Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  Works that matter work differently. Such works, in history, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, and literature, can do many things, but preeminent among them is their capacity to offer truth. So far we've left the quest of truth to Falwell and to faith. We, the supposed heirs of Socrates, have fled from our authentic vocations. Perhaps it is time again to confront the Sphinx, who now, as always, poses the riddle of life: What use will you make of the world? (And what use might it make of you?) How do you intend to live? It is time, perhaps, to help our students look into the Sphinx's eye (and to look there ourselves); time to see what we see.

  Truth

  LITERATURE AND TRUTH? The humanities and truth? Come now. What could be more ridiculous? What could be more superannuated than that?

  We read literature now for other reasons. We read to assert ourselves, to sharpen our analytical faculties. We read to debunk the myths. We read to know the other. We read, sometimes, for diversion. But read for truth? Absurd. The whole notion of truth was dispatched long ago, tossed on the junk heap of history along with God and destiny and right and all the rest. Read for truth? Why do that?

  For the simple reason that for many people, the truth—the circle, the vision of experience—that they've encountered through socialization is inadequate. It doesn't put them into a satisfying relation to experience. That truth does not give them what they want. It does not help them make a contribution to their society. It does not, to advance another step, even allow for a clear sense of the tensions between themselves and the existing social norms, the prevailing doxa. The gay boy can't accept the idea that his every third thought is a sin. The visionary-in-the-making isn't at home with her practical, earth-bound, and ambitious parents. Such people, and I believe most people who go to literature and the liberal arts out of more than mere curiosity are in this group, demand other, better ways to apprehend the world—that is, ways that are better for them. And the best repository for those other ways are the works of the poets, as Williams said, and of the painters and composers and novelists and historians. Here one may hope for a second chance, a way to begin the game again, getting it closer to right this time around.

  But how do we find this truth? How do we begin to extract it from literature? Well, to begin with, we must read and interpret the work.

  Here arises a problem. We all know that there is no such thing as a perfect interpretation. In fact, some of the more sophisticated among us have come to believe that interpretation is by necessity interminable. It's a mark of shallowness to believe that we can get to the core of the poem. Do I dare? Do I dare? So says the Prufrock of contemporary academia.

  What I take to be worthwhile interpretation is centered on the author. I do not join my colleague E. D. Hirsch in affirming that the author's intention ought to be the measure of the reading at hand. We can never discover as much. There are simply too many levels of the mind that contribute to creation, not all of them responsive to analysis.

  No, the art of interpretation is to me the art of arriving at a version of the work that the author—as we imagine him, as we imagine her—would approve and be gratified by. The idea is not perfectly to reproduce the intention; that can never be done. Rather, the objective is to bring the past into the present and to do so in a way that will make the writer's ghost nod in something like approval. That means operating with the author's terms, thinking, insofar as it is possible, the writer's thoughts, reclaiming his world through his language. In preparing to write Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye did all he could to merge with William Blake, to relive and in so doing to re-create his vision. And he did it with grand success.

  The teacher's act of inspired ventriloquism need not be perfect. All that he needs to do is to supply a vision, based on the work at hand, that is as ramified as possible and that offers a fertile alternative to what the students in class are likely to believe, or are likely to believe that they believe.

  But that's impossible, one might say. You can never satisfyingly reproduce an author's vision, or even come close. On the contrary, we do this sort of thing all the time. We describe books and films to each other. We use all the resources we can gather in order to explain one friend to another. We recount situations of almost unbearable complexity—the details of a long illness, the dynamics of a divorce—in hopes of using our accounts to move forward, to make the best of life, or what of life remains. Our powers of description, which need not stop at paraphrase, are often put to the test. They are among the most humanly necessary powers we possess. Who should be in a better position to deploy such powers than the professor who has been preparing for virtually all her life to do just that?

  If this process of inspired re-rendering is impossible, why then do we freely apply various theories to texts? Shouldn't the impossibility of adequately apprehending them also offend our sense of just complexity? If we can theorize about reading, we can also evoke the experience of reading per se. All of the punctilious rhetoric about the impossibility of rendering literature, of making contact with it and adding another voice to the author's voice, illuminating what may be dark, making explicit what is implicit, all of this resistance may be nothing more than the timidity that stops us from turning a liberal arts education from a field for mind-sharpening exercises, into what Keats called a "vale of Soul-making."

  The punctilious want perfect interpretation. They want to score 100, as they have on all tests all of their lives. But what presses us is too important to wait for perfection. What faces us is the prospect of a world where religious meaning withdraws and people are left in the midst of soul-destroying emptiness, hopping and blinking and taking their little poison for the day and their little poison for the night.

  A comparison with truth as it is apprehended in religion can be illuminating. As the scholar Karen Armstrong observes, "Modern New Testament scholarship has shown that we know far less about the historical Jesus than we thought we did. 'Gospel truth' is not as watertight as we assumed. But this has not prevented millions of people from modeling their lives on Jesus and seeing his path of compassion and suffering as leading to a new kind of life. Jesus certainly existed, but his story has been presented in the Gospels as a paradigm."

