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Philosophy and Literature, Volume 37, Number 2, October 2013, pp.

531-541 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/phl.2013.0025

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The Difficulties of Reading with a Creative

Mind: Bergson and the Intuitive Reader

by Paul Ardoin

hilosopher Henri Bergson has written at length about the creative process of artists and poets: the poet starts from a fuller view
of reality than that of most people and then plumb[s] the depths of
his own nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he
lays hold of the potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left
as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished
work of art.1 The result enables us, the audience for art, to discover
in things more qualities and more shades than we naturally perceive.2
According to Bergson, our view of reality is thereafter altered, and we
begin to realize that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible (TCM, p. 136). For Bergson, then, the primary use of art and
literature is to urge us toward a philosophical life and a closer identification with our inner life and the various durations surrounding us.
Art does important but limited work; it dilates our perception, but on
the surface rather than in depth. It enriches our present, but it scarcely
enables us to go beyond it (TCM, p. 157).
In order to go beyond that, Bergson argues, we need philosophy,
through which all things acquire depthmore than depth, something
like a fourth dimension which permits anterior perceptions to remain
bound up with present perceptions, and the immediate future itself to
become partly outlined in the present (TCM, p. 157). This is not the
only moment in which Bergson places the art of reading in contrast
to the intuition I recommend to the philosopher, despite a certain
analogy, be it said in passing, he makes between the two (TCM, p. 87).
It is my aim here to use Bergsons ideas to connect the twothe act
Philosophy and Literature, 2013, 37: 531541. 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Philosophy and Literature

of reading and the exercise of intuitionmore closely (and in a way

consistent with his own philosophy).
When he contrasts the act of reading with the philosophical act that
creates something like a fourth dimension, Bergson assumes that art
and literature are experienced in a particular vacuum that isolates the
viewer or reader from her past. This is an assumption that seems to be
shared with even the most apparently Bergsonian of authors (Proust, for
example). But the assumption is not only false, it is contrary to much
of what Bergson demonstrates throughout his body of workin Matter
and Memory, for example, Bergson argues every perception is already
memory. Practically, we perceive only the past.3 We know from Bergson
that we cannot avoid bringing our prior experience into any present
perception, including the perceiving of a work of art; I argue that we
can then use that experience to expand the role of reading beyond a
mere push toward a more philosophical life. In fact, we can approach
literature itself philosophically and become truly Bergsonian readers,
who enter a work of literature without shedding the past and, instead,
utilize that past toward a creative reading experience.

I
Proust, in his multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time ( la recherche
du temps perdu), frequently returns to the image of the kaleidoscope,
one of several metaphors for the rearrangements that spur involuntary
memory.4 Ultimately, these rearrangements and Marcels experiences
will lead that protagonist to become the artist capable of producing the
novel itself, or one like it. The novel is well-known for demonstrating
the power of involuntary memory, and certainly might lead a reader
to realize that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible
(TCM, p. 136), but, Bergson might suggest, it cannot do much more
than that at the level of content, which is necessarily restrictive.
The medium of the written word, for example, brings with it numerous problems: words are notBergson tells usthe thought, only its
expression: the thought is above the word and above the sentence.
It only expresses itself by means of a sentence, that is, by a group of
pre-existing elements (TCM, p. 121). This limits the thought, which
itself is a movement, to an inadequate expression that is essentially
discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxtaposing words, leaving a gulf
which no amount of concrete representations can ever fill (M & M, p.
125). Words, after all, have a definite meaning, a conventional value

