Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  Professional literary critics shy away from the process I have been describing, in part because they fear they can never get the poem exactly right, never render it into the present in a way that would satisfy some abstract standard of perfection. But perfection is not at issue here. What we really need to do is to use Wordsworth as the basis for constructing and conveying a Final Narrative, a way of seeing and saying things, which is potentially better than what our students or readers possess. Your visions being true to every moment in the poem is less important than that you offer live options to those around you. The chances are that as a teacher, you will need a Wordsworth to offer such vital options—you will need a visionary's help. You and I will not be able to do so on our own. And so the vision will be much more Wordsworth's than ours. But the key is to offer our students something potentially better than what they have, and to see if it resonates with their own best aspirations.

  Identification

  THE QUESTIONS I pose about "Tintern Abbey" and about virtually every other work of art are inseparable from the matter of identification. That is, I ask students to perform a thought experiment. I ask them to use their powers of empathy and imagination to unite with another being. In the case of "Tintern Abbey," the being is the poet, but I have no qualms about asking readers to identify themselves with characters in novels, with Pip in Great Expectations, with Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, with Rastignac in Old Goriot, with Emma in Jane Austen's novel. I often ask them to find themselves, or to discover what is unknown in themselves, among the great characters in literature as well as within the imaginations that bring those characters to life.

  Discussing James's Portrait of a Lady, I begin with a simple question. Does James love Isabel Archer?

  Almost all of my students do. They find her vital, benevolent, charming, a full embodiment of what is best about America. They're drawn to her verve and her courage, particularly at the start of the book when she is young and on her own and, with an American insouciance, refusing offers of marriage from one Old World potentate after the next. They love Isabel, often, because in her they see their own best selves. They identify with all that is freshest and most promising in her.

  Almost as a reflex my students tend to take the next step: James must love his heroine, too. They all love Isabel, after all, and in loving Isabel love some part of themselves. Surely James concurs.

  But then we begin to read the novel—that is, to interpret it—and some surprising things happen. James's disdain for his heroine, which is not unalloyed with considerable affection, is there on the page nearly from the start. In lengthy, authoritative, and summary accounts he attacks her with the greatest force. It's clear that he detests what he takes to be her shallowness, her glib self-confidence, her habit of thinking far too highly of herself. James writes that Isabel "had no talent for expression and too little of the consciousness of genius; she only had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior." And later in the same passage: "Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines . . . In matters of opinion she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. At moments she discovered she was grotesquely wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself." James can admire Isabel, too; he is far too fine a novelist to give us a simple portrait. But his dislike for her American egotism at many points reaches contempt.

  In a sense, Isabel's horrid fate, marriage to the disgusting, fortune-seeking Gilbert Osmond, is James's punishment for her. In terms of novelistic probability, the marriage seems rather forced. What we see of the courtship falls far short of persuading us that Isabel would actually give in and marry Osmond. But a purgative marriage—a punishment—is what Isabel needs, so the master of realistic fiction bends plausibility and brings it to pass. Isabel's small-time hubris, the vanity of provincial America, summons Gilbert Osmond and the almost equally appalling Madame Merle to deliver to Isabel the chastening that, as I believe James sees it, she so deserves. Brash Isabel early in the book announces that she might rather go without clothes than be defined by them. By the end, James has her dressed in so many layers of drapery that the four-piece suit Woolf said T. S. Eliot favored looks liberating by contrast. And then James is content, for Isabel has been chastened. She has learned to submit. She has learned to surrender her American wildness in the interest of something else, something more European and refined and more modestly fitted to an awareness of human limits. Then James does admire her—her submission to fate is rather awful and rather touching. One recalls the sufferings that the Marquis de Sade visits on the unworldly, Rousseauian Justine, whose naive sense of human nature the Divine Marquis despises. It may not be going too far to say that in Portrait James is our Marquis, and Isabel is the one whose virtue finds its reward. What James detests in this novel and chastens with purgatorial zeal is the American wildness to be found in Emerson, in Whitman (whom James notoriously poked fun at), and in Emily Dickinson. That the spark should be alive in a woman is probably all the more frightening to James.

  The first time I discussed this book in class I was surprised by the result. Most of the students were outraged that, on reasonably close examination, it was clear that James's sentiments about the young Isabel were, to put it kindly, critical. What made this perception particularly difficult is that those harsh Jamesian sentiments had now to be seen as in some measure about them, about their own possible naivete, about their own unthinking self-love—that is, about the aspect of themselves that they had discovered in Isabel. Many declared themselves anti-Jamesian. "Henry James must be one of the cruelest authors ever to write," one essay began. They saw James, I believe accurately, as the enemy of a certain kind of American spirit—though by no means an unambivalent enemy.

