Why Read?

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Why Read? Page 10

by Mark Edmundson


  This is Frye's version of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." For Eliot, most of us must live outside the world of great works, looking on in awe. But Frye's imaginative world is a world for you and for me, a democratic world of art and creation that we can enter by making an honest attempt to write with visionary integrity. We need to render what we see as truly as we can. In so doing we can come into the world of genius—feeling, perhaps, the shock of recognition that Melville said united all who deployed the energies of creation, whether they succeeded in worldly terms or failed. (Melville put his own relation to worldly success memorably: "So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to 'fail.'")

  What Frye offers, through reliance on the self, is entry into Keats's immortal freemasonry of intellect. The aim of a liberal arts education, from this perspective, is to show us that, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it, "we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call 'circumstances' (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer—freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value."

  Frye imagines opening the world of artistic freedom to ever growing numbers of people; he is self-consciously democratizing where Eliot is exclusionary. But the energies of art do not belong to everyone simply by virtue of being born. One has to strive to enter into the world of Homer and Isaiah and to draw on their powers. The most admirable individuals, for Frye and Blake, will be the ones who throw themselves into the life of creation; those who refuse the opportunity have turned away from what matters most in life. "The worship of God," wrote Blake, "is Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius and loving the greatest men best."

  As arresting as this affirmation of genius may be, it probably should not go without challenge in a classroom. For perhaps there are other paths, and before the student is swept in by the attractions of Blake and Frye, and Keats and Bate, it's necessary to look critically at them.

  Taking a deep initial delight in a book or an author is a little like falling in love. There is a nearly rapturous acceptance of all the author brings. The truth unfolds as if from above. But to adapt that vision to one's own uses, to bring it wisely into the world, more than love is necessary. One also has to apply a critical scrutiny to the work—consider its connotations, examine its antecedents, asking always: What would it mean to live this vision? The initial feeling of being swept off your feet by a book has got to be followed by more thoughtful commitment, as marriage follows love. When you say yes to an author's vision, you're entering into a marriage of minds. And such marriage ought not to take place without critical scrutiny.

  In Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Marilyn Butler is generally about as detached from her subject as Frye is immersed in his. But at one point, she steps forward and affirms her identification with Jane Austen, using Austen to contend against the self-generated visions that the Romantics and their proponents worship. Here is Butler: "In all Jane Austen's novels, characters are judged by their manners. But one is not born with manners, nor can one easily pick them up; one is taught them as a child by parents who had them. The issue of manners is raised more explicitly in German literature of Jane Austen's period than in English. In that country of legalized class distinctions, burger writers could not rise socially; they had to use their inner resources, and make a self-justifying system out of solipsism—Romanticism is such a system—because their manners, or lack of them, would always exclude them from the charmed circle of the hereditary aristocracy. For Jane Austen, the writer who expresses the ethos of the landed gentry, manners are indeed the passport. But true to her function at its highest, she idealizes manners and endows them with all their theoretical value . . . They proclaim that the old style of social responsibility is accepted, duty (the idealized reading of upper-class motivation) put before the new individualism."

  Blake and Frye are avatars of Romantic individualism, and they are, to Butler, an error that must be attacked, both in the past and present; to her, they make a system out of an aggressive, resentful solipsism. For Butler, Romanticism is a plague, something that tears society apart, encouraging us to live only for ourselves. It must be shown up for what it is. Greatly preferring Blake-Frye as I do, full of gratitude to Frye for performing the task Schopenhauer sets out and making Blake's work unfold as a contemporary answer to the question "What is life?," I find little to agree with in Butler. But in teaching Austen alongside Blake, as I often do, Butler seems to me key in helping students to see the differences between the two and to begin to make some choices, choices that will matter not just in class but for future life.

  Of course Blake does want us all to live in Golgonooza, the city of ongoing creation, but you get there by being an inspired artist, by trusting yourself and by being yourself with the greatest possible gusto. And this is not something that everyone is prone to do. As Oscar Wilde put it, "Most people are other people."

  What matters about these critics is that they are writing accurately about their authors (at least insofar as I can see) and doing so with the conduct of life as their concern. They are asking what it means to live the authors at hand. They are mining them for vital options, questing for truth.

  Orwell's Dickens

  GEORGE ORWELL'S ESSAY on Charles Dickens is not an academic investigation, a fresh interpretation from the standpoint of Marx or Freud or whomever else you might care to apply for the purposes of translation. Rather, the piece is an internal argument—it's Orwell contending with himself. He is pitting what I take to be his own early infatuation with Dickens against what he has learned later in life through his immersion in politics (and war) as well as through his study of Marx and other social thinkers. Orwell seems to be writing this essay because he needs to. He needs—while describing Dickens with all the accuracy he can muster—to find out whether he, and by extension his readers, ought to take to heart the truth in Dickens's work.