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533

relatively fixed; they can express the new only as a rearrangement of the
old (TCM, p. 82). Words themselves are limited in meaning-making to
their own brand of kaleidoscopic rearrangement.
This is the same shortcoming Bergson finds in science, philosophy,
and ordinary logic, historically: ordinary logic . . . sees in a new form
or quality only a rearrangement of the oldnothing absolutely new,
preventing us from accessing and understanding a duration in which
novelty is constantly springing forth and evolution is creative (TCM, p.
26). Marcel accesses this duration and emerges from the experience an
artist. The question remains, though, whether the reader can do more
than simply observe this process.
If there is a modernist project, one of its goals is to move beyond
the concrete experience of words, sentences, and content, to do more
than simply undertake . . . the study of the soul in the concrete, upon
individual examples (TCM, p. 27). These modernist works seek to attend
to the form of the work itself as the content, affecting readers directly
through Woolfs undulating waves of words or Joyces multidimensional
sentences.5 In the case of Proust, this means taking the reader through
Marcels experiences, involuntary memory, and development with him;
that is, we are reading the book as it is being written through experience. This reflexive process should move us beyond the twin hurdles of
concrete, specific events told through the concrete, specific medium of
word. However, beyond these are the hurdles of time and experience.
Bergson tells us, for example, to the artist who creates a picture by
drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory;
it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the
content being altered. The duration of his work is part and parcel
of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the
psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The
time taken up by the invention, is one with the invention itself.6 This,
again, sounds like In Search of Lost Time, in which the work follows the
evolution that invents the work.
The problem is that the evolution of a real life takes a long time,
even longer than could fit into three thousand pages. Bergson, in Matter
and Memory, uses the example of a second of red light. Red light, the
light which has the longest wavelengthand of which, consequently,
the vibrations are the least frequentaccomplishes 400 billion successive vibrations in a single second. For a consciousness to completely
perceive even that second would take more than 25,000 years (M &
M, p. 2056). On a moment-by-moment basis, millions of phenomena

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Philosophy and Literature

succeed each other while we hardly succeed in counting a few (M & M,

p. 207). Could Proust really capture a lifetime of development in three
thousand pages, and could we read and sympathetically experience it
over the course of a few weeks or months? Can you shorten the length
of a melody without altering its nature? (TCM, p. 19). Is not writing
always compression, selection, and division of experience into events?
It would be a wonder if a reader even took from the book an idea that
an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible when there is no
time in the reading process or space in the book to describe the real
duration of artistic creation.
We run into related problems when a novel attempts to have us
experience what a character does (or when the novel aims at a specific,
general experience for the reader at all). Again, there are dual obstacles:
first, we cannot share the exact experiences of a character, even if we
come across formal techniques designed to simulate those experiences;
and second, we cannot leave our unrelated experiences outside of the
novel. Bergson refutes the idea of sharing identical experiences in The
Creative Mind by answering the question of whether someone other than
Shakespeare could have written Hamlet: It is clear that a mind in which
the Hamlet of Shakespeare had taken shape in the form of the possible
would by that fact have created its reality: it would thus have been, by
definition, Shakespeare himself (TCM, p. 102). That is, this other
possible writer, in order to create Hamlet, would have been thinking
all that Shakespeare will think, feeling all he will feel, knowing all he
will know, perceiving therefore all he will perceive, and consequently
occupying the same body and the same soul: it is Shakespeare himself
(TCM, p. 103). To create In Search of Lost Time, it would be necessary
to have all the experiences, thoughts, and perceptions of Proust, over
the same course of time, and not simply read about a condensed list
of experiences and perceptions, taken out of the flow of time and the
context of duration.
In addition to gaining all the experiences and perceptions of Proust,
we would also need to lose all of our own, something Bergson implies
is possible (in fact, usual) when he claims that art simply enriches our
present. Our past experiences, though, are always with us; that is the
centerpiece of Bergsons philosophy. Even if I made a concerted effort
to empty my mind before beginning to read a novel, I could not do
so. Bergson explains as much in his discussion of the idea of nothing
in Creative Evolution:

Paul Ardoin

535

I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the

sensations that come to me from the outer world. Now it is done; all
my perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and the
night.I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am still
there, with the organic sensations which come to me from the surface
and from the interior of my body, with the recollections which my past
perceptions have left behind themnay, with the impression, most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can I suppress
all this? How eliminate myself? (CE, p. 278)

