Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics

210 Pages·2011·1 MB·English

by  Peter Kivy(auth.)

Once-Told Tales
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New Directions in Aesthetics
Series editors: Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, and
Berys Gaut, University of St Andrews
Blackwell’s New Directions in Aesthetics series highlights ambitious single-
and multiple-author books that confront the most intriguing and pressing
problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art today. Each book is written
in a way that advances understanding of the subject at hand and is accessible
to upper-undergraduate and graduate students.
1. Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law
Robert Stecker
2. Art as Performance
David Davies
3. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature
Peter Kivy
4. The Art of Theater
James R. Hamilton
5. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts
James O. Young
6. Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature
Scott Walden
7. Art and Ethical Criticism
Garry L. Hagberg
8. Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen
and David Hume
Eva Dadlez
9. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor
John Morreall
10. The Art of Videogames
Grant Tavinor
11. Once-Told Tales: An Essay In Literary Aesthetics
Peter Kivy
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Once-Told Tales
An Essay in Literary Aesthetics
PETER KIVY
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
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This edition first published 2011
© 2011 John Wiley & Sons Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kivy, Peter.
Once-told tales : an essay in literary aesthetics / Peter Kivy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65767-6 (hardback)
1. Literature–Aesthestics. I. Title.
PN45.K555 2011
801′.93–dc22
2010049388
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444397642;
Wiley Online Library 9781444397666; ePub 9781444397659
Set in 10/12.5pt ITC Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Malaysia
1 2011
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He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men
from the chimney corner.
Sir Philip Sidney
And what so tedious as a twice-told tale.
Homer
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For Joseph Margolis: Philosopher and Friend
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Contents
Preface viii
1. What It’s All About 1
2. The Aesthetics of Literature: A Neglected Topic 12
3. The Aesthetic Property: Its Kinds and Its Kind 26
4. The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic 47
5. Structure Aesthetics and Novelistic Structure 69
6. Continuous Time and Interrupted Time 76
7. Seeing is Believing 98
8. Reading is Believing 124
9. Twice-Told Tales and More 144
Appendix: Paraphrasing Poetry 165
References 190
Index 194
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Preface
Once-Told Tales is meant to be a companion piece to my previous monograph
on the philosophy of literature, The Performance of Reading. Like the former
book, it is far from a systematic treatment of the many complex issues that
literature raises for the philosopher of art. Like the former book as well, it
presents its argument, at times, through the comparison of our experience of
silently read fiction, its major concern, with our experience of the other arts,
in particular the art of music.
But, unlike The Performance of Reading, the present volume does not dog-
gedly pursue a single issue. Rather, I have allowed myself to stray from the
core issue, which is to say, the role of narrative structure and other “aesthetic”
features in our experience of the novel, in silent reading, to issues that are not,
to be sure, unrelated to it but that, nevertheless, are detours. The detours,
however, do, in the end, return to the high road. So I make no excuses for
taking the scenic rather than the direct route to where I am going.
Almost all of the book is new material. But some previously published
work has been pressed into service at a crucial point in the argument. Chapter
5 contains one entire article, “Continuous Time and Interrupted Time: Two-
Timing in the Temporal Arts,” Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 3
(2004), and portions of another, “Fictional Form and Symphonic Structure:
An Essay in Comparative Aesthetics,” Ratio (second series), 22 (2009).
I am most grateful to three anonymous readers for Wiley-Blackwell who
read an earlier version of the book and provided many valuable suggestions
for its improvement, and grateful to Jeff Dean of Wiley-Blackwell for his
advice and support. I of course am fully responsible for any errors of fact or
theory that may remain in the text.
Peter Kivy
Cape Cod, Summer 2010
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Chapter 1
What It’s All About
1 What Am I Doing?
The title and subtitle of this book both require explanation. Together they do
indeed capture what I am trying to do, but, perhaps, in somewhat cryptic
form. So let me now break the code. And I am going to begin to do that by
trying to make clear, as the street argot has it, “where I’m coming from.”
2 My Experience
When I began to write on what might be called “analytic aesthetics,” I chose a
problem of a rather abstract kind.1 Early on, having finished with it, it seemed to
me that I had reached a dead end in my work, and decided to try to say some-
thing in “analytic aesthetics” less abstract and more relevant to my own personal
experience of art. I quite naturally then turned to the art that I knew best and was
most deeply involved with: the classical music of the Western canon.
I think I realized at a very early stage what my philosophical “method” in
philosophy of art was going to be, and has been, for the most part, ever since.
In my first book on musical aesthetics, The Corded Shell, I emphasized in the
preface the importance I placed on the musical examples adduced: that “they
are,” as I put it, “very much a part of the argument.”2 And in my second
1 Peter Kivy, Speaking of Art (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
2 Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980), p. xiii.
Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics, First Edition. Peter Kivy.
© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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2 What It’s All About
book on the subject, Sound and Semblance, I became even more explicitly
aware of what that meant. As I put the point then: “I have come to the
conclusions expressed here, first and foremost, through my experience of
music, not by spinning out philosophical arguments.”3
In turning to the philosophy of literature, in recent years, I have followed
the same procedure, employed the same basic method that I have done in all
of my writings on musical aesthetics. I have begun with my own experience
of literature and tried to generalize from that. That having been said, I can
now turn to the title of this book, with an explanation to hand of its meaning
and significance.
3 The Title
I am mainly concerned in this book with the experience, my experience, of
the art form known as the novel. And my experience of the novel is the
experience, usually, of a once-told tale. Which is to say, I seldom read a novel
more than once, and when I do I usually read it the second time for the same
reason that I read it the first time: to be told a story. That is the basic
experience—my experience—on which the arguments to come are based.
There are two very good reasons often adduced for being very wary of gener-
alizing from personal experience. First, it is dangerous and unwarranted to
assume that one’s own experience is shared by others. And, second, contrary to
long-standing philosophical as well as pre-systematic intuitions, it is dangerous
and unwarranted to assume that one cannot be mistaken about the correct char-
acterization of one’s own experience, first-person reports having proved over and
again to be inaccurate or even downright wrong; or, in other words, experience
is not necessarily transparent to the one whose experience it is.
Both points are well taken, and should doubtless serve as a constant reminder
of our fallibility in these regards. But, that having been conceded, there is no
need going to the opposite, skeptical extreme of believing that my experience of
literature is unique to me alone, therefore not generalizable to others, and that
I am not even in a position to know what it is, or correctly describe it.
As regards the former worry, it needs merely to be pointed out that I am
not a solitary autodidact, residing in a cave on a desert island, but a fully
socialized, conventionally educated participant in a culture that includes novel-
reading as one of its recognized modes of activity: an “institution,” if you
will, made possible by a large number of other activities, among them, obvi-
ously, authoring, editing, publishing, criticizing, advertising, and discussing.
3 Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), p. xi.
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