  Dickens, as Orwell has come in time to see, has no social doctrine. Perhaps he is unmatched at dramatizing injustice but, to Orwell, Dickens has no conception of how various social arrangements conspire to create it. When Dickens wants to indict evil, or inhumanity, he indicts this or that inhumane person or inhumane act. His scope is entirely limited to what he can see in front of him. Dickens has no capacity to step back and to envision things in their larger, more general workings. "He has no constructive suggestions," Orwell says, "not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong."

  A case in point, for Orwell, is Dickens's view of education: "He attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public school to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination."

  "He lacked that kind of imagination": by which Orwell means that he lacked a political imagination. Theories of education, as Plato demonstrates in The Republic, are always political theories, blueprints for future societies. Dickens had no political theory. He was unable to conceive of an alternative to the slash-and-burn capitalism that was developing everywhere around him. He could protest against institutions, but he could not imagine their replacement with better ones. Rather, the man behind the functionary's desk must become a better man. Orwell, it's soon clear, is arguing with himself, for and against socialism, the doctrine that Dickens could have adopted and never did, and the doctrine that is tempting Orwell himself. When Orwell chides Dickens, early on in the essay, for not having a social imagination, what he means is that he has no imagination for socialism.

  Orwell's argument with himself, and with his own prior love for Dickens, is so honest, non
dogmatic, and uncommitted to preordained conclusions, that by the close of the essay he has, it seems, discovered something. The process of writing the essay appears to have remade his mind. Yeats said that when you have an argument with the world, you write an essay. When the argument is with yourself, it issues in a poem. This is an argument with the self that results in an essay replete with the passion that comes in the best poems.

  Here is Orwell on the limits of the kind of socialist thought that he has been measuring Dickens against. "All [Dickens] can finally say is 'Behave decently,' which . . . is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression on the human face.'" In fact, Orwell now sees, Dickens's permanent radicalism may well be more attractive than the temporary discontent, aimed at the overthrow of an existing system, that so-called revolutionaries maintain. The revolutionaries want to replace the current system with another that will last for all time—the dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe—and that will almost inevitably solidify and hem in life.

  Orwell in his youth seems to have fallen in love with Dickens. And the first phase in being influenced by a writer—influenced in the best sense—is precisely such love. But the process must go further than that. To actually adopt a writer's vision, the reader has to engage in critical examination. The writer needs to answer the hardest questions one can put to him, because, in effect, these are our questions, our perplexities about how to live and what to do. Just so, when we are on the verge of marriage, we need to know that love is at the core of it all. But we also need to think hard about our choice. What kind of mother or father will the person make? Will she bear with me in bad times as well as good, sickness as well as health, poverty and wealth alike? Posing such questions of an author's vision—can it sustain me in the hard hours as well as the sweet?—is central to the act of criticism that precedes consequential belief.

  Some students will go even further. So far, we have been talking about two sorts of people: those who are reasonably comfortable with the values they've been socialized to accept, and those who feel an uneasiness with them, however latent. This second group is ripe for literary study. They need a second chance to come of age. But some of them will not be satisfied with what they find in books, however much it may draw them. They'll see that Shelley or Austen goes only so far, and they'll feel the need to complete and correct the writers they love by writing novels and poems and essays of their own. Writers become writers for many reasons, but one is that the books on the shelf are never quite the right books. They don't render the world in exactly the way that it is. So there is reason to write more. Walter Benjamin tells the story of a village schoolmaster who was too poor to buy books; when he saw a title in a catalog that intrigued him, he sat down and composed the volume himself. "Writers," Benjamin observes, "are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."

  Influence

  WHEN SOME TEACHERS think about this approach to education, they find the issue of influence particularly troubling. They are concerned that they might become propagandists, rather than what they hope to be, critical thinkers who enjoin critical thought. They don't want to implant ways of seeing things in their students, using their authority and the powers of their grades. Rather, they want to echo the advice that Johnson gave Boswell, turn to their students and demand that they rid their minds of cant. What is to be put in the place of this cant—or doxa, or ideology, or, if you like, bullshit—the critical thinkers rarely say.

  To me, there are few pleasures greater than being influenced: learning something I need to know from another. Longinus describes this feeling of connection with a great author in a splendid sentence when he says that when we encounter sublime wisdom, we feel that we have created what in fact we've only heard. The utterance so much echoes our latent wisdom that we take the author's words as our own. Emerson, greatly fearing influence, especially early in his career, speaks of the indignity of being "forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." But Emerson addresses us here as an aspiring original. To the true reader, every form of usable truth is welcome many times over. Later in life, Emerson is more circumspect: "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him."

