On Wednesday afternoons I teach a creative writing class in a church basement that has been converted to a day shelter for homeless women. The church is located five blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., and is at the edge of one of the corridors burned in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Surrounding the century-old church are high-rise hotel, office, and apartment buildings and a mix of elegant Victorian mansions, middle-class townhouses and slums. At the moment, construction cranes arc into the sky in back of the church where a fifteen-million dollar structure is in a skeletal stage on the site of the former church parking lot. It will house the several day and night shelters and halfway houses now scattered at various nearby locations. These were opened because the church saw a need to provide refuge for the dispossessed who have found their way here without resources in their hometown, from other parts of the U. S., and from other countries. This is the community, an intersection of diverse individuals and subcommunities; at this place of intersection, those who have and those who do not have must work out a way to live together in the same location.

Hospitality is the foundational principle for the church com-munity to allow homeless persons to be reinterpreted not only as existing within society, but as bearing a gift of great value to the society. In the 1960s, the church responded to the need of the many people who slept nightly on its steps surrounded by drug and prostitution trade by opening its doors to shelter those regarded as the most invisible, misunderstood and unwanted in U. S. society. Drawing upon the concept of hospitality as understood and practiced in ancient Mediterranean cultures, which includes the old Testament Jewish culture, and combining it with more recent thinking (e.g., Marx, Buber, Herkel, King), the church chose to see itself as a place of hospitality, an oasis, a refuge for the traveler needing a place of safety and replenishment. In ancient hospitality practice, a person was obligated to open his home to the stranger, the unknown person, passing through. He had to provide a place to rest, food, clothing if needed, and entertainment. This usually included the telling of stories. The host provided these; the guest was a recipient, valued as a human being and a possible source of a gift to the host. Furthermore, the stranger retained his or her identity: he was not given a name or a label as are today’s "homeless". They were welcomed, and could offer a story of who they were, but they were not obligated to do so. Their freedom to speak or not, to name and show themselves or not, was guaranteed by the rules of hospitality.

The church deepened this ancient practice by seeing the people who take shelter there as giving the church, and potentially the near community and the larger society, a valuable gift: the opportunity to change its values by refocusing toward reciprocity among the individuals constituting a society and away from fear, isolation, monetary gain, and the devaluing of human persons as objects for classification and use. Hospitality’s host/guest rules establish a framework in which the rights and responsibilities of all individuals to life, family, property and truth can be met. As noted by James Kinneavy regarding the fundamental moral value in the world’s major religions, the host/guest relationship is constantly shifting, with the giver also receiving and the receiver also giving; the value of reciprocity accrues to the community through the individual actions of its members as they relate in hospitality.

Language activity is at the center of any community’s life; it is a major access route to understanding, and thus to the creation of community. With the diversity and change going on in this location, language activity includes panhandling on the streets outside, sermons, grant proposals, news letters and stories, court documents, telephone calls, job, medical, and school applications, literacy courses, and day-to-day conversation both for pleasure and for getting things done. The work of reading and writing literature might seem to be a mere extra and often is so regarded in the larger culture. I want to argue that literature is a fundamental way of expanding and deepening selfhood as well as response and responsibility to others. I situate my discussion of the role of literary writing and reading within a specific community’s context in order to explore ways that literature might function to draw from, and add to, the work of reconstructing community life within the vision of hospitality that guides the work.

The group of writers I meet with relates differently each week as the individuals explore their experience and honor each other’s representations of experience. As they learn formal elements, they take what they find useful in shaping the ways they are and want to be. The work blends aesthetic, ethical, epistemological, and spiritual dimensions—major areas of human need and striving beyond the physical. This chapter will discuss first how literature involves all of these dimensions during the writing and reading of literary works. This phenomenological approach will give a view of the nature of literature as a powerful vehicle for human development, specifically for individuals in relation to others. Then it will address the question of how the use of literary writing and reading can deepen a hospitable community vision.

Literature has an important role in human flourishing: it can lead persons into the deepest wells of their being and outward again to more responsive relations, for literature heightens the functions of language in these directions. Readers and writers of literary works must enter into a relationship of host/guest within themselves in order to make meaning in language. There is no other way for meaning to happen. When reading and writing is engaged in by members of a specific local community, the selves struggled for in the writing are offered to the community as gifts of knowledge of self-identity and experience. Readers are alternately host and guest, receiving the gift of the other, offering understanding and recognition of the fuller human being, and broadening and deepening their own epistemologies and knowledge of life and community, as they are led into each other’s situated points of view.

