Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature by Louis Groarke (review)

Reviewed by: Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature by Louis Groarke Suzanne Stewart Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature. By Louis Groarke. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-0-2280-1423-2. Pp. 336. $110.00 CAD. In Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature, Louis Groarke invites us to pause at the gate: to keep the cover of a book closed, to consider, first, the essence of what we are reading: not its subject matter, but its general principles and purpose as literature. Groarke encourages readers to think broadly, deeply, and upliftingly with contemplative wonder about literature—which can be defined, he makes clear. Groarke finds within the Aristotelian framework a method for arguing that literature, a superlative form of language, not only offers readers an experience of transcendence, but also ennobles the human mind in moral terms. In effect, Groarke redefines literature by returning to the past, to collect earlier, forgotten examples of literary theory. With clarity, he defends the distinctiveness and excellence of literary works, while questioning the supposition that literature cannot be systematically understood, or meaningfully set apart from other humbler, more ordinary, day-to-day forms of verbal and written expression. As Groarke proceeds through the book by looking backward in time, he revisits, first, the Chicago School of Poetics which flourished during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, a group of intellectuals argued that a literary work must be understood "as an ordered whole." The Chicago School was reacting against overly narrow, technical approaches to literature that focus minutely on language alone, including methods of "close reading," to the exclusion of other, broader concerns, such as an author's biography and intent, as well as the genre of a work. In this milieu, Groarke finds a "revived Aristotelianism," in which literature is acknowledged more generously—and philosophically—as the sum of multiple parts: not only language, but also form, as well as the author, and, above all, the purpose of the work as literature. Only this combination of "coequal properties," Groarke insists, provides a "well-rounded account of literature." From there, Groarke returns to classical Greece to make the more daring claim, by building on the work of the Chicago School, that Aristotle's four causes when applied to literature enable readers and theorists to better understand how literature is neatly constructed, and how it functions at an elevated moral and spiritual level. Appealing to Aristotle's scientific side, Groarke argues that, like a living organism, whose features hold together and function as a whole, to achieve the purpose for which it is intended, literature, too, can be appreciated from this biological perspective. The core of Groarke's book, then, comes in chapter 5, "Definition by Four Causes," where he examines Aristotle's understanding of reality according to four distinct, but converging, conditions. All things have physical components (a material cause); a characteristic design or structure (a formal cause); someone or something that moves or causes that entity to exist (an efficient cause); and a purpose, or goal, which it strives to achieve [End Page 146] (a final cause). Throughout the book, Groarke includes, for nonphilosophers, ordinary, day-to-day examples to illustrate his ideas; indeed, he intends the book to speak most directly to literary readers and critics. Think, for instance, he proposes, of the four causes that constitute living beings: each has a body, including tissues and bones (a material cause); each possesses the structural traits of its species (a formal cause); each comes into being through a method of reproduction (an efficient cause); and each has, as its ultimate purpose, the intent to survive (a final cause). A nonliving entity, like a table, can be similarly understood: the stuff of which it is made—wood, perhaps—is its material cause; its size and shape and design satisfy the formal cause; the builders or craftspeople serve as the efficient cause; and its purpose—of adornment or practicality—designates a final cause. Then, with originality, Groarke reveals how these four causes, when taken together, reflect an ideal of the best literature, a method in turn that offers an evaluative criterion for distinguishing literary works from...

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