  The Gospels do not capture Jesus perfectly; the readers of the Gospels presumably do not capture their essence to perfection, should such perfection exist. But that has not stopped many people from having their lives changed—and to their perception, changed for the better—through encounter with Jesus and his much-mediated word.

  The test of an interpretation is not whether it is right or perfect, but whether it leads us to a worldview that is potentially better than what we currently hold. The gold standard is not epistemological perfection. The gold standard is the standard of use.

  Wordsworth's Truth

  WHAT DOES IT mean to ask of a poem if it is true? What are we taking a poem—or any work of human intellect and imagination—to be, if it is potentially a source of truth? Why don't we follow Kant, and all the idealists before and after him, in seeing art as purely disinterested? Why are we unable to concur with Sir Philip Sidney in his oft-cited view that the poet "nothing affirms and therefore never lieth"? Why not artistic purity? Why not art as purposiveness without any specific purpose?

  What I am asking when I ask of a major work (for only major works will sustain this question) whether it is true is quite simply this: Can you live it? Can you put it into action? Can you speak—or adapt—the language of this work, use it to talk to both yourself and others so as to live better? Is this work desirable as a source of belief? Or at the very least, can it influence your existing beliefs in consequential ways? Can it make a difference?

  Let us say that the work at hand is Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798." The poem—it is anything but accidental—takes place not far away from a ruined abbey. In the midst of the ruins of religion—or the ruins of conventional religious prospects for him�
�Wordsworth finds himself forced to compound a new faith. This faith will not be based on preexisting scripture; it will not be a faith received from others. Wordsworth, spurred on by his return to a scene that was at the center of his childhood, will gather to himself those memories that give him the power to go on living and go on writing.

  The world as Wordsworth has lately experienced it is stale, flat, and profitless. He lives in a din-filled city, among unfeeling people—and, worse yet, he senses that he is becoming one of them. He thinks of himself as abiding "In darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight." Time upon time, he says, "the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, / Have hung upon the beatings of my heart." There is a dull ache settling into his spirit, one that the eighteenth century would have called melancholy and we would now call depression. But rather than relying on religious consolation, as Dr. Johnson tried to do when he battled his own terrible despondency, or on drugs, as Wordsworth's dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge did, Wordsworth relies on himself. Laudanum, predecessor of today's antidepressant drugs, the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and Coleridge's preferred source of solace, is not what's wanted. The poet will find consolation in himself or not at all.

  And why should he not be disconsolate? For how can one bear life in its manifold sorrows, with all of its horrible sufferings, the sufferings of children and the innocent preeminent among them (think of the horrors unfolding in the world as you read this page, as I write it) and not go mad? Virtually all of us are bound to suffer as well—"pain of heart, distress, and poverty," if not of one sort then of another, to use Wordsworth's phrasing from "Resolution and Independence." But what seems to trouble Wordsworth most is that amidst this commonality of suffering, we still treat one another with rank callousness, with "greetings where no kindness is," "rash judgments," "sneers." Without the figure of a loving (or at least a just) God presiding over the world, ready at some point to dispense rewards to the worthy, and punishment or correction to the erring, it is no easy matter to find a reason not to despair. Where is Wordsworth, who seems devoid of religious faith (pious Coleridge always feared for Wordsworth's soul) to find any reason to continue on?

  Wordsworth's answer is that there is a part of himself that is free from the fallen society in which he's immersed. It is a part that lives on deep in him, although covered over by custom, convention and fear. And in this region of half-remembered being he finds hope, or, as he puts it, "life and food / for future years."

  He remembers himself as a child free in nature, with a spirit that belongs to nothing but the gorgeous, frightening natural world and has not been colonized by the city and its dispiriting ways. He thinks of the time "when first / I came among these hills; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever nature led." In memories of that free self, Wordsworth finds an authentic pleasure, a vision of life lived without the anxieties that attend on awareness of death. The child in Wordsworth is free of that mortal fear; he senses that he will return painlessly to the natural world that brought him forth and gave him his vital, unambiguous force.

  There is something in the poet that was there before civilization left its imprint. That something is free and it makes Wordsworth freer, however temporarily. In the last phase of the poem, he worries, edging again toward gloom, about whether in time the freedom will be foreclosed. He is becoming aware, in other words, of the merely transitory power that Emerson associated with even the most impressive human expansions. In time, they can "solidify and hem in the life." Maybe this contact with nature existing inside of him won't serve Wordsworth as an antidote all his life through.

  Some critics like to look at this poem as a major moment in "the Romantic invention of childhood." But that is too ironic and distancing a notion. For the poem asks us to look into our own childhoods and into the lives of the children around us, and to see if they might not have something to teach us. May they show us how to live in a less guarded, more joyous and exuberant way? Could they teach us how, for a while, to stanch our fears of the future, and live in the present moment in nature? ("We are blessed always if we live in the present," says the American Wordsworthian, Thoreau.)

