Emerson understands education as a process of enlargement, in which we move from the center of our being, off into progressively more expansive ways of life. We can see this sort of thing happening on the largest scale when the author of Julius Caesar becomes capable of creating the vast work that is Hamlet. Yet Hamlet is an outgrowth of Caesar, the character of Brutus expands—another circle on the great deep, if you like—into the revealing mystery that is Hamlet. But such rippling outward happens every day, too, as when a child leaves her family and goes out into the painful, promising world of school. Then the child's circle of knowing has to expand to meet the new circumstances, or she'll suffer for it.
The aim of a literary education is, in Emerson's terms, the expansion of circles. One's current circle will eventually "solidify and hem in the life." "But," Emerson immediately continues, "if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over the boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to intense and innumerable expansions."
This passage, eloquent as it is, breeds many questions. How shall we understand the substance of these expanding rings? What is their human content? How does one know that this or that new circle is conducive to better things than the old? Where does the impetus for enlargement come from? Is it always time to move outward, or is there a time in life when it makes sense to fall back, or to stand pat? What role do books have in this process? And what part does a teacher play? How does the student put herself in the way of the kind of expansion that Emerson describes? How does she know that it's coming to pass? Is it painful, pleasurable, both? Are such changes always for the better? Might they not also be changes for the worse?
For the purposes of literary education, I want to see these Emersonian circles as being composed of words. But the circles will also be alive with feeling. They will be rife with the emotions—the attractions and powers and taboos—that infuse the words that mean the most to us. Words like "mother" and "father" and "God" and "love" and "America" are not just blank counters in a game designed to fill up a stray hour. They are words with a history, personal and collective, words differently valued, differently felt, by each of us. We define them in ways partially our own, based on our experiences. And of course, the words also define us. So we might think of Emerson's circles as Rorty's Final Narratives. And we might think of the question about religion as a way to tap into one's ultimate terms, to make contact with one's outer-lying circles, and in so doing to initiate the process of growth.
It's time, no doubt, for a provisional thesis statement: the function of a liberal arts education is to use major works of art and intellect to influence one's Final Narrative, one's outermost circle of commitments. A liberal education uses books to rejuvenate, reaffirm, replenish, revise, overwhelm, replace, in some cases (alas) even help begin to generate the web of words that we're defined by. But this narrative isn't a thing of mere words. The narrative brings with it commitments and hopes. A language, Wittgenstein thought, is a way of life. A new language, whether we learn it from a historian, a poet, a painter, or a composer of music, is potentially a new way to live.
Grateful as I am for Rorty's translation and Emerson's luminous passage, there is one place where I must part company with them both (and with Allan Bloom as well). For my hopes, I think, are larger than theirs. I believe that almost anyone who has the opportunity to enjoy a liberal education—and such educations are not only to be had in schools; the world is full of farmers, tradesmen and tradeswomen, mechanics, lawyers, and, up to some crucial moment, layabouts, who've used books to turn their lives around—almost anyone is likely to be able to cultivate the power to look skeptically at his own life and values and consider adopting new ones. This ability—to expand one's orbits—is central to the health of democracy. The most inspired and inspiring Americans have always done so: others can and will join them. But the process is not an easy one. Allan Bloom is quite right: liberal education does put everything at risk and requires students who are willing to risk everything. Otherwise it can only touch what is uncommitted in the essentially committed student.
But Bloom, much, much more than Emerson and Rorty, believes that such risk and such change are only for the very few. Bloom sees Socrates' path as exclusively for an elite. It is not so.
For Ignorance
" WHAT THAT YOUNG man lacks is inexperience": so said the maestro of the young prodigy. Part of what I hope to do by asking students to brood publicly about God and ultimate commitments is to let them recapture their inexperience. They need a chance to own what may be the most precious knowledge one can have at the start of an education, knowledge of one's own ignorance.
Plato and Aristotle both say that philosophy begins in wonder. But Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps closer to the point, thought that people came to philosophy, to serious thinking about their lives, out of confusion. The prelude to philosophy was a simple admission: "I have lost my way." The same can be true for serious literary study. At its best, it often begins with a sense of dislocation; it begins with a sense that one has lost one's way.
The best beginning reader is often the one with the wherewithal to admit that, living in the midst of what appears to be a confident, energetic culture, he among all the rest is lost. This is a particularly difficult thing to do. For our culture at large prizes knowingness. On television, in movies, in politics, at school, in the press, the student encounters authoritative figures, speaking in self-assured, worldly tones. Their knowingness is intimidating. They seem to be in full command of themselves. They appear to have answered all the questions that matter in life and now to be left musing on the finer points. They demonstrate their preternatural poise by withholding their esteem. Not to admire anything, Horace said, is the only way to feel consistently good about yourself. Most of the cultural authorities now in place, in art, in the media, and in academia, are figures who programmatically hoard their esteem and apparently feel quite good about themselves in the process.