  Many of our students have grown up being suffused with TV, movies, video games. Is what is to be found in Blake and Dickens so much worse than what Paramount and Disney have to deliver? Should we suffer endless qualms lest the world according to Spielberg be displaced by the world according to Wallace Stevens? Yet there is something real about these concerns; teaching in the way that I describe does have its dangers.

  To me, part of the risk of true teaching lies in the willingness to see students make choices, sometimes bad choices. We must not be afraid of submitting our students to influence. We face people who are on the verge of major decisions. Should I marry? Should I have children? Should I go into law? Should I stay in my parents' church? Such questions matter to young people, and they matter now. If thinking about these questions in a classroom can be dangerous, it can be much more dangerous not to think about them. The result of never brooding over major issues is likely to be that one follows the crowd. One takes common convention as a guide. Rich in use as convention can be, for some it is stifling, begetting lives of quiet desperation. We spend our days pursuing ends that outrage our natures, making ourselves sick, as Thoreau said, so that we can lay something up against our coming illness. A fundamental qualification for teaching literature should be the view that great books are worth studying, and because of the salutary effects that they can have on life. Why would a student wish to study with anyone who didn't think as much? Doing so would be like hiring a lawyer who had lost all of his faith in the law and didn't want to sully himself through contact with the corrupt legal system.

  The professors who become most uneasy about asking their students real questions are often those with the most doubts about the capacities of everyday people to make their own decisions and to direct their own lives. These professors, whatever they may say, are fundamentally afraid of living in a democracy, where people think for themselves, rather than letting experts do their thinking for them. This fear is a scandal at the center of the current day academy. Though many professors claim to be on the left, the fact is that they do not trust, or sometimes even much like, everyday, relatively unschooled people. In fact, they tend to despise the people in whose behalf they claim to be working.

  As disconcerting to me as the fears of those who think that students will be too easily swayed are the doubts of those who feel that human beings can be changed little, if at all, for the better. Eminent among these is Sigmund Freud. What Freud calls the transference is purportedly an inescapable part of life, perhaps even an element of every significant encounter. The theory of the transference suggests that we live eternally in the past, never in the present and future. To Freud, we perpetually approach figures of authority and figures of erotic interest not as the people they are in themselves, but rather as though they were figures from our past. The boss's injunctions are inflected with the mother's commands. The lover's carpings are the father's as well. We are lost in a world where, as J. H. van den Berg puts it, "everything is past and there is nothing new." We find ourselves amidst facsimiles of replicas of reproductions.

  One of the reasons that Freud hated America as much as he did is that the nation seemed organized on the premise that the present could have a liberated relation to the past. We believed that it was possible to draw on the past, not be swallowed by it against our w
ills. Democracy, which depends on the enfranchisement of greater and greater numbers of people, on the widening of their possibilities, is inseparable from faith in the present and future.

  To have gone into teaching is to have placed one's wager on the hopeful side of the question. By choosing to teach, we have declared a hope that the powers of nurture may be a little stronger than nature's. We've affirmed the hope that the present can be more alive than the constricting past. What is our proof beyond that hope? Do we have any evidence, besides our temperamental wish to think well of the world? I think so. As teachers we see proof all the time. We see proof, first of all, in the nearly miraculous works that we often teach. If a human being can write as Shakespeare or Blake did, coming from humble beginnings, with no advantages other than those they created themselves, then what is not to be hoped for from an individual man or woman? "A human being did that!" one says, reading their work. "And what might I, too, no less human, be able to achieve?"

  Freud and all the other purveyors of the Gothic imagination may be right. It's possible that the present is bound so tightly to the past that it rarely breaks free. Edgar Allan Poe, the ultimate Gothic writer, delighted in depicting people who are fated from the start to be devoured by past sins, whether they committed them or not. Is there any doubt, once you see the enormous crack running through the House of Usher, what will happen to it and its residents by the tale's end? Poe, who sought his own doom ruthlessly enough, seemed to believe that all of us would eventually be sacrificed on the altar of long-ago transgressions.

  Education is a gamble. Socrates was gambling when he asked his young friends to put their beliefs into play. Jesus was gambling when he told streetcorner denizens, in whose eyes he saw something unsatisfied, to get up and follow him, put aside the begging bowl or the tax collectors' book. The Buddha gambled when he told people that they could free themselves from the wheel of incarnation through meditation and awareness of the noble truths. This is what teachers, great and small, do: they wager that they can help people become one with their highest promise. Freud once said that the aim of therapy was to turn misery into common everyday unhappiness—and one admires the tough-mindedness in his remark. But Thoreau, himself an estimable figure, talked about bringing the past into the thousand-eyed light of the present, and living forever in a new day. And from what I can tell from Walden's best pages, sometimes he did.

 

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