Bergsons goal here is to interrogate the idea of nothing as less than

something, but he also demonstrates the difficulty of leaving yourself
behind. Even if it were possible to do so, even if you could forget all
your past experiences, you could not block out the sensual present: you
would feel the book in your hands, the chair at your back, the various
cramps that come with reading a three-thousand-page book. And even
that condensed list of experiences and perceptions is still too long to
consume in one, uninterrupted sitting. Would the effort of forgetting
yourself last through meals and trips to the mailbox? Would you be
able to forget your entire past while reading a moving book when an
effort, an emotion, can bring suddenly to consciousness words believed
definitely lost (TCM, p. 154)? Does not Proust himself demonstrate
how easy it is for the past to overwhelm you at a moments notice? Is
that not what involuntary memory means? Ironic that in order to really
experience what Marcel does, we would have toby our undivertable
attentionprove involuntary memory impotent or trivial.
In fact, even the author who insists upon this impossible feat of
attention dependsconsciously or noton the reader bringing past
experiences into present interaction with the book. How, for example,
could a reader make sense of the written language without memory and
experience? Of the process of reading words on a page, Bergson reports,
Our mind notes here and there a few characteristic lines and fills all the
intervals with memory-images which, projected on the paper, take the
place of the real printed characters and may be mistaken for them. Thus
we are constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception
is really comparable to a closed circle, in which the perception-image,
going toward the mind, and the memory-image, launched into space,
careen the one behind the other (M & M, p. 103).
The memory of letters and word meanings may seem trivial, but
according to Bergson, Any memory-image that is capable of interpreting
our actual perception inserts itself so thoroughly into it that we are no

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Philosophy and Literature

longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory (M &

M, p. 103). What other memories necessarily intertwine with perception
simply as a prerequisite for understanding a text like In Search of Lost
Time? Knowledge of French history? Social hierarchy? The Dreyfus affair?
From the level of the letter and the word to the level of sociopolitical
history, at least, the process of memory is inseparable from the process
of reading and making meaning, which means that entering into a literary work purely is an impossibility. In fact, by writing, the author sets
prior knowledge as a necessary prerequisite. How can he then expect,
with such a list of invited previous experience, to keep some kinds of
experience out? How can he expect, when acknowledging (by the use of
the written word) that the reader existed prior to opening the book, to
demand of the reader an exact and restricted combination of experience?
And how could the reader possibly do that kind of filtering work even
if she wanted to and knew which experiences were useful and allowed?
Yet that is just what a text like In Search of Lost Time expects. It is what
any text that purports to marry form and content (and thereby create
a specific experience for each of the individual members of a general
audience) expects. This particular strain of modernism, then, is not the
way to go beyond the surface expansion of our present attention that
Bergson sees in art. It cannot even limit the reading experience to the
simple present, as Bergson claims art does.
Nor do I know, either, of any book that fits Bergsons example of
an artwork that simply expands our present perception while avoiding
access to our past. If such a book existed, though, there would need be
only one. That book would affect every reader in the same way (a trick
modernist literature cannot pull off, even with its expanded repertoire
of formal tricks, because it can avoid neither time nor experience)
and would require no prior knowledge, even of words. It is no wonder
Bergson uses the example of visual art when describing its experience
as a purely atemporal one.
Visual art, of course, carries with it similar burdens of time and
experience, but we will bypass that concern for now. If this perfect
work existed and could cause us to realize during one, instantaneous
view that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible, why
would there ever need be a second piece of art? The same work of art
would serve the purpose for all people, since no viewer would bring any
outside experiences to the work, and once that purpose were fulfilled,
every viewer would know that faculties of perception can be expanded.
Bergsons very definition of the effects of art seems to eliminate the
need for all future works of art.

