In a marvelous passage in his book on Freud, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes the moment when the Oedipus complex stops being a regressive trap for the individual and begins to be a sign of future promise, a provocation to do some fresh work in the world. This is the moment when the father is no longer the mystical foe, but an ambivalent ally whose own contributions to the world one can, however subtly, however strongly, revise. The person who stands on the edge, between regression and progress, past and future, is the one who has made herself ripe for literary education.
So the approach to teaching the humanities I am describing is not therapeutic per se. Nor, as I hope the discussion of Hamlet shows, is it to be written off as a way of dispensing elevating platitudes. It's not an exercise in cheering yourself up. Teachers should feel free to introduce the most appalling visions to their students. To read the Marquis de Sade, with his insistence that sexualized cruelty is the deepest desire of all men and women, is to encounter a way of apprehending life that can qualify as a vital option, if only to some. The objective of this kind of teaching is not to pretend that the Marquis does not exist, or that the disgustingly anti-Semitic Celine is not a writer worth serious study, or that Pound's fascism puts him out of bounds. Rather, it is to encounter such works and put them to the test of imagined experience. What would it be like to go Sade's way? What is to be gained and what lost in the life of the libertine?
It is not the professor's business to eradicate every form of what he takes to be retrograde and disgusting behavior. All student perspectives are welcome in class; whether they are racist, or homophobic, or whatever, they must be heard, considered, and responded to without panic. The classroom I am describing is a free space, one where people can speak their innermost thoughts and bring what is dark to light. They may expect to be challenged, but not to be shouted down, written off, or ostracized. Bitter, brutal thoughts can grow prolifically in the mind's unlighted cellars. But when we bring them into the world and examine them dispassionately, they often lose their force.
A few sessions into studying Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, I asked a question that touched on the students' sense of self. "If you woke up tomorrow in Orwell's world, what path would you take? Would you try to blend in, as most people do? Or would you resist, in Winston Smith's way, defending truth as you perceived it, against all the surrounding lies? Or would you go Julia's route and live for pleasure in the midst of an insanely puritanical world?" (Julia, it's said, is a "rebel from the waist down.") The first answer I got shocked me. "Pd be O'Brien," a young woman said. O'Brien may be the most memorable character in the book: he's a gifted intellectual and high functionary of the inner party, who has become a horrible sadist. He takes a nearly sexual delight in reducing Smith from a resister to a cringing lump. "I'd try to put myself on the top, just like I try to now," Elizabeth went on. "And I think a lot of people here would do the same thing." As soon as Elizabeth said as much, we weren't having an ordinary conversation anymore, but a dialogue about the way we ought to live our lives.
A good classroom is a free-speech zone, where everything can be expressed, and where, at times, one will read authors who are not, in the teacher's opinion, conducive to a form of the good life, but are prophets of cruelty and hatred. We will explore their visions. We will bring to the fore the experimental selves they provide, and ask ourselves: what would it mean to live like that?
Most of the books we teach, especially to the young, will contain, implicitly or overtly, versions of the good life that we can endorse. But not all. We will, I hope, have faith that, given fair hearing, those imaginative voices that lead to health, generosity, energy, humor, and compassion will win out over the other sort. But we will also know that such a victory is not foreordained.
Not long ago I met a very likable and generous professor of humanities. He was mild-mannered, but no pushover. What he had to say about his own way of teaching fascinated me.
"It seems to me," he said, "that every generation of humanities teachers has worked, subtly and quietly, to make students into more progressive people. We've encouraged them to be skeptical about religious belief. We've helped them to be more open-minded in their response to others, particularly when they're different. And we've particularly worked to persuade the guys that their masculinity won't be lost if they become more sensitive than they were before. We've tried to suggest that a no-holds-barred capitalism isn't the best thing for everyone and we've tried to push in the direction of more and more social and economic equality. We've tried to change the way people get pleasure out of life. We've shown them that there's more than TV; they can enjoy poetry and opera and philosophy. You can probably say that we've tried to make them more civilized."
I found this well put and plausible. Maybe America would be a better place if this professor's educational goals came to fruition. It would be a more humane country if we all became more sensitive, more community minded, less materialistic, more civilized.
"So," I said, "it's as though what you're trying to do is make them into honorary Europeans, postmodern, postreligious citizens of Paris or Brussels?"
He agreed. That was exactly what he was shooting for. But thinking further on the matter, it strikes me that it's a very bad idea for us teachers to have a preexisting image of how we want our students to turn out, even as potentially attractive an idea as this teacher was offering. No, I think that what we need is for people to understand who and what they are now, then to be open to changing into their own highest mode of being. And that highest mode is something that they must identify by themselves, through encounters with the best that has been known and thought. We all have promise in us; it is up to education to reveal that promise, and to help it unfold. The power that is in you, says Emerson, is new in nature. And the best way to release that power is to let students confront viable versions of experience and take their choices.