  But a few of the students felt differently. What they came to believe was that Isabel needed to be chastened. She deserved it. She had found her apt fate as surely as a protagonist in a Greek tragedy finds his. Osmond was exactly what she needed and exactly what she deserved so as to "suffer into truth," to use a Sophoclean formulation. Two of the students were candid enough, and brave enough, to say that, in fact, they felt that the harsh discipline that James was applying to Isabel ought well to be applied to them. They were like Isabel Archer in her earliest manifestation, and like her needed submission to purgatorial cleansing. As the book burned away what was most noxiously self-assertive in Isabel, so they hoped that it might do the same for them. Or at least it might begin the process. Such puritanical resolve on the part of early twenty-first-century American students struck me as both a little frightening and quite moving.

  As someone who far prefers Emerson to James, indeed who prefers the young Isabel to James, as a temperament, I was temporarily saddened that people so young could be drawn to puritanical self-dislike. But I soon saw that my response was neither here nor there. It didn't much matter. I had done my job, which was to put students in a position to read and then to be read by the work at hand. Everyone who sat through that class was in a position to know himself better by virtue of the exchange. In this discussion, the process of "identification," of seeing oneself in a literary character, was essential.

  Few activities associated with literary study are in worse repute than identification. Teachers in middle school—grades six to eight—by now caution against it, seeing it as a block to serious study. Surely it has no place in a college classroom. Surely no professor should endorse it publicly.

  Sometimes what worries teachers about identification is the belief that it's inseparable from wish-fulfillment. You become one with a heroic figure and leave your small, timid self behind. What you have then is a mere daydream. I find both wish-fulfilling fantasies, as literature provides them, and daydreaming to be precious human activities, for reasons that I'll later explain. But the process of identification that went on wit
h Isabel—by young men and by women both—was not a matter of wish-fulfillment. On the contrary, in the identification process any simple narcissism underwent serious challenge by James. This is so because in studying James, as in studying any consequential writer, the step that follows identification is analysis of a firm but generous sort.

  Still there's something about the process that can make the professional critic squirm. Perhaps it's the release of emotion that's involved, the fact that when we work with identification we don't sound like scientists who command a rigorous discipline. Perhaps we don't sound official or academic enough. Maybe we're worried about our authority. But as inspired religious teachers and artists of every stripe demonstrate all the time, the process of human growth—when it entails growth of the heart as well as of the mind—is never particularly clean or abstract. To grow it is necessary that all of our human qualities come into play, and if some of those qualities are not pretty, then so be it. But to keep them to the side so as to preserve our professional dignity—that is too much of a sacrifice. (Men and women die every day, perish in the inner life . . . for lack of what we have to offer.)

  In general, academic literary study over the past two decades has become ever colder and more abstract. But there is one area of exception. Many feminist teachers have been willing to deal with emotion and the facts of daily life in their classrooms. Against prevailing orthodoxies, these professors have insisted on speaking personally, and have made sure that their students have had a chance to do so. Some feminists, it's true, have surrendered to pressure for high-toned theoretical respectability, but many have stuck to their guns and talked intimately and immediately about experience. It's in classrooms of this sort that students can at times connect the books they read to their own lives. Something similar can be true in classes on race, at least when students can talk candidly. (For a variety of complex reasons, though, they almost never can be direct and honest on this subject, even with the best-intentioned professors presiding.) But such classrooms are, alas, just about the only places where bringing together word and world is still the objective.

  Milan Kundera speaks about novels as being populated by "experimental selves." These selves are persons whom we might be or become, or who signify aspects of the self. The novelist—with our assistance—sends them forth into the world, to see what the world will make of them, and they of it. They are the Active human embodiments of what Nietzsche would call thought experiments. These selves are not after a long-lasting truth. Rather, they engage in an inquiry; they try, in good Emersonian fashion, to expand their particular orbits on the deep, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Dickens's Pip needs to surrender his great expectations and expand into a life of humane, well-measured decency; Austen's Emma needs to see that the world has more living and feeling beings in it than herself and those few she holds in high regard. But part of what those characters learn is that no way of seeing things is final. They don't look, and cannot look, for a final resting place sanctioned by a larger authority than themselves. As Kundera puts it, "The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel."

