Magritte and Wallace John Dewey

¶ … Magritte and Wallace

John Dewey has claimed that great art has a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning. It is very difficult to evaluate this claim. The precise denotation of "meaning" is obscure and hotly contested in philosophy and elsewhere. It is similarly unclear how we should understand "inexhaustible" -- surely the meaning of a masterwork is not impossible to exhaust in the unrestricted sense of impossible -- it is possible that an omnipotent deity exists, and something omnipotent could exhaust the meaning of anything. But then how should we understand the scope of possibility? And how can we determine whether something's inexhaustibility is sufficient to be seemingly inexhaustible? It is dubious that I should settle these questions here, even though doing so would be necessary to reaching an unqualified conclusion. I am resigned, then, to a qualified conclusion. This paper first rehearses Dewey's claims in favor of the inexhaustibility of meaning, clarifying his thesis as we proceed. Afterward, we ask whether these considerations hold for two of this author's favorite masterpieces, Magritte's Collective Invention

and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

I conclude that insofar as they "speak to" universal features of human life, they indeed contain inexhaustible depths of meaning. I do not claim that there are universal features of human life, though, and I do not claim that if there are then it is possible to "speak to" them; rather, I take it that these two great works of art "speak to" features very common in modern life, and their depths of meaning are thus seemingly inexhaustible for many modern individuals.

In order for us to decide whether some particular work of art seems to have an inexhaustible depth of meaning, we must be clear about what Dewey considers a work of art. It is not what one might assume. For Dewey, DaVinci's Mona Lisa is not a work of art; neither is Dante's Divine Comedy or Brunalleschi's Il Duomo. These all, rather, are art products. Insofar as we think of them as artifacts that sit passively and enjoy their reputations as master works independent of any appreciator, they are not works of art. The work of art, on the contrary, is essentially constituted by the interaction of art product and she who actively appreciates it. The following remarks are representative of Dewey's thoughts on the matter:

…the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears. (249)

The "thing" in which it is alleged a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning inheres, then, is in fact a strange sort of thing -- it is a relation. It is the relation between art object and viewer. With this noted, let me add that in order to avoid clumsy and circuitous locutions, I will refer to the "work of art" associated with any art product by the same name as that which we use for the art product. Thus, I shall call the work of art involving both Magritte's Collective Invention and some viewer simply "Collective Invention."

As a second prefatory matter, we must discuss meaning. Although we must prescind from the philosophical debate over the nature of meaning, and so we cannot say whether it inheres in great works of art in indefinite amounts, still we can and should address what Dewey has in mind when he uses the term. (If it turns out that his account of meaning is problematic, then his account of aesthetics shall inherit these problems.) First, we must follow Dewey in distinguishing between expression and statement. "Science states meanings," Dewey tells us, but "art expresses them." (84) This claim has some intuitive appeal insofar as many of us can call to mind examples of this contrast. Science (seems to) tell(s) us that humans are animals but with extraordinarily complex minds unlike all else in the animal kingdom and perhaps the world; Magritte's Collective Invention expresses this (among other things).

But this analogy does not clarify aesthetic experience completely. Magritte's work is art, but much that we would not consider art may also express what science states. It seems natural to say that the visual illusions devised by psychologists expresses what their theories state. For example, one might say a Necker Cube expresses what vision researches have stated concerning the human visual system's ability to "generate" 3D percepts from the two dimensions of information available to the fovea. Since the visual system outputs more information than it receives as input from the fovea, it must make "assumptions." Viewing a Necker Cube, it seems that the visual system makes conflicting assumptions, so that the cube seems to "flip" from one of the cube's face's being foremost to another's being so.

NECKER CUBE

Fortunately, Dewey continues.

Statement sets forth the conditions under which an experience of an object or situation may be had…expression as distinct from statement does something different from leading to an experience. It constitutes one. (84-5)

This too seems to hold for both Collective Invention and a Necker Cube. Or, anyway, it's not entirely clear that the Necker Cube fails to constitute an experience. The meanings of Collective Invention are no doubt various and complex, so let's put them aside one moment and consider the Cube. It does seem right to say that viewing a Necker Cube constitutes an experience: it's a slightly disorienting experience, and it has the cube's "flipping" as a part. If there were no experience constituted by viewing a Necker Cube, we should not be able to truly describe it as we just did. Should we say, then, that the Necker Cube is art?