It will come as little surprise when I say that what I have been endorsing here is a form of humanism. Humanism has a long and complex history, but for the purposes of this book, I want to describe humanistic education in a relatively condensed way. To me, humanism is the belief that it is possible for some of us, and maybe more than some, to use secular writing as the preeminent means for shaping our lives. That means that we might construct ourselves from novels, poems, and plays, as well as from works of history and philosophy, in the way that our ancestors constructed themselves (and were constructed) by the Bible and other sacred texts.
To me, the drawback of significant past versions of humanism is that they have all come with latent and overt ideas about the person they wanted to see emerge from the process of reading and thinking. Like my friend the kindly professor, humanists have known from the start what sort of person they hoped to create. The New Critics, with their emphasis on those qualities—a capacity for irony and ambiguity, the power to maintain inner tension—that they saw as conducive to maturity, did precisely this, encouraging their devotees to be responsive to a preexisting model. Matthew Arnold, who usefully announced to the world that in the time to come poetry might have to replace religion as the source of spiritual sustenance, was himself narrowly committed. Arnold gave us the touchstones, passages at the heart of true literature, passages that all of us needed to grapple to our souls so as to become genuinely educated. But Arnold's stoical resignation, the discourse of tempered middle age, will not do for everyone.
Later on, Jacques Derrida undermined Jean-Paul Sartre's humanism by pointing out the metaphysical, which is to say the subtly coercive, base on which it rests. Asked to provide a standard that could guide the individual in his choice of actions—with action understood to be at the core of the existentialist's philosophy of life—Sartre makes the mistake of responding in a generalizing and delimiting way: Act always in such a manner that you are working to create a self that could serve as a model for others. We are back with Kant, back under the shadow of the categorical imperative, and back to a coercive form of pedagogy that is not at
all consistent with hopes for self-reliant freedom. Even Heidegger, who in the "Letter on Humanism" tries to distance himself from Sartre, is accurately criticized by Derrida for propounding a kind of philosophical monotheism. Derrida sees that Heidegger himself has a preordained ideal to which all human development should aspire. Heidegger celebrates something called Being and, more precisely, the individual's apprehension of and identification with a pure state of existence. For Heidegger, the highest human destiny is to be the "shepherd of Being." Yet Derrida himself, as shrewdly as he may write in "The Ends of Man," has nothing of a positive nature to offer. He has no vision of possible human development. Derrida limits himself to the work of clearing away superannuated and delimiting modes of humanistic thinking, and then can do no more.
T. S. Eliot, in the great essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," tried to found a humanism by positing the existence of literary monuments that could be modified by the intervention of this or that newly canonical writer. Encountering Eliot on the canon, I think of Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that the Phenomenology would rank as one of the greatest of all works if only its author had the sense to finish by saying that it was merely a thought experiment, only one idiosyncratic version of the way that it all is. One might say something similar of Eliot. If only the monuments were explicitly and joyously his monuments, his and no one else's. If only he told us all to go out and make, from the profusion of magnificent works that surround us, something on the order of a quotidian liturgy, a secular scripture, as Frye liked to call it, of our own. "I must Create a System," as Blake, Frye's great teacher, put it, "or be enslav'd by another Mans." Eliot, the potential liberator, becomes a creator of what Blake, hyperbolist that he sometimes was, called "mind-forg'd manacles." Even Frye, author of the greatest book of visionary literary criticism yet written—for it takes visionary powers to make a past writer's vision live in the present—eventually throws his wonderful energy and intelligence into forming a system. The master system of Anatomy of Criticism reveals all of literature's meanings; in it all readers should believe. But such systems pass quickly away. They will always be replaced by other coercive and exclusionary intellectual organizations that offer the comforts of collective, institutional religion—at least, until we can discover what Blake knew: that all deities ultimately reside in the individual human breast.
Disciples
IT IS SOMETIMES hard for us critics to see that we are disciples. Or that we ought to be. The fact does not sort well with our dignity. But in fact the true T. S. Eliot scholar is not a grubber after Eliot-related facts, or the creator of ingeniously baroque readings of Eliot. He is not the source of minutiae for the Eliot newsletter or any other such thing. No, he is far more important than that, and also far less.
He is, or ought to be, Eliot's disciple. He is responsible for so immersing himself in Eliot that only he and very few others can plausibly bring Eliot's vision alive in the current world, which, as the critic deeply believes (or why would he have become a deep student of Eliot to begin with?), has sore need of it. He is the one who will know instinctively—as Frye knew of Blake, as Bate knew of Keats and Johnson, as Orwell knew of Dickens—precisely how his author would feel in response to virtually any event that comes to pass around us.