  And what about this nature? The poem asks us to look around at nature as it exists in our moment, and to consider what sort of restoration is to be found there. It suggests that in nature is the perpetuation of human vitality, that between civilization and nature there is a dialectic, and that letting one element in the tension grow too mighty, as Wordsworth's eighteenth-century forebears seem to the poet to have done, can be killing. This poem has legitimate connections to the best current ecology movements. The work can add to—or create—the conviction that in the love of wilderness and its preservation, there lies hope for humanity.

  In "Tintern Abbey," one also encounters the bracing hypothesis that depression or melancholia or what-have-you is a great force, to be sure, but that it is a force we may combat through individual resourcefulness and faith. Maybe the answer to one's despondency does not lie in nature or memory or childhood per se, but Wordsworth's poem enjoins us to feel that it lies somewhere within our own reach. The site of our sufferings, what J. H. Van den Berg called the overfilled inner self, may also be the source of our cure. We are creatures who have the capacity to make ourselves sick, collectively and individually, but we often have the power to heal ourselves as well.

  All these things, and many more besides, readers may draw from "Tintern Abbey." They may say, "Yes, of course, I've always thought so, but never quite had the words to say as much." Or "All right, I'll try Wordsworth's cure, or something like it. It could very well work." Others will be put off by this particular vision. Perhaps they'll find it too self-absorbed. Where are the others? What is Wordsworth to give to the poor? What is Wordsworth's role in the larger human hope for liberation or freedom from want? These are valuable questions. And if the answers—and there are answers—do not satisfy the individual reader, then he will legitimately look for another place to put his allegiances, another circle to expand into. Or perhaps he will stay with some enhanced confidence in his own.

  But asking critical questions should not devolve into a mere parlor game. That is, we should not teach our students that the aim of every reading is to bring up the questions that might debunk the wisdom at hand, then leave it at that. We must ask the question of belief. Is this poem true? Can you use this poem? Or are you living in a way that's better than the poem suggests you might live? To these queries, we should expect only heartfelt answers.

  By refusing to ask such questions once we have coaxed the work's vision forward, we are leaving our students where we found them. And if we leave them in the grasp of current social dogma, we are probably leaving them in the world of the normal nihilist; we are leaving them to the ideology of the consumer university, center of training and entertaining, in its worst manifestations. We may turn "Tintern Abbey" into a species of diversion, or we may turn it into an occasion for acquiring analytical techniques, but in doing so we are mistaken. For there is a deep force in the poem that we can put to saving uses in the present.

  We ask often what we think of great works. What, we might also ask, would the creators of those works think of us? What would the Wordsworth of "Tintern Abbey," replete with drawbacks though that poem may seem to some, think of our posturing analytics?

  But, one might say, all I have produced here is a reading, itself a translation of Wordsworth, no different from the application of, say, Foucault's terms to Wordsworth's poem. Isn't that right?

  I don't think so.

  Granted, my account of Wordsworth would not match the poet's own, word for word. Granted, there are points at which, brought to life to listen, the poet might part company with the description at hand (or with the more expansive account of the work that I would offer in a classroom). But I have tried to be true to the poem. I have attempted, acting something like its advocate before the court of readers'
opinion, to make the best possible case for its application to life. And as a teacher I have done so, in fact I must do so, as though I believed in the poet's every word.

  The fact is that I do not. I may want, in time, to register my quarrels with this vision of experience, and I may want to offer the criticisms of others. But before those criticisms arrive, the poem needs to have its moment of maximum advocacy; it requires, and by its power it has earned, a display of full faith. And the testament to that faith takes place in a language integrally related to the language of Wordsworth. The teacher speaks of nature and childhood and memory. And that is a much different thing from speaking of discipline and norms and discourses, as Foucault might do in the face of this work. There is a difference between evocative description and what Eagleton and Macherey call rewriting. Both reimagine the work. Both bring the past into the present. But the difference in approach is so great as to constitute not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. One is re-presentation, one translation.

  The activity I have in mind is in some regards anticipated by Nietzsche's precursor in philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. "What is life?" That, to Schopenhauer, is the question at the core of all consequential art works. Schopenhauer believes that "every genuine and successful work of art answers this question in its own way with perfect correctness." The reader's task is to bring the works' wisdom to the fore: "The works of the poets, sculptors, and representative artists in general contain an unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom. . . . Everyone who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute out of his own means to bring that wisdom to light; accordingly he comprehends only so much of it as his capacity and culture admit of; as in the deep sea each sailor only lets down the lead as far as the length of the line will allow." For Schopenhauer, however, the artists reveal one major truth and one only, that of the Life Will in its sublime potency. To us now, literature, and the arts in general, reveal truths that are multiple. Every artist that matters gives us a world of words that we may translate into a world of acts. Poets, to modify Shelley a little, are the too often unacknowledged legislators of the word.