Perhaps it is, but our analysis so far is incomplete. For Dewey further distinguishes the experiencing of things and "an experience."

…we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and only then is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation…is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. (35)

So that we may refer to it simply, let's call this "the self-sufficiency of an experience." Further along, Dewey elaborates the concept of "an experience" in terms of works of art:

In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so -- just as in a genial conversation there is a continuous interchange and blending, and yet each speaker not only retains his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his won't.

An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. (36-7)

Let's call this the "unity of an experience." Let's be clear about where we stand in our analysis. We want to know whether it's true that great art is seemingly inexhaustible in is depth of meaning. We need first to know what it is for art to have meaning; only then can we say whether some great work has an inexhaustible depth of it. Dewey tells us that art expresses meaning rather than stating it, and he clarifies that art does not simply lead to an experience, it constitutes one. In order to understand this distinction, we must know what an experience is. We know now that an experience is self-sufficient and unifying.

Let's return, then, to the Necker Cube. Although it is perhaps a strain, it is difficult to see why viewing a Necker Cube could not constitute an experience. Is it unifying? It is. Indeed, it unifies two inconsistent percepts -- one of the cube with face (say) ABCD front-most and another with face (say) EFGH nearest the viewer.

Does it carry with it its own individualizing quality? Perhaps not. Perhaps one cannot see what is distinctive about a Necker Cube unless one has "already" experienced two-dimensional renderings of cubes, and unless one "already" knows that they should not "flip" as the Necker Cube does. But if we're this rigid with the "self-sufficiency" condition on an experience, Collective Invention likely won't satisfy the condition either. Plausibly, it's distinctive quality depends conceptually on the viewer's having experienced fish, the ocean (and maybe even the Atlantic Ocean), etc.

We should note that the unity found in the Necker Cube is quite modest compared the richness of Magritte's painting. The latter's dark waves unify experiences of a fearsome and truly elemental ocean in the winter; of a fish's waterside flopping as simultaneously pathetic, terrifying, and heart-breaking; and one's own experiences of helplessness. But I think we should be loathe to take these differences in degree of unity as differences in kind of experience. Viewing either Collective Invention or a Necker Cube constitutes an experience, rather than simply leading to one. We should say that each is a work of art.

Collective Invention, however, is perhaps great art. If so, then according to Dewey, it should not only be that viewing it constitutes an experience, as with the Necker Cube; it should be that viewing it repeatedly constitutes repeated experiences; and each successive experience of it is deeper -- which, I assume, is to say that each successive experience unifies more experiences.

I should now like to ask whether two works that I consider masterpieces do seem to be possessed of an inexhaustible depth of meaning. The works are Rene Magritte's painting Collective Invention and David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. I conclude that each of these masterworks does indeed seem to contain an inexhaustible depth of meaning. But this is with some qualifications; most importantly, these are modern works, and I shall commit to their being inexhaustible only as they "speak to" experiences that I shall characterize as modern.

Let's begin by asking how it could seem that something -- anything -- continually unifies ever more experiences. Consider the relationship between close friends, lovers, or family members. The briefest interval of separation is often concluded with an excited exchange of details of what each did in the other's absence. A husband reports the details of his day to his wife, who responds in kind, and then they ask their child to do the same. Dewey has told us that conversations are exemplary of the self-sufficiency of an experience, and it's plausible that they're unifying as well. If nothing else, they unify the experiences reported with the experience of reporting and sharing with one's companion. In most cases, they are also unified with listening to and inquiring about one's companion's experiences.

These conversations do indeed seem to become ever richer and greater in their unifications. The dinner-table talking unifies each family-member's daytime activities with those of the other family members, and these with dinner-table discussion. Tuesday's dinner is unified with Monday's, the recent holiday's, and all those dinners the family had together last year. In more dynamic families, there is more than a simple accretion of experiences, though; maybe mom gives helpful feedback on her son's day, while sis cracks fond jokes. As Dewey says, each participant retains her own character while simultaneously revealing it; we can add that each participant also develops her character further and comes to understand the those of her companions in deeper subtlety.