Should one believe in God? What is truth? How does one lead a good life? All these questions the cultural authorities appear to have resolved. Only the smaller matters remain.
But the true student has often not settled these matters at all. Often she has not even come up with provisional answers that satisfy her. And finally, after years of observation and thought, she may be willing to wager that the so-called authorities probably haven't resolved them either. They're performing a charade, dispensing an unearned and ultimately feeble comfort. The true student demands more. And to find it, she is willing, against the backdrop of all this knowingness, to take a brave step. She is willing to affirm her own ignorance.
Beneath acculturation to cool, beneath the commitment to training and skills, there often exists this sense of confusion. And where it is, the student should be able to affirm it, and the teacher to endorse the affirmation.
"You must become an ignorant man again," says Wallace Stevens to his ephebe, or beginning poet. The same holds true for the beginning student of literature, and often for the teacher as well. The student must be willing to become as articulate as possible about what he has believed—or what he has been asked to believe—up until this point. He must be willing to tell himself who he is and has been, and, possibly, why that will no longer quite do. This exercise in self-reflection, deriving often from the sense of displacement, of having lost one's way, can start a literary education. And once a student has touched his ignorance, he has acquired a great resource, for in such ignorance there is the beginning of potential change—of new and confident, if provisional, commitment. As Thoreau puts it, "How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?"
Again and again, the true student of literature will return to this ignorance, for it's possible that no truth she learns in the humanities
will be permanently true. At the very least, everything acquired-by immersion in literature will have to be tested and retested along the way. It's for this reason that the teacher often enters a course with a sense of possibility akin to the students'.
One of the most important jobs a teacher has is to allow students to make contact with their ignorance. We need to provide a scene where not-knowing is, at least at the outset, valued more than full, worldly confidence. Thoreau heading to Walden Pond almost empty-handed, or Emily Dickinson going up to her room in Amherst to engage in a solitary dialogue with God, are grand versions of the kind of open and daring endeavor that we can all engage in for ourselves. Emerson says that power abides in transition, in "the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim." We're most alive when we're moving from one set of engagements to the next. We're in motion then, but not fully sure where we're going, feeling both our present ignorance and the prospect of new, vitalizing knowledge.
Down the Hall
WHILE I'M ASKING my questions about God and what makes a good life, and affirming, when need be, a certain sort of ignorance, what's going on in the classrooms of my colleagues down the hall, and for that matter, in humanities classrooms across the country? A number of things, all well worth remarking upon. There is training, there is entertaining, no doubt. But many professors go at least some distance in resisting the ethos of the corporate university and of American culture overall. What they do can pass well beyond the university's ad brochures, where the students bask on the grass in all-approving sunlight, or hover around a piece of machinery that's high-tech, high-priced, and virtually unidentifiable.
Many professors of humanities—professors of literature and history and philosophy and religious studies—have something of consequence in common. Centrally, they attempt to teach one thing, and often do so with real success. That one thing is reading. They cultivate attentiveness to written words, careful consideration, thoughtful balancing, coaxing forth of disparate meanings, responsiveness to the complexities of sense. They try to help students become more like what Henry James said every writer ought to be, someone on whom nothing is lost. Attentiveness to words, to literary patterns and their meaning-making power: that remains a frequent objective of liberal arts education.
It was the New Critics who brought the phrase "close reading" to the fore in American education. Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, and a number of other influential scholars pioneered an approach to reading that continues on, in various forms, into the present. The well-wrought students of Brooks and Warren were ever on the lookout for irony, tension, ambiguity, and paradox. To find these things, they had to scrutinize the page in front of them with exacting care. All to the good.
But what happens in most New Critical readings is that the master terms themselves—call them, if you like, elements in the New Critics' Final Narrative—take precedence over the actual poem. So rather than measuring the particular vision of John Donne, with all his manifold religious commitments and resistances, his sexual complexities, his personal kinks and quirks, the New Critic reworks Donne into a collection of anointed terms. Donne's "maturity"—to put matters in a compressed way—becomes a function of his capacity to cultivate paradox and irony.
Some writers are more responsive to New Critical values than others, and surely Donne is one of them. His work is replete with irony and ambiguity. Yet with the imposition of the rhetorical terms—terms that have no significant place in Donne's own Final Narrative—the poet becomes a function of New Critical values rather than a promulgator of his own.
