Perhaps predictably, Allan Bloom singled out “the Bible as literature” in The Closing of the American Mind as an indication of “the impotence of the humanities,” suggesting that to “to include [the Bible] in the humanities is already a blasphemy, a denial of its own claims,” and that teaching the Bible as literature rather than “as Revelation” makes it possible for it to be read as a secular document, “as we read, for example, Pride and Prejudice.” For Bloom, the professors who taught classic texts, among which he includes the Bible, were not interested in the “truth” of those texts.63 Presumably, the idea of “a literary understanding of ‘truth’ ” would have struck him as fallacious.
The phrase as literature has also been used in other contexts, like, for example, “film as literature,” once a legitimating move that explained or justified why courses on film were included in the curricula of literature departments. When methods of film analysis moved away from this paradigm and closer to visual, historical, and philosophical analysis—and as film studies established itself as a humanities discipline in its own right—as literature tended to drop away, sometimes replaced by the more anodyne and, which often denoted a comparison between specific works of literature and specific films or film genres. On the other hand, “Freud as literature” or “Marx as literature” or “Darwin as literature” suggests that a body of work associated with another discipline or subject area will be read according to protocols designed for, and effective in analyzing, literary works. In the case of Marx and Freud, at least, it sometimes comes with an unspoken subtext, implying that as literature is a fallback or secondary framework, and that the analysis of these writers has come under the aegis of literary scholars because they are no longer influential in the fields of psychology or economics.
In his classic essay on the “author-function,” Michel Foucault described Freud and Marx as belonging to a class he called “initiators of discursive practices”:
The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirely from that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never more than the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital; they both established the endless possibility of discourse.64
Foucault is quick to anticipate objections to his placement of such authors in a more influential position than that of novelists: “The author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some ‘importance’ in the literary world, his influence can have significant ramifications.”
But his main point is to try to distinguish between a writing practice that spawns imitators and one that generates productive thought and resistance. “Marx and Freud, as ‘initiators of discursive practices,’ not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated.”65 These writers have begun a conversation that would have not been possible without them. Thus, the twentieth century saw the popularization of adjectives like Freudian and Marxist. Given the blurring that often comes with cultural transmission, such terms were almost guaranteed to be caricatured and misunderstood. Nonetheless, their prominence in popular media is a telling indication of the role these writers have played in literary criticism and interpretation, as well as in the way modern thinkers think. “There are,” Foucault says provocatively, “no ‘false’ statements in the work of these initiators,” because the issue is not false or true or right or wrong but what he called the possibility of discourse. This drives unsympathetic critics crazy. For some, the flat claim that “Freud was wrong” or that “Marx was wrong” becomes an article of faith and one that definitively halts any possibility of discourse. But Foucault’s contention is that such initiators teach a new way of thinking, not a set of prescribed (or proscribed) thoughts. “A person can be the author of much more than a book—of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate.”66
So are Marx and Freud literary authors? Are Capital and Civilization and Its Discontents works of literature? I’d say yes, and not only because these authors write so well, though it is important to me that they do. The moves that they make in setting up an argument, in offering detours and counterexamples, in not being afraid to contradict and reverse themselves, are literary in the most complimentary sense of that elastic term. The literary critic Peter Brooks wrote an essay called “Freud’s Masterplot,” about the argument and stylistic development of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that became a centerpiece for Brooks’s book about narrative fiction, Reading for the Plot.67 Freud, Marx, Darwin, and other major intellectual and cultural theorists provided a range of plots and languages for creative writers and critics who came after them.
What isn’t literature? It might make sense to adapt the saying about New England weather and suggest that if something isn’t literature now, we just need to wait five minutes—or five years, or fifty, or even five hundred. The process takes time (often centuries or decades) to change Thomas Bodley’s “riffe-raffe” into the masterpieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, or the actionable obscenity of Lolita or Ulysses into the most honored of twentieth-century novels. Becoming literature, as we saw in the case of the ballad, isn’t always an unreflectively positive transition—there are perceived losses as well as gains with the change in status. For literature is a status rather than a quality. To say that a text or a body of work is literature means that it is regarded, studied, read, and analyzed in a literary way.