Paul Ardoin

537

II
Because we determined it is impossible to remove time and prior (or
even simultaneous) experience from the equation of reading, we know
by logical extension that since no two readers can enter a book the
same way, neither can two readers take the same experience away from
the book when leaving it. Nor could one reader experience a book the
same way twice, even in the case of immediately successive readings. If
my present always brings with it my past while pushing its way into my
future (a favorite description of Bergsons), then my first experience
with a book becomes part of my overall past experience, along with
everything that happens until the next time I read the book. Time is
invention or it is nothing at all (CE, p. 341): A book will necessarily
have a different effect on me as an adult than it did when I read it as a
teenager because I am a different person with different experience by
the time I read the book again. This common experience is enough to
demonstrate that a work of art does more than simply allow its audience
to realize something about philosophical living.
What a book does instead is encourage me to access something in
myself and to create a new, unique experience that can only appear
when that exact me reads that book at that exact time, in that exact
environment, in that exact edition, at that exact pace, etc. Otherwise
even experiencing art becomes a type of habit, offering only a variation
on what we have already learned (that perception can be expanded,
for example), rather than a unique experience every time. This experience is unique because it is intuitive, not just intellectual. It invites
me to enter into myself when I enter into a book, rather than simply
focusing on the book; that is, it invites me to approach art in the same
philosophical way Bergson suggests we approach other aspects of life.
Rather than simply trying to enter the vertical experience of the sentences in Finnegans Wake, for example, the philosophical reader must
also, in fact primarily, enter vertically into herself.7 This would require
paying more attention to the individual in the reading process and
more attention to the past she brings with her to the book, not less.
It would be a question of turning this attention aside from the part of
the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning
it back toward what serves no practical purpose. This conversion of the
attention would be philosophy itself (TCM, p. 138; italics in original).
If anything, the novel is the perfect starting place for this process, since
it already tends to stray away from serving a clear practical purpose.

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Philosophy and Literature

Bergson encourages the scientists among us to turn away from the

practical, down into our own inner selves: the deeper the point we touch,
the stronger will be the thrust which sends us back to the surface. . . .
Brought back to the surface by an impulsion from the depth, we shall
regain contact with science as our thought opens out and disperses
(TCM, p. 12425). By diverting attention away from normal, practical
interaction with the universe, the intuitive scientist avoids the trap of simply rearranging the old and can instead recognize something truly new.
When we read a work of literature intellectually, we can, at best, rearrange our current view of old elements a little more. The difference
between an intellectual reader and an intuitive reader is the difference
between rearrangement and re-creation. It is the difference between
viewing reality as a kaleidoscopic reordering of familiar elementsa
mere prearrangeable juxtaposition of things already knownor as a
continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty (TCM, p. 91). If we read
intuitively, we live more philosophically and we can perhaps better fill
in the gaps between the words on Prousts page and find the motion
behind the years of Marcels life that necessarily appear as a system of
points (CE, p. 348).
To find the motion the system of points divides, we must simply
read the way Bergson demands we practice philosophy and science,
recognizing all the consequences which the intuition of true duration
implies, that creation is continuous (CE, p. 346), that therefore
reassembling the jigsaw puzzle of a book (no matter the difficulty of the
puzzle) is not creation but an effort to halt creation. Time is, instead,
vital to the individual, intuitive reader. She knows, when a child plays
at reconstructing a picture by putting together the separate pieces in
a puzzle game, the more he practices, the more and more quickly he
succeeds. The reconstruction was, moreover, instantaneous, the child
found it ready-made, when he opened the box on leaving the shop.
The operation, therefore, does not require a definite time, and indeed,
theoretically, it does not require any time. That is because the result
is given (CE, p. 340). The intuitive reader has no use for the result
as given, since the result of a great work of art as given is simply that
perceptive faculties can be expanded, and she has already learned that
and is ready to discover something new through an act of re-creation
that invites the previously closed book into a world of motion.