To see this relationship we need first to understand how meaning is made in language from a situated point of view. Then we can examine how literature resituates language to a certain extent, allowing aesthetic distance and freedom.

(1)a We got some beer out of the trunk. b The beer was warm. First sentence (1)a appeared on the screen. As soon as they had read it, they pressed a button and (1)b appeared in its place. When they understood the meaning of the second sentence, they pushed a different button. Test subjects required a mean time of 835 milliseconds to respond to the second of the pair.

In the next part of the experiment, subjects were shown a sentence that could be located in a context with (1)b, though not quite as readily: (2)a We checked the picnic supplies. Sentence (2)b was identical to (1)b: The beer was warm. Subjects took a mean time of 1,016 milliseconds to respond.

Yet another first sentence was given to the test subjects, this time one in which no context could be located: Andrew was especially fond of beer. This time the subjects took the longest time of all to respond. The sentence, The beer was warm, makes no sense following this third option because the bridges in data and frameworks to let the reader into the writer’s point of view are missing.

Writing needs to be situated in time and place; the point of view, spatio-temporal indicators (chiefly deictics, pronouns, tenses, and articles) represent in language this positioning, linking two individuals in a dialogue in which they share points of view. In literary discourse, however, writing may be "resituated," expecting the reader to find his way into the text’s point of view. The point of view is present, but it is an imagined and constructed point of view, "resituated" because it is not geared to a specific reader. It may need to be read by progressively entering the writer’s imagined world (the introverted consciousness) without direct participatory exchange. The responsibility of the reader to stand back and permit confusion for a time and to construct meaning from available data and his own schemes is assumed. The reader must get inside the text’s point of view or it cannot be understood.

In terms of our model here, the reader plays host to the guest’s story of his world, listening to the stranger and attempting to know through his eyes and language the world of which he speaks. The literary writer attends to the introverted consciousness to a greater degree than in other genres of language, thereby increasing attention to the word itself and lessening attention on the direct attempt to lead the reader through the bridges connecting the points of view. The reader is required to find the point of view the writer is presuming and to follow it. Thus, the reader must enter into the world imagined for him, as well as the one the writer has imagined from his own point of view. Of course, in all communication, the speaker imagines the point of view of hearer, for he must decide what information needs to be brought forward in terms of what the hearer already knows and what he must be given. But in literary writing, the author deliberately constructs a point of view that is an imagined reader who need not be real and located in an actual, specific context and point of view.

Wolfgang Wiser’s theory of aesthetic response explains how literary texts lead their readers into new points of view by locating them within schemes and then leaving unfulfilled the expectations grounded in world views or literary forms. Readers encounter "gaps," or areas of negativity that result from hypotheses the reader builds up from textual data but that turn out to be wrong within the text’s world. The text takes the reader up to the boundaries of his knowledge and ways of knowing the world, where the reader confronts the unexpected or the unknown. The text has the potential to lead the reader beyond the borders of his knowledge; he learns to open his perspective on human life to a wider view, to put himself inside the point of view the text requires of him in order to make sense of it and to learn what this point of view is like, and thereby to revise the schemes he brings to his understanding of the text. During this process he is constantly stepping back and forth between his own self and points of view and the points of view imagined in the text: he takes the role of both participants in a dialogue, constructing meaning from the text and holding it against his own points of view on reality. The reader steps inside as empathic ally, and outside as critic. This double process requires him to try to hold two often opposing viewpoints at the same time with a suspension of final judgment, that is decision about his acceptance or rejection of the represented world until the process of reading (interpretation) is completed.

Depending on the uses we make of texts, we may choose to increase the empathic stance, as Wayne Booth suggests in his model for reading as friendship. As empathy is one characteristic required for good moral reasoning, and hence for effective and humane action, literary reading can enhance the capacity for empathy. Empathy tries to see the other fully, yet sees the other as a distinct individual, human, flawed, suffering, and possessing value in virtue of being human. Empathy casts a bridge of understanding to the other and recognizes two individuals and the bridge. It seeks and finds a shared place, and does not confuse it with an identification in one’s own biases and needs. It seeks a fuller knowing, adopting a passive stance so that the other may lead one into the different point of view of the speaker. This act of attention is itself a gift, one that is practiced in reading literature and that conveys, with all the knowledge gained from listening to and stepping for a time inside the others’ point of view. This empathic stance is critical to community building among individuals, moreso the more diverse, the more unknown they are to each other.

