The Crisis of Knowledge

In this series, I want to share my thoughts about Harold Kaplan’s book, The Passive Voice¹. Kaplan deals with several related literary topics, but they all arise from the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history.

I have some doubts about my part in this endeavor, which I’ll state briefly in this introduction to the series. I’m not a literary critic myself. In addition, some might wonder why I chose Harold Kaplan out of all the literary critics in the United States. Last but not least, what can I possibly say other than what he has already said? I’ll start by talking about some of the author’s stated concerns.

Kaplan uses literary examples to illustrate his point about the crisis of knowledge. His treatment of these works can be distressing, but he reassuringly opposes them to the story of King Lear to illustrate the difference. He hopes it will provide ‘an interval of climactic clarity’ regarding these issues. His work is full of implications for our conversation. In my opinion, Kaplan does provide clarity for our time. Although he wrote two generations ago, the problems discussed in this book are still with us. As for why I chose Kaplan above other writers, I know his work from his book, Democratic Humanism and American Literature,² which I cited in a previous article.

Kaplan’s Essays

The essays in the order they appear in the book are:

• Madame Bovary: The Seriousness Of Comedy
• The Universal Comedy Of James Joyce
• Hemingway And The Passive Hero
• The Inert And The Violent: Faulkner’s Light in August
• Character As Reality: Joseph Conrad
• The Naturalist Theology of D. H. Lawrence
• The Problem Of Action
• The Touchstone of Tragedy

Unseen Influences in Literature and Culture: Loren Goldner

This is a quick diversion from the main topic of this series, but it explains one of my interests in Kaplan’s book. I have been haunted for some time by Lauren Goldner’s³ identification of events and ideas that have recently influenced our society in a covert way. The covert nature is what I find haunting. Goldner describes a time when the American people’s attention was captured by chaos. He argues that the social and political turmoil of the 60s wiped out the literary consciousness that existed in the 1950s. The general public never said what they thought about this, but it was observed by people who were connect to the literary world and they commented on the fact that this change was not described, or even acknowledged, in literature.

Tom Wolfe has expressed his shock that no great novel emerged from all this. Certainly no ‘story’ interests members of that generation (that is, people born between 1940 and 1955, people old enough to be conscious in 1970) remotely as much as the ramifications of that decade or, more precisely, half-decade. The conservatives today are quite right to remain obsessed about it, correctly sensing that something was broken then that has never been put back together, literature being a part of that. And yet no serious literary expression of that earthquake was written either in the midst of it or subsequently. (Goldner, p. 59)

According to Goldner, the same break occurred in France, Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, around the same time. How does this analysis coincide with Kaplan’s book? Goldner was under the impression that critics from the ‘quarters of the Lionel Trilling sensibility’ were silent. Kaplan sets the record straight. He regularly cites Lionel Trilling. Although Kaplan doesn’t mention the specific change of the 1960s, his critique indirectly includes writers in the 1950s. The problem is much older than the last 60 years.

The important point of Goldner’s analysis is that those writers were speaking to the culture of that time. Furthermore, their readers were engaged with what they had to say. In that light, the fact that readers were overcome by the turmoil of the 60s and suddenly began living in a world without those ideas suggests that events can have a powerful effect on the general population. Kaplan would agree.

Harold Kaplan’s Wider View: The Ruling Spirit of Modern Fiction, the Passive Voice, and the Crisis of Knowledge

How did the crisis of knowledge happen? It happened because human intelligence has gotten ahead of teleological and metaphysical considerations. For that reason, it is no longer clear to us if knowledge serves experience or vice versa. But it is clear that human intelligence now has to find its own justification. One justification has been the ‘majesty and power of truth for truth’s sake’. And this does not inspire action. Today, a large part of our thinking effort goes into thinking about thought, because we no longer trust what we know. This is one way to explain the passive voice in literature. The passive voice is a reaction to the ‘ruling spirit of modern fiction’.

Kaplan contrasts the passive voice with the sacred story. The sacred story energizes the living of life through reciting the drama of salvation. He argues that the religious imagination has a primitive frankness and unity. If it increases knowledge, it does this in service to the problem of action in life. The ruling spirit of modern fiction on the other hand is unfriendly to action. It is incapable of putting action first. The result is the passive voice.

Death of the Anthropomorphic Spirit

Kaplan thinks the key to the crisis of knowledge (and the passive voice) is the death of the anthropomorphic spirit. He thinks this spirit began dying in the west as early as the seventeenth century, long before Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is dead’.

The death of the anthropomorphic spirit led to the loss of man’s dramatic role in the universe. This loss is evident in the passive voice of modern fiction.

The Implication that humanity has changed

Before we go on, it’s necessary to know exactly what timeframe we’re talking about. Kaplan quotes Lionel Trilling on page 7 of his book as saying that the presiding spirit of the novel goes back to Cervantes (1547-1616). It was produced by the century in which modern science was born. ⁴ This would explain Kaplan’s dependence on Shakespeare as a touchstone for this exploration. If Trilling is correct, the human mind and heart has changed dramatically since the sixteenth century largely due to the effects of modern science.

Conclusion of Part 1

The following is a quote of Kaplan’s description of the scientific mind. He didn’t write this with an ironic tone of voice. It’s ironic in my opinion because it doesn’t make me think of liberal heirs of the Enlightenment. I think of the new American regime that claims religion and tradition as justification for ending environmental regulation and social programs. But of course the crisis of knowledge affects liberals as well. In this light, the political divisions are a superficial formality.

The intellectual suspicion of the human intellect is the great theme which pervades modern fiction as much as it challenges philosophy. What is at stake for both is not a set of substantive ideas so much as the dramatic problem of knowledge. In literature this is to state the condition of an alienation from reality, a sense of broken communication with both that which exists and that which matters. It is literature in the first place which is most deeply committed to the anthropomorphic sensibility, really the full sensibility, in which a perception seeks harmony with the life sentience and the life thought of the perceiver. The abstracted, skeleton sensibility of modern science implies a violence to feeling at its root, where it is the animal instinct to place a value on truth before truth itself is known. The mind creating the widest consensus of modern belief, the mind which is scientific and not religious or literary, clearly asserts that nature is neutral, that the human interest, modestly conceived, is imposed upon nature and not received from it, and that the absolute human interest, no matter in what dream of perfection or immortality, has no correspondence in nature at all (pp. 6-7).

1. The Passive Voice: An Approach to Modern Fiction, Harold Kaplan, Ohio University Press, 1966. ↩︎
2. Democratic Humanism and American Literature, Harold Kaplan, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972. ↩︎
3. Vanguard of Retrogression, Loren Goldner, Queequeg Publications, New York, 2001. ↩︎
4. The Liberal Imagination, Viking, p. 208. ↩︎