FOUR
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
To say you love literature would seem to be a prerequisite for life as a teacher and critic. But it’s also the case that when students, buffs, and fans profess that they love Shakespeare or they love Jane Austen—the two most frequently mentioned love objects, in my experience—the teacher often worries as much as she rejoices. Love is not a critical stance; it does not necessarily welcome interpretations, especially multiple interpretations. What Freud accurately called “the overestimation of the object”—the idea that the loved one is imbued with extra value, with superlatives, even with perfection, as a way of ensuring that the lover stays in love—is sometimes a way of avoiding analysis and critique rather than pursuing them.
Like many other people who teach and write about literature for a living (the biographer R. W. B. Lewis once memorably said to me that “teaching Shakespeare was taking money for jam”), I’ve often encountered undergraduate and graduate students who were concerned that literary criticism, literary analysis, and literary theory would take away their pleasure in reading rather than making it richer and fuller. Happily, that tends to be a brief moment rather than a lasting one, since the delights of literary immersion, whether through an examination of imagery, symbolism, prosody, rhetoric and syntax, historical context, and/or performance, tend almost always to produce new ways of loving familiar texts as well as encounters with new texts to love. Still, there are moments of evasion, avoidance, disavowal: “I don’t want to spoil it for myself.” But there is no cause for concern. Poems, plays, novels, critical essays, aphorisms—these are all vivid, vigorous, healthy, tough, resistant: they will survive. Dismembering them through analysis and interpretation is one of many ways of engaging with and remembering them. Works of literature are not soap bubbles or daylilies or meteors or mirages: they will last, indeed much longer than any reader or critic.
Before “English”
The idea of an “English major” is a fairly recent development, as institutional histories go, dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he was an undergraduate
at Yale in the 1850s, wrote Andrew Dickson White, later the cofounder and first president of Cornell University, “there was never a single lecture on any subject in literature, either ancient or modern … As regards the great field of modern literature, nothing whatever was done. In the English literature and language, every man was left to his own devices.”1 Frederick Barnard, who would later become president of Columbia College, reported that he gained what literary training he could, not in Yale’s courses, but in the literary societies.2 The novelist Henry James, who spent a brief time at Harvard Law School (but took no degree), said, “A student might read the literature of our own language privately, but it was not a subject of instruction … Professor [Francis James] Child provided an introduction to the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer. There, so far as English literature was to be considered, the College stopped.”3 Child was then the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; it was not until 1876 that he was appointed the first, and at that time the only, professor of English at Harvard. From 1834 to 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres, where, in addition to teaching English, he supervised students in Italian, Spanish, French, and German, as well as offering, or being prepared to offer, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.
When English was taught in the university, it was often in the form of historical surveys (“without reference, necessarily, to the texts of the classics themselves”4) or the study of philology and rhetoric. The first real courses in English were not offered at Harvard until 1872–73 (long after Henry James was a student), and even then two of the three courses were in Anglo-Saxon and in the history and grammar of the English language. Shakespeare, a popular subject for undergraduates, became a Harvard course in 1876, but even so, the reading and discussion of English poetry and of Shakespeare continued to be largely relegated either to family training at home (or through tutors) or to social clubs on college campuses. Love of literature, when it existed—as manifestly it did, since the period produced numerous writers and poets of distinction—was a personal pleasure, not an academic goal. Was literature useful—or useless? For Emerson, Longfellow, and Henry James, it was invaluable; they lived it and breathed it. Longfellow retired from teaching and devoted himself to writing once his income from publishing permitted him to do so. James decided he did not want to study law (and as we’ve seen, he couldn’t have studied English or literature in the sense we understand those fields today). Instead, he traveled in Europe, wrote fiction, and began to contribute to magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly.