But the way of using differs from person to person. In our poetry class, the choices made in selecting language and schemes began to arise more from the participants own perspectives of themselves and of their imagined addressees. Because it was not participatory discourse intended to accomplish something with the addressee, because the introverted (remembered and imagining) consciousness was foregrounded over the extroverted one, the self does not have to hide behind a "nice" exterior that would ease day-to-day relating. Because the poetry is read to the writing group, the expression of the fuller self-identity, experience and points of view revealed in the poetry receives the attention and acknowledgement of selfhood that bespeaks a community which values the fuller, subjective being of the individual. And because this giving-of-self in poems and receiving of others’ selves as presented in the fuller experiential range of literature happens in a community, those in the community expand their ability to incorporate diverse perspectives without needing either consensus or resolution on points of disagreement.

I said above that the writer’s struggle takes place within himself. Like the process of reading, it requires a searching out of the unknown places, their meeting with the known, and a resulting interpretation that is the meaning of those places at the point in time of the writing. At this point in time in their lives, these women are uprooted, struggling to survive and to redirect their lives. This is a huge task, as it is a reinterpretation of the self, a finding, struggling with, and naming of both wounded and strong places.

One of the women who sits with us reads and listens but does not write (not yet). She has a scar eight inches long starting in the middle of her neck, crossing her jaw, and branching onto her cheek nearly to her nose. It is a large and gnarled scar more than a quarter inch high and wide. It reminds me of the edges of those long, flat locust pods that I collect in the fall because they make good rattles. In thinking this, I connect something painful to something beautiful and treasured. I do not know what happened to her, but I know that it must have been brutal, a long deep cut followed by a lack of care. This wound was not sutured in a hospital emergency room, and the deeper wounds must not have been cared for either, else, why is she here? I know this about her, too, from the few sentences she has spoken: She is in pain, she thought poetry was supposed to rhyme (does she still think so?), and she thinks she can’t write poetry. And I know her name. It is the same as a large oil-rich city in the U. S., and I think of the irony of this identity of name and her location here in a shelter for the homeless in the capital of the richest country in the world.

Because I do not know her, but I want to, I must fall back on whatever connections I can make. These meanings are my meanings about her; they are my point of view, but I know this; they are part of who I am, not who she is. Encountering her has caused me to look again at the meanings of my own life, for in order to separate her from myself, in order to "read" this intersection with her, I can only explore my own experience and schemes.

So I go back to my own scar to explore, and I write a poem titled "Scars," which is about my own remembered experience of 42 years ago within the context of this new encounter of another person with a scar. The scar identifies us as the same—people who have suffered a brutal and uncared for wound. The rest is a gap, an unknown, a space not crossed. During the act of writing, I become aware that I am comparing the two scars. I dig into my own experience of being wounded, and discover biases toward wounding, toward myself and toward others. I discover a strength in being able to distance myself from the wounded place, and find in that distancing through writing that I have deepened a felt solidarity with one who has suffered a similar wound. It is a strength I did not have the last time I wrote about this place, and it is gained not because of the visible knowledge that there are others like me—I know this—but rather because of the new meaning of relatedness to an other that was created in the act of writing. I have offered myself the gift of knowing myself anew, freed from a previous bias that nothing good or beautiful could come out of this wound: freed from a bias that we are the same, those of us who have suffered this particular way. We are and we are not. My experience is mine, I can tell it in its detail, in its meaning for me.

After writing, I am surprised to find that I am more able to hear the complexity and individuality of her story, should she ever choose to tell it. I am more willing to wait, not so anxious to know, more willing to grant her right to privacy, her status as guest. I discover I know her less, because I have discovered I knew myself less than I had thought. Letting her stand as stranger, as unknown, the withdrawing of my labels and uses from her withdraws her status as object in my attention, she becomes more fully subject, more fully herself as I am more willing to see that I do not know her. Now I am more ready to see who she is. From a position of greater self-understanding and greater openness gained through writing in literary genres, writers are better prepared to receive the discovered represented selves in others’ writing. They are better able to know them as individual beings and to acknowledge the separation. One woman expressed her learning of this in the beginning of a poem addressed to another woman by asserting the separation: "I am not you. Contrary to your belief and efforts to force me . . . to be you. But it’s really not you that you want me to be . . . just someone else so you can be you." All those someone else passed down through generations, no one would ever take responsibility to pass back and stand alone. Another writer invites someone into herself, across a bridge metaphor of music:

"Come to me Like a symphony. Play me like a piano. Let your fingers feather I want to remember how you played Long, soft, and romantic. Your music can lull me. Come to me." The next poem she writes moves in the opposite direction, seeking a way to keep the pain caused by others from continuing to wound her. In this poem, she writes a letter to herself, "Dear, Don’t confuse your self again. Know the beginning from the end. These are things we have been Through before. Believe me girl when I say: `The past is the past, so let it Stay.’ But remember: the hurt can come Back. Emotions like a dart board. Those people are like darts. It will be ok girl."