  The rise of the novel coincides with a realization expressed, or perhaps created, by the development of democracy. That realization is of the great span of individuals to be found in the world, of the sheer proliferation of divergent beings. The commonplace that we each have a novel within us actually touches a consequential truth. It suggests that there are as many mysteries, as many ways of being, as there are lives. Whitman asserts this idea by being a deeply inward lyric poet who also recognizes the divergence of human lives around him—the balance he strikes between the intensity of the personal lyric and the breadth of the novel is part of what makes him a major figure, and one who speaks to the movement of his times. I think that a humanistic education begins in literature because, unlike philosophy, literature does not assume that one or two or five paths are enough to offer human beings. There are too many of us, and we are all too different; we all have our open-ended truths to pursue.

  Gender and Identification

  As I MENTIONED, some of the students who identified themselves with Isabel Archer were male. They did not read as men. Rather they read as human beings, finding in Isabel some of their own griefs and hopes. More and more I see this happening.

  I frequently teach the Iliad, generally derided as the most outmoded of books, something to be tossed onto the junk heap of history. When I was teaching as a graduate student at Yale, the book was chiefly considered as an opportunity to reflect on the way that women were regarded in the Homeric period, and then to reflect on how much had changed or was changing.

  Is the Iliad a book replete with vital possibilities, or is it a mere historical curiosity? Is it locked in the past, or a potent guide to the present and the future? A number of my students—men and women both—initially thought that it was a period piece and nothing more. The way the poem treated women disgusted them. In the Iliad, they said, a woman has the status of a few bullocks or a bronze tripod or two. True. Some, like Helen, are beautiful, and that beauty is a sort of power, but it is a limited, debased power compared to what the men wield. This is all well worth saying, well worth pointing out.

  What the men have is the heroic life, with all its possibilities for glory. As C. M. Bowra describes it: "The essence of the heroic outlook is the pursuit of honour through action. The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his exercise of them. His honour is the centre of his being, and any affront to it calls for immediate amends. He courts danger gladly because it gives him the best opportunity of showing of what stuff he is made. Such a conviction and its system of behaviour are built on a man's conception of himself and of what he owes to it, and if it has any further sanctions, they are to be found in what other men like himself think of him. By prowess and renown he gains an enlarged sense of personality and well-being; through them he has a second existence on the lips of men, which assures him that he has not failed in what matters most. Fame is the reward of honour, and the hero seeks it before everything else."

  The class was about ready to concur that such a worldview was a thing of the past, or should best be, when one of the women students, usually quiet, spoke up. She said that the poem mattered to her because she could see things from Achilles' point of view. The moment that caught her attention first was the one in which Achilles' father tells him that he must be the best in every undertaking. He can simply never accept the second place. "I'm an athlete," she said, "and that's how I was raised by my parents and my coaches. I was told that I had to win at everything. I had to come in first all the time. After a while, though, I had to stop living like that. It's too much."

  "Have you ever wanted to go back to it?" someone asked.

  "Yes," she said, "all the time. It makes life incredibly intense." By which she meant, I suppose, that such a life provides ongoing energy; it allows for full, unambivalent human exertion, in the midst of a culture that often encourages self-dividing responses. If Wordsworth's meditative return to childhood is one viable answer to melancholia, then surely unbridled competitiveness is another. Competition can be a way to give what's vital in you more life. You could see that what had once been closed off and left behind for this student began to open again. The life of competition, the agon, is not for everyone, and it will not be approved by all. But if it is your highest aspiration, the thing you most want, then, whether you take the path or not, it is worth knowing about your attraction to it. Homer's heroic life is the life of thymos, the thirst for glory, and if you are, at whatever depths, an individual driven by thymos, by the desire for glory and praise, despite the moral c
ensors you've thrown up against that drive, you need to deal with the fact in one way or another. I know no better way to begin doing so than through Homer.

  Another classroom scene can help to illustrate the kind of teaching I want to endorse. A student in the same class, a young African-American woman, professes in her opening essay on the good life to be an ardent Christian. She believes in doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, in turning the other cheek. She believes Jesus to be the most perfect of mortals. But she reads the Iliad and, after a period of indifference, she's galvanized by it. What sweeps her in is a life where triumph matters above all else. She is fascinated by the fact that the warriors in the poem always seek victory. Envy is not a vice to them; it goads them to glories. The young woman, who, it comes out, wants to be a well-to-do corporate lawyer, has no trouble seeing some of herself in the unapologetic ambitions of Homer's heroes.

  But then, too, she wants to be a Christian? Jesus' originality lies partly in his attempt to supersede admiration for the ambition and self-vaunting of Homer's heroes—an admiration very much alive in the Roman empire Jesus is born into. Which will it be, my student needs to ask herself, Jesus or Achilles?