In the novels of Jane Austen, both women and men read aloud for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of their listeners. In Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price is inclined to resist the too easy manner of Henry Crawford, but she has to acknowledge his skill as a performer when he takes up the “volume of Shakespeare” she herself had been reading aloud to entertain the indolent and demanding Lady Bertram:
[H]is reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she had been long used; her uncle read well—her cousins all—Edmund very well; but in Mr. Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always light, at will, on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty.5
Even more striking is the way in which courtship is accomplished through reading aloud in the posthumously published Persuasion (1818), where the flighty Louisa Musgrove, confined to a sickbed because of an accident, is wooed, and won, by the widower Captain Benwick, described as “a clever man, a reading man,” who sits by her bed and reads her poetry. However dissimilar they might be, muses the heroine, Anne Elliot, they would become more alike over time. Louisa “would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry.”6
Reading aloud, taking books from the public library, participating in book clubs and reading groups—these were not only modes of self-improvement but also opportunities for pleasure and sometimes for romance. As they are still today. Oprah’s Book Club and thousands of individually organized book groups invite lovers of literature (or “lovers of books”) to participate in weekly or monthly discussions. Some of these groups read best sellers; others read classics or books chosen to reflect on a central theme. Special-topic areas, like African-American women’s reading groups and gay men’s reading groups, have formed, and are flourishing, around the country and the world. Lists of book-group favorites are posted, and authors of popular novels and self-help books periodically make themselves available to attend sessions. Dozens of Shakespeare reading groups advertise online and by personal invitation offering an opportunity to read the plays aloud. And many successful adult professionals, having made careers in fields like law, medicine, economics, and technology, return to extension and continuing education courses, in person or online, to pursue their interest in, and love of, literature.
The number of American college students graduating with B.A. degrees in English, which in 1950 was about 17,000, or 4 for every 100 bachelor’s degrees, increased in the next decade, peaking in 1971 (when there were more than 64,000 English graduates nationwide, or 7.66 per hundred total bachelor’s degrees). From that point it began to decline, with a minor uptick in the early nineties. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the percentages had returned to the level of fifty years previously, 4 in 100.7 (Meantime, other humanities fields were experiencing even more serious declines.) By 2006–7 the number had decreased further, to 3.62 of every 100 bachelor’s degrees.
A variety of reasons for this decline can be offered or guessed at, including the economy, information technology, the lure of lucrative careers in the financial sector, the great expansion of academic fields beyond the basic subject areas of midcentury, the national push for science education, and so on. Many English (and other modern literature) majors always planned to go on to law school or other kinds of professional training after college, but the old truism—that a degree in English made you seem literate and well grounded in general education—was gradually replaced by a new truism, that the English major was useless. It was only a short step to thinking that perhaps this made it somehow self-indulgent, whereas ambitious young students ought to be networking, laying the groundwork for a legitimate career, developing marketable skills—in short, thinking ahead. If they thought far enough ahead, they might envisage themselves enrolling in evening courses or cultural tour groups in an attempt to get back in touch with their interests in literature.
It’s always been difficult to explain to administrators and fund-raisers why criticism and theory are research. Undergraduate education in the literary classics is considered a part of general education, but specialization, while normative for intellectual advancement in the social sciences and the sciences, has often been looked upon with skepticism or suspicion when conducted in the humanities. Epithets like political or ideological (terms that are, incidentally, perfectly acceptable categories of analysis in other areas) have been hurled at literary scholars as if such interests somehow undermine or make less pure their interest in works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Robert Alter’s 1989 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age argued that pleasure and love of literature was the proper province of literary study. If literary scholarship were to become too professional, the elusive but crucial element of love might drop out. You can see that this is a kind of double bind: if literary study is centered on love of literature, it is regarded as basic but not advanced, general but not specialized, ancillary and pleasurable but not essential. But when literary study moves into the realm of theory, or editorial practice, or material culture, or any other of its myriad edges, left or right,
up or down, it runs the risk of abandoning its main mission to give pleasure, inspire love, and be, in effect, its own reward.
If a scientist were to tell us he or she loved science (as scientists frequently do), we probably would not consider such a remark tantamount to saying that science was not professional, or did not involve research or specialization, or that the speaker was a fan or a dilettante rather than a working scientist. Love of politics does not mean that the lover is not also a potential scholar, or candidate, or bureau chief. But love of literature (or love of art or music) often is taken to indicate a set of recreational interests or a level of social—rather than intellectual—sophistication.
So literary criticism and literary studies, which were once considered the accoutrements of a gentleman’s or a lady’s social education, or alternatively, in the spirit of Matthew Arnold, a bootstrapping opportunity for the achievement of meritocracy without the advantages of inherited wealth or position, or, in the spirit of the Great Books movement and James Conant’s General Education in a Free Society, the necessary preparation for productive citizenship in a democracy, are now again—for slightly different reasons and with a different populace—an “extra,” an elective, an enhancement rather than either a necessity or a power position.
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 14