Don’t take your feeling back. The first writer is more concerned with getting her meaning across than with form. A second, who has been in the group longer, is learning to discover meaning through developing her knowledge of form. The poetic form especially helps to construct the meaning of the first poem. A third writer can produce perfect iambic pentameter and rhyme. She is struggling to let go of form because it distracts her from getting at deeper meanings. She is trying to get to her experience without form getting in the way, to find a form that is her meaning instead of letting the concern for pattern take her away from her exploration of experience. She is succeeding, as the last portion of a poem addressed to her parents attests: "The happy feelings coming home from war Were seen as love and gave you hope to carry Life together as a proven thing that Waiting would have caused you both to see."

I sit back now your child in more distress

Than either one, as grown, could ever hear.

If all your love is all you show to me

The chance of living happy and with peace

Is something I can only dream of now

And later try to find another way.

The warmth of feeling someone next to me

Is soft and happy. Well, can I have a puppy?

Still another writer has discovered the need to attend, but to wait in gaps until a meaning occurs. The ending lines of one of her recent poems imagines a sheet of writing paper talking to her, and her responding:

"I’m empty, Fill me in"

be patient with me for soon

you will not be empty

What is the relation of formal literary elements and the work of discovering one’s epistemological point of view on an experience? How does the intersection of formal options and options as to point of view result in gaps that are potentially productive of relations among individuals? I have already described how I see this occurring from my own experience. The unknown is a space for casting out lines of meaning, which are created bonds. When I compare a scar to a locust pod, I am engaging in aesthetic activity, seeing human beings in an objective status as people who have been cut deeply. The act of perceiving aesthetically was the impetus to both separation and connection; the act of writing aesthetically enabled me to extend the first thought into something richer and more complex in meaning, thereby deepening the meaning of the encounter.

The act of reading literature similarly requires the casting out of lines from the reader’s knowledge to the text’s data. The interpretation is consequently subjective, it is a relationship of reader to text, not something objective. Wiser explains how aesthetic response is guided by a text’s data, which give clues to thematic meaning but do not explicitly connect these clues. The reader must construct meanings across the gaps between the clues. Readers are able to meet the text in the understood clues, some of which are indications of schemes, and it is through these that the reader enters the text’s world. Something not expected from the reader’s schemes happens in the syntagmatic dimension of text, that is the combinatory axis, where words and schemes are linked in a coherent chain: one or more of the links are missing, or a segment of a different schema is substituted, and the expected elements and ordering are disrupted. In this rupture, the reader has to construct meaning by filling in the gaps with interpretations. Meanings are thus relational; they are connections between the text’s world and the reader’s world. The reader’s world is changed by the encounter with the text, as he revises his schema and adds the new knowledge gained to his world view. Reading can elicit change in a reader’s perspectives and knowledge to the extent that the reader is able to do the bridging, to make some sense across the gaps. As is clear from Chafe’s work, if information is in the background, or is not present at all in the reader, meaning cannot be made at all. Peripheral and inactive information is more frequent in literature, as it enables the gaps that are characteristic of the literary discourse.

The primary dimension of selection and aesthetic activity is the paradigmatic, which involves the selection from among similar options for words and schemes. Roman Jakobson regarded these two axes, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, to be the two processes of language, the selecting, substituting one and the combining, ordering one, respectively. He recognized that the paradigmatic property becomes prominent in literature, most strongly so in poetry. With the combinatory property deemphasized in favor of the substitutive, the mind focuses on patterns of language and the play of language as language. The nature of literature as constructions vs. as reality is thus brought into view. In terms of community-building, the very high-lighting of language qua language enables readers and writers to see the constructed nature of language, and to see ways in which one’s thinking about the world is a selection and ordering of internal and external data. Literary reading and writing can promote open minded attention, expanded epistemologies and flexible meaning-making. All of these are conducive to the work of creating free, peaceful and supportive communities. In terms of making meaning across gaps, the prominence of the paradigmatic property engages the selection process that is at the heart of point-of-view, epistemology and ethics. The data that accrue into patterns are foregrounded in virtue of their appearance as pattern. As Jakobson demonstrates, the play of language engaged by noticing a pattern distances the message from the text. We might say that the reader is distanced as well, because he notices the text as an object of attention for aesthetic play and participation vs. for practical use and participation. And because the patterns are paradigmatic, exemplifying rules governing the ordering and organizing of the world view, the reader must access the world view through the patterns, which are a bridge into another’s epistemology. The reader shifts back and forth among his own and the text’s points of view, bringing the reader’s own paradigmatic process, with its principles and processes of selection, into the open. Lines of relational meaning are created, and it is clear to the reader that he is doing this. In non-literary communication, we do this, but usually we do not recognize or pay attention to the fact that we are doing so. Yet, such recognition and attention is a necessary facet of deepening interpersonal understanding.

