This book concerns the way in which literature, particularly as it is defined at a certain historical moment, is bound up with the question of not knowing. And it concerns the question of what literature knows of ignorance. ‘If a narrative is something told’, Stanley Cavell speculates very generally inDisowning Knowledge, ‘and telling is an answer to a claim to knowledge, then perhaps any narrative, however elaborated, may be understood as an answer to some implied question of knowledge, perhaps in the form of some disclaiming of knowledge or avoidance of it’.¹ In this context I will suggest that...

We are ignorant. We are born into and remain in ignorance: this is what we know. And this knowledge of our ignorance is what it means to be human. Socrates, the indigent, know-nothing philosopher who nevertheless promulgated even if he did not invent the oracular dictum ‘know thyself’, also knows that to be human is not to know.¹ To be human, to have a ‘soul’, as Socrates has it in thePhaedo, is to be confined within the prison of the body and thereby to ‘wallow’ in the ‘mire of every sort of ignorance’ – from which it is philosophy’s task...

‘Be quick when you switch on the light/and you’ll see the dark/was how my father put it’, John Burnside remarks in ‘Otherlife’, Part IV of ‘Fields’ inThe Asylum Dance(2000): ‘catch/the otherlife of things’, he goes on, ‘before a look /immerses them’.¹ It is this ‘otherlife’ of things that is the large topic, thetopos, of poetry – of ancient as much as of contemporary poetry. The clear implication of Burnside’s lines is that it is this ‘otherlife’ of things that poetry enables us to see – to see and not see, as you might ‘see the dark’ as (but when?...

The quintessential text for a certain conception of Romanticism, and for the Romantic sublime in particular, is Wordsworth’s apostrophe to the Imagination in Book 6 ofThe Prelude. The declaration of ignorance, of bafflement or cognitive loss, follows on from and is indeed produced in response to the so-called ‘Simplon Pass’ episode in which Wordsworth records a moment of geographical bafflement, a moment at which the poet comes to the uncanny realization that he has already passed the crossing-point that he is, however, still seeking. As is typical in a certain configuration of the sublime that inhabits Wordsworth’s poetry, the...

It feels odd, this question, the question that poems often seem to be asking – ‘What is it like to be ignorant?’, or ‘What is not knowing like?’ It feels odd because we hardly need a poem or novel to tell us what it is like, mired as we are in ignorance, stymied at every turn by things we don’t know, things that we don’t even know we don’t know. But from a different perspective we might think it not so strange, we might think that in fact poetry is anyway everywhere concerned with such questions – questions of the ordinary, the...

How do you get hold of other people conceptually, how do you know them, grasp them?¹ It is often said, and more often, I suppose, just thought or assumed, that the point of literature, part of its point at least, and the point in particular of novels and especially the classic nineteenth-century realist novel, is to allow us to understand and therefore to know, to grasp, others.² Structurally, that is to say, the tradition of the classic realist novel, in particular, can be conceived as a vast network of textuality with just one purpose: to comfort the bewildered reader with...

Joseph Conrad ‘never wrote a true short story’, declares Ford Madox Ford in his memoir of his friend and collaborator.² Ford goes on to explain his sense of a ‘true short story’ as ‘a matter of two or three pages of minutely considered words, ending with a smack . . . with what the French call acoup de canon’.Conrad instead wrote ‘“long-short” stories’, Ford argues, a form that is ‘practically the same as that of the novel’. Ford gives as examples of short story-writers Maupassant, Chekhov and O. Henry, writers whose tales are ‘practically stereotyped – the introduction...

Anyone who has spent much time with children cannot fail to know at least two things: first, that at a certain stage in their development, children believe that you, that the adult, knows, must know, the answer to their questions; second, that you don’t; that you don’t, can’t know everything – that in fact you can hardly be said to begin to scratch the surface of knowing everything (some would say you can’t know, really know, anything) and that if a child scratches the surface of your knowledge she will very quickly come upon its limits. And children do. That is...

Melancholy is the monster. It makes monsters of us, it monsters humanity: to be melancholy is to be human and to be melancholy is to be monstrous.¹ Melancholy is thought, philosophy, poetry and knowledge. Melancholy is the subject of speech and the subject who speaks; melancholy is beyond speech, beyond language. Melancholy is unique, singular and infinitely variable;² melancholy is universal, unchanging, is the condition of unchangingness.³ Melancholy: human and non-human, in and out of nature, monstrous. Melancholy is a foreign body, an impostor, an impostume. Melancholy is a swelling or growth in the head – for Robert Burton ‘a kind...

When questioned, Philip Roth can be peculiarly insistent on the subject of his own, authorial, ignorance:

Robert McCrum: Do you think sex is the Western novel’s deepest theme? Philip Roth: I don’t know.

Robert McCrum: So what is the purpose of fiction?

Philip Roth: God only knows.¹

‘I don’t know anything about anything’, Roth complains in another interview, from 1984, half-jokingly contrasting himself with John Updike, who ‘knows so much’, who knows ‘about golf, about porn, about kids, about America’ (CPR151). For Roth, ignorance includes, especially, the question of knowing about oneself: ‘blank space is part of who one...

It’s a curious fact, one that might help us to distinguish literary texts from other forms of writing – history books, say, or political memoirs, or scientific textbooks, or certain kinds of philosophical writing – it’s a curious fact that, as I have tried to suggest throughout this book, ignorance, authorial nescience, is well founded as a principle of literary composition, particularly in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. But it is even more striking that declarations of authorial ignorance became, in the twentieth century, something like a rite of passage, and indeed just what poets in particular were – as they still are, I...