Paul Ardoin

539

III
Woolf lauds the book of motion in her essay Modern Novels, placing
it in contrast to earlier, materialist work so well constructed and solid
in its craftsmanship . . . there is not so much as a draught between the
frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards.8 Her chief complaint of
materialist work is that it attempts to contain spirit inside of meticulous
plotting; however, she explains, whether we call it life or spirit, truth
or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to
be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. We
must instead acknowledge the mind, exposed to the ordinary course
of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions . . . From all sides
they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in
their sum what we might venture to call life itself. The chief task of
the author, for Woolf, becomes to convey this incessantly varying spirit.
Woolfs philosophy, here and elsewhere, is correctly noted by critics like Mary Ann Gillies as closely aligned with Bergsonian thought.9
Bergsons own words suggest he would agree with Woolf that the successful modern novel is able to convey this incessantly varying spirit.
To receive information about spirit that has been conveyed, though, is
not the same as to experience that spirit. Gillies attempts to walk a fine
line on this issue regarding Woolfs moments of being. Some critics,
Gillies writes, think of these moments as instances of frozen time, a
notion contrary to Bergson ideas about times constant flow. Instead,
she argues, it would be more accurate to think of these moments of
being as examples of dure that become spatialized because they are written down (Gillies, p. 59). Bergson himself seems to argue in favor of a
spatialized view in his second introduction to The Creative Mind, when
he praises a method of teaching literature that encourages children in
learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection, focusing on punctuation and rhythm (TCM, p. 86).
One hopes here to get back the movement and rhythm of the
composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in
sympathy (TCM, p. 87),10 but this very strategy depends on a kind of
spatializationone that is the focus of Bergsons repeated critiques of
Zeno: movement and duration cannot be translate[d] . . . in terms
of space (M & M, p. 191), though language cannot help but do so.
Language is doomed to spatialize because it regard[s] the becoming as
a thing to be made use of. The wordsmith has no more concern with
the interior organization of movement than a workman has with the

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molecular structure of his tools (M & M, p. 191). The ordinary reader,

then, is at the receiving end of a mechanical, intellectual expression of
the authors own intuitive experience.
What I suggest as a possible first step beyond the apparently doomed
nature of language is the illumination of that doom in Beckettian
attempts to fail better when movement and duration are never translatable by language but language is all we have.11 In Becketts works,
readers can experience something more than the second-hand extension of faculties of perception and the lesson that they can enact that
extension in their own lives. Beckett reveals the absolute impossibility
of transmitting anything more than a spatialized (and therefore frozen)
moment of being through a language that is limited to cataloging our
myriad impressions.
Florida State University

This project emerged from Florida State Universitys Bergson reading group, all the members of which
deserve thanks for their feedback and input.
1. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley
Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 8384.
2. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (Totowa: Littlefield, Adams
& Co., 1946), p. 157; hereafter abbreviated TCM.
3. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer
(Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2005), p. 150; hereafter abbreviated M & M; italics in original.
4. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. Lydia Davis, et al. (New York: Penguin,
2004).
5.See Samuel Becketts argument in Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce, Our Exagmination
Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare and Co., 1929).
6. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998), p.
340; hereafter abbreviated CE.
7. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939).
8.Virginia Woolf, Modern Novels, The Times Literary Supplement (April 10, 1919).
9. Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1996), p. 58; hereafter abbreviated Gillies.
10.Suzanne Guerlac, in her extended reading of Bergson (Thinking in Time), puts it
thus: Art . . . does not operate like a physical cause. It addresses us. It invites us into

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541

a relation of sympathy. We feel with the poet, dancer, or musician by entering into the
rhythms of his or her art (p. 52). This rhythm is a less literal one than Bergson discusses
in The Creative Mind, and the strategy feels more Bergsonian than his own suggestion
of training an art of diction (TCM, p. 87)that is, more like the Bergson of Time and
Free Will than the Bergson of The Creative Mind, who was concerned with the kinds of
hurdleslinguistic and otherwisethat I have discussed here. See Suzanne Guerlac,
Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006),
and Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,
trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910).
11.See various, especially Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1984).