 136Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006