We fancy we are saying something merely rhetorical when we talk about how authors who matter live on forever. But it is not figurative speech at all, if a literary culture is unfolding as it should. No, the scholar by dint of hard work and imagination can, at will, merge himself with the authors who matter to him. By the exercise of his own heart's intelligence, he manages to keep them alive in the present. By sacrificing some of his individuality to the thoughts and feelings of another, by giving up himself, he becomes a light of knowledge to all around him. And when the scholar does not do so, our common culture suffers.
When I was in graduate school, I became a student of Freud. It seemed necessary then to learn absolutely everything I could about him. I read his works numberless times; I read everything about him that I could get. And his vision fully infiltrated my mind. On any given subject, then and now, I can offer a plausible Freudian response, though by this time I believe at best a significant fraction of what Freud did. This kind of study involves a certain self-annulling, not unrelated to the annulment of self that Eliot describes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." There, Eliot speaks of the poet's surrender of personality in order to make way for the influence of past poets. "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable." Such learning—and I don't mean to single myself out here; many people have it—is part of what a scholar's education is about. My job as a Romanticist is not primarily to say unprecedented things about the Romantics, or to go to conferences and impress my fellow scholars, most of whom actively dislike the authors they teach, anyway. My job is to continue the lives of the poets on in the present, to make them available to those living now who might need them.
It's not necessary to be a lifelong scholar of this or that writer to make his work available to the uses of the present and future. Learning surely helps a great deal, but energy, imagination, and a little judiciousness go a long way, too. What's most important, I think, is to find the writer at the peak of his potential for life. You can dwell on Dostoyevsky as the writer who conveys an astounding and just portrait of a certain sort of murderer in Crime and Punishment. But ultimately, one probably does more for students by helping them to understand Dostoyevsky's vision of life as an insane, ever-blackening turbulence that we can only navigate humanely by recourse to religious faith.
A given age is likely to be infused to the core with standard prevailing opinion, which is the product of the moment. The day is generally suffused with—recall William Carlos Williams's lines—"what passes for the new." One way to break through that prevailing opinion is to have recourse to the best that has been known and thought in the past. Offering past wealth to the present is what a scholar is supposed to do.
Sometimes someone steps from our ranks whose own vision of matters is worthy of consideration in its own right. But most of us cannot lay fair claim to that power. Rather, we are the powers that keep Chaucer and Spenser and Milton from fading into oblivion. This is a noble task. And rightly universities give people security, relative calm, and a solid sustenance to let it unfold.
Are you so original? Such an adept translator or rewriter of texts? Come out from behind the pretense. Write us your own novel or poem or essay, take up matters where there is more pressure on the individual to compound his way of apprehending things, and let us see what you have on offer. Then we may judge whether you might not have been better off with the genuinely noble, if also more modest, process of discipleship. And if you stay with true discipleship, who knows? Does Plato not go at least as far as Socrates? Does Frye at his best not do more than complete Blake? Such achievement must come naturally, through a process that begins in some measure of self-annulment. Yet it is a self-annulment that can be amply rewarded. As Camille Paglia puts it, "Great teachers live their subject. The subject teaches itself through them. It uses them and, in return, charges them with elemental energy."
Exemplars
THE KIND OF teaching I endorse entails impersonation. The teacher temporarily becomes the author, valuing what the author values, thinking as the author would. George Orwell does this for Dickens in his wonderful essay on the novelist. Marilyn Butler does it for Jane Austen; Harold Bloom for Wallace Stevens; Geoffrey Hartman and Walter Jackson Bate for Keats. Helen Vendler has done it for many contemporary poets in her review-essays. With unparalleled brilliance, Northrop Frye does it in his book on William Blake, Fearful Symmetry. These critics merge with their authors and by doing so become more than who they are.
Such critics are not only valuable in themselves, but valuable in dialogue with one another. Consider what is to be gained by juxtaposing Butler and Frye on the subject of the Romantics. For years, Frye immersed himself in Bl
ake's work; he thought and probably even dreamed as Blake would. And the result is a remarkable transfiguration. Frye becomes Blake, or at least a highly plausible version of Blake. It is a Blake who is alive to the needs of Frye's present, an available, cogent Blake who speaks to Frye's society and, I believe, to our own.
Listen to Frye, in one of many memorable passages, matching the eloquence of Blake to bring him to us. "Inspiration," writes Blake-Frye, "is the artist's empirical proof of the divinity of his imagination; and all inspiration is divine in origin, whether used, perverted, hidden or frittered away in reverie. All imaginative and creative acts, being eternal, go to build up a permanent structure, which Blake calls Golgonooza, above time, and, when this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding, will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the new Jerusalem which is the total form of all human culture and civilization. Nothing that the heroes, martyrs, prophets and poets of the past have done for it has been wasted; no anonymous and unrecognized contribution to it has been overlooked. In it is conserved all the good man has done, and in it is completed all that he hoped and intended to do. And the artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time."
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