Literary Engagement and the Contemplative Disposition

Abstract

Literary Engagement and the Contemplative Disposition Dennis Kinlaw (bio) In his 2010 essay "Reading in a Digital Age," literary critic Sven Birkets surveys media consumption and internet usage's devastating effects on the human attention span in general and literary engagement in particular.1 Awash in a torrent of information streams, readers have largely abandoned their capacity for immersive engagement to adopt more practical modes of textual consumption: grazing, clicking, skimming, and layering windows on computer screens, primarily. What appears at first another paean to less technologically saturated times, exactly the type of piece one might skim on a screen, takes on new depths when Birkets pivots from the general paranoia such technology produces to address his primary concern: contemplation. "My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking," Birkets writes, concluding, "I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered." As a "non-instrumental" mode of thinking that elevates reflection as an end in itself, contemplation emerges as uniquely imperiled in an age that favors rapid information over reflective self-formation. Contemplation, it seems, is the real casualty at the heart of our attention crisis. Cloaked in a quietude seemingly lost in contemporary culture, literature emerges less as a temporary respite from the shallows of contemporary life than as an aesthetic outpost whereby readers are equipped with the cognitive skills required for contemplative thought. Reading works of fiction, this essay intends to argue, resuscitates a self-modifying form of attention at the heart of the contemplative tradition. While writing from outside this tradition, Birkets recognizes as much when he describes the novel as a "a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different."2 As scholars across disciplines develop compelling evidence for the mental,3 emotional,4 and social benefits5 of literary engagement, how might works of fiction also be examined for their capacity to provide readers a type of contemplative calisthenics? Furthermore, to what extent are the imaginative and perceptual demands reading requires [End Page 192] analogous to and often indistinguishable from the spiritual disciplines intrinsic to the contemplative tradition? Motivated by these questions, this essay sets out to explore how literary engagement fosters and forms the cognitive and spiritual resources prioritized in the contemplative tradition. Understood as a "way of seeing things" characterized by self-surrender and attuned to the "hidden nonfinite" depths latent in the finite world we live within, contemplation requires an altered outlook whereby one's self-interested and ends-oriented approach to reality is radically reframed.6 Achieving this outlook, however, entails a certain recalibration in the ways one typically attunes oneself to the world. In hopes of illuminating some of the ways literary engagement resources contemplative modes of knowing, I address the following three stages of reading as distinct stages of contemplative recalibration: (1) self-surrender, (2) perceptual attunement, and (3) narrative absorption. Each of these stages, I argue, invites readers into a type of contemplative posture grounded in an enhanced receptivity to otherness. If an exploration into the phenomenology of reading falls terrifically short of the beatific vision at the heart of historic forms of contemplatio, this essay makes the case that it is precisely upon one's capacity for the types of cognitive skills reading requires that such exalted states are largely determined. While grace is a gift given without warning, there remains merit in the making-ready to receive this gift. Literary engagement, through cognitive processes whose spiritual dimension is implicit, resources this making-ready within the receptive reader. Before I examine the three stages of contemplative recalibration literature affords, I would like to begin at a more fundamental point that connects the contemplative and literary traditions. Whether coming from a contemporary literary critic or a twelfth-century Carthusian monk, the first step to reclaiming one's capacity for contemplation remains the same: read. READING ON THE FIRST RUNG Reading holds a privileged place within the contemplative tradition. Grounded in the recognition of reading's potential to lead...