Can one have such a "conversation" with Collective Invention? I believe so. The confirming condition is that every time I return to it, it unifies ever more of my experiences -- it "speaks to me" of all the things I've done since I last saw it, and it associates them with what I take to be the picture's theme, a near-universal feature of modern life, and the artist's intent in creating it. There's much to say about this, of course, but I should be brief, so let me focus on one aspect of the experiences I believe Collective Invention unifies for its viewer (setting aside the viewer's relationship with the painter, other viewers, etc.), and please excuse my heavy dependence on metaphors.

Jose Ortega y Gasset said, "to live is to feel oneself lost." Let me suppose that this is true at least for many of us in modern times -- perhaps this is not so in places or at times where/when Divine convictions dominate (d) an entire culture, or where/when indigenous humans commune (d) more completely with the Earth, or in the Garden of Eden. This experience, where it is felt, is pervasive. Though she might often claim that he makes her feel "at home," a wife can always doubt that her husband loves her; she can always suspect that she's massively deceived and all the experiences that ostensibly give her life meaning are in fact illusory. She has and can have no guarantee that the world she lives in is not completely foreign to her and, in the next moment, its thorough unfamiliarity will be revealed to her.

Collective Invention expresses these feelings perfectly. The figure in the painting is not just a "fish out of water," its situation is even worse. It has a fish's gills and a human's ungainly legs. Out of the water, it may walk, but it cannot breath. In the water, it may breath, but it is poorly equipped for swimming-its front is "made" to glide through the water side to side while its bottom is best suited for kicking like a propeller. The viewer sees in Collective Invention a creature that surely feels itself lost, and so it gives an image to the pervasive feeling of living. We might say, then, that not only does it "speak to" feelings of helplessness and being lost, it also "speaks for" them. It "gives voice" to them.

I believe these metaphors are apt, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we would say similar things about one's relationship with a close friend, lover, or family member. A friend's fears "speak to" our own, and when they listen to our hopes, their sympathy speaks for the hoped-for possibilities. Insofar as Collective Invention is a work of art only as it is viewed, as some viewer brings to it her own experiences; insofar as any potential viewer must have had, prior to viewing, some experiences living; and insofar as Collective Invention unifies, speaks to and for experiences of living, it contains a seemingly inexhaustible depth of meaning. That is, each interaction with it is an experience; and each time one returns to it, one has inevitably had more experiences feeling lost, and so it speaks more deeply to the viewer.

The same holds for Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's sprawling masterpiece. It too speaks to the feeling of being out of place in life, and perhaps it chronicles the various other, more familiar emotions with which this feeling is associated: depression, striving, confusion. Its characters suffer from clinical depression, brood over the horrors of sexual abuse, aspire single-mindedly for athletic greatness, etc. One reviewer called it "an…encyclopedia of hurt."

It unifies a panoply of the reader's experiences with those of its characters, the late authors own, now-public depression, etc.

Let me focus on one of the novel's expressions of Ortega y Gasset's claim. One of the primary characters, Hal Incandenza, is a standout player at a high profile tennis academy; the following describes a recurring dream that has driven him to abuse marijuana in order to help him sleep:

I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's public. (Wallace, 67)

Hal is haunted by a dream in which what should be familiar is utterly alien. Playing tennis and doing so well has so far given his life purpose and direction; he strives to play better and much of his thought and energy are directed at improving his game. But, somehow, his sleeping life won't cooperate. It presents to him a world in which he has no idea how to play tennis, in which he cannot even fathom the rules, the dimensions of the court, or even the relevant divisions of the court. Its lines appear to him as overlaid; the court appears indeterminately long.

Above, we imagined a wife who may often feel "at home" in the world, but who recognizes, perhaps in moments of quiet reflection, that this feeling is at least penetrable. She can fathom the possibility that her relationships are founded upon deception, that her past has been mis-remembered, her convictions are false. Hal in Infinite Jest faces this prospect in the form of a dream. And, what's more, since the dream keeps him awake and thus renders him lethargic on the (real) tennis court, it's telling that he addresses it in a way that sabotages his very ambitions. The fear that he is lost in the world has caused him to divert himself from the path though life that at least seems to give him direction. The feeling is indeed pervasive, and perhaps it is self-perpetuating as well.