Gaps will inevitably remain. If literary reading and writing drive knowledge of ourselves and our world past their present boundaries, it they also make us more keenly aware that there is ever more that we do not know beyond what has become known. And there are areas that can never be known or spoken: much must remain in silence and mystery. Because of literature’s capacity to bring both identification and distantiation, we are able to learn to approach and embrace, as well as to retreat and let be. We can delineate ourselves, others and our relations, and we can know how partial is our knowledge, how great and open the possibility for further learning. Confronted by the unknown, we find ourselves more humble, more human and more in awe of human beingness. Finally, on explorations into unknown territory, writing and reading our writing from within a community, are rest and replenishment for mind and spirit. They are gifts we offer and receive on these interior journeys.

This is a good place to be if one wishes to create with others a vital community.

1. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 53.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov and trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 4-5.

3. Ibid., p. 6.

4. Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 10.

5. Ibid., p. 207.

6. Ibid., p. 207.

7. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

8. Ibid., p. 170.

9. Ibid., p. 132.

10. Stanley Fish "Affective Stylistics", in Is There a Text in This Class?

11. E.D. Hirsch, Validity and Interpretation.

12. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 269.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. by Vadim Liapunov. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990.

. The Dialogic Imagination.

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Chafe, Wallace. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Hirsch, Edward D. Validity in Interpretation.

Wiser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." In Essays on Language and Literature. Eds. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levi. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. 296-322.

Kinneavy, James. "Ethics and Rhetoric: Forging a Moral Language for Public Schools and Public Debate." Paper presented at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., April 1994.

Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Ohmann, Richard. "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style. " Essays in Stylistic Analysis. Ed. Howard Babb. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972, pp. 36-49.

Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven and Yale: Yale University Press, 1985.

 

In the history of literary studies in this century there has been a significant change in attitude with regard to the ethical and the moral. Earlier in the century this was central to the evaluation of a work of literature. Then there was an abandonment of concern for the morality of the piece and attention was devoted entirely to its aesthetic character—understood as not involved in morality. This was well enough if taken in the sense that the aesthetic was more than an issue of morality. Unfortunately, however, this was taken to mean that it was amoral.

The developing attention to the person in all dimensions of life, however, has tended to correct this. It is now recognized that the aesthetic concern for the beautiful and the ugly requires that the full humanity of those involved be recognized. This requires above all attention to the quality of the existential exercise of one’s freedom, which involves the moral character of that exercise. Consequently, ethical concern is returning to literature and literary criticism once again, but in a new and more integrated manner.

On the part of the reader this personal dimension requires a pattern of empathy, a willingness to hear, and hence to listen to and discover the other. This is a key element of the solidarity required for civil society. Language is a key element in the bonding of peoples and at a deeper level embodies the broad attitudinal patterns of an entire culture. Hence those who share a language naturally tend to bond together in preference to relations with others who speak a different language.

This solidarity in language is subject to manipulation by those concerned with excluding various groups. Thus an appeal to the German language was made by the Nazis in their attempt to develop a racial ideology and to practice exclusion.

Beyond language, literature itself is a truly exceptional wisdom of the person and community. In contrast to an analytic syllogism which can only unfold what already is present in the premises, literature gives constant expression to the wealth of human life and culture. It summons up the riches of memory and expresses them in new ways through the exercise of the imagination. By imaging the ethical dimension it reflects moral life; by engaging the aesthetic dimension it gives expression to human affectivity. But it does this in a way which allows for the expression of wonder before the deep unsoundable mysterious character of human life lived in the context of transcendent meaning.

The creative character of literature express as not only meaning, but action and thereby exceeds what already can be conceptualized, adding that which can be suggested in gestures that convey a more integral and comprehensive human meaning and attitude. This has impressive reach, for it includes not only one’s own life or that of one’s own generation, but reaches back to earlier generations, to their struggles, to their concrete responses and to their antecedents and consequences.

Hence literature becomes a special window on reality. It includes the realities being addressed, but it unfolds them through the creative genius of the author and the multiple and varied sensibilities of each reader.