The New Critical student, by encountering the right poems in the right way, undergoes a shaping, a form of what the Greeks called paideia. For the qualities that he learns to value in poems can also be cultivated in persons. So the ideal student (and the ideal professor) of New Criticism is drawn to the ability to maintain an ironic distance on life, the capacity to live with ambiguities, the power to achieve an inner tension than never breaks. The ideal New Critical student, like the ideal New Critical poem, is prone to be sophisticated, stoical, calm, intent, conventionally masculine, and rather worldly. What such a student is not likely to be is emotional, mercurial, rhapsodic, or inspired. The New Critical ethos—what we might call, after Keats, an ethos of negative capability, the capacity to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"—surely has its value. But it is one ethos among many. To reduce literature to that one ethos, when it contains a nearly infinite number, robs great writing of its diversity, and life of its richness.
The Harvard University scholar Walter Jackson Bate purportedly used a Marx Brothers style routine to capture what he thought of as New Critical close reading. "Close reading," he'd mutter, and push the book up near his nose. "Closer reading": with a laugh, digging his face down into the book. Then finally, "Very close reading," where nose and book kissed and not a word of print was legible. Bate's routine suggests that with a certain kind of exclusive attention to the page, life disappears. The connection between word and world goes dark (or becomes somewhat deviously implicit). The reader is left adrift, uncorn-passed, in a sea of sentences.
Foucault, Industrial Strength
THERE WAS THIS much to be said for the New Critics: they were prone to specialize in reading and teaching works with which they were spiritually aligned. Donne and the New Critics genuinely do have something in common, though they also part company at important points. The violence of applying the anointed terms to Donne or Marvell or Keats's odes, or Shakespeare's sonnets is real, though hardly overwhelming. But down the hall in the humanities building now—and on the shelves of the library devoted to recent literary and cultural study—one finds work that is best described as out-and-out rewriting of the authors at hand. In fact, we might call these efforts not so much criticism as transformation.
Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic drawing on the work of Pierre Macherey, describes a good deal of current criticism as quite simply an exercise in rewriting. One approaches the work at hand, and recasts it in the terms of Foucault, or Marx, or feminism, or Derrida, or Queer Theory, or what have you.
So a current reading of, say, Dickens's Bleak House is not so much an interpretation as it a reworking and a revision of the novel. Dickens is depicted as testifying, albeit unwittingly, to Foucault's major truths. In Bleak House, we are supposed to find social discipline rampant, constant surveillance, the hegemony of the police, a carceral society. Whatever elements of the novel do not cohere with this vision are discredited, or pushed to the margin of the discussion. (In a Foucaultian reading of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Stephen Greenblatt, often a fine critic, manages to leave Falstaff virtually unmentioned.) Thus the critic rewrites Dickens in the terms of Foucault. One effectively reads not a text by Dickens, but one by another author. Dickens's truth is replaced by the truth according to Michel Foucault—or Fredric Jameson or Helene Cixous—and there the process generally ends.
It may be that the truths unfolded by Foucault and the rest are of consummate value. It may be that those authors are indispensable guides to life, or at least to the lives of some. If so, all to the good.
If so, they, the critics, ought to be the objects of study in themselves. Let us look at Foucault, for instance, and see how one might lead a life under his guidance. What would you do? What would you do, in particular, as a denizen of an institution that produces precisely the kind of discipline that Foucault so detests? For a university, in Foucaultian thinking, is a production center, a knowledge-producing matrix which creates discourses that aid in normalizing people and thus in making them more susceptible to control. In fact, if you are a university citizen, you live in the belly of the beast. How, given what you've learned from Foucault, will you work your way out?
But these questions are virtually never asked. What usually happens is that professors apply the terminology to the work at hand, to Dickens or Emerson or Eliot, then leave it at that. The professor never measures the v
alues and the shortcomings of the ruling critical idiom itself. For what authors who create comprehensive views of life offer is what Frost thought of as grand metaphors. "Great is he who imposes the metaphor," the poet said. But then it is the task of the reader, on encountering such metaphors, to see how far one can ride them out. At what point do they stop putting us in an illuminating relation to life? Where do they break down? Darwin's thinking about natural selection may help us to understand the animal kingdom. But should we use it to justify a society where all-out competition reigns? Perhaps this is a point where the grand Darwinian metaphor fractures.
Foucault would teach us that all disciplines discipline. That is, that every area of intellectual inquiry—psychology, sociology, history, literary criticism—tends toward providing reductive norms for human creations and for human behavior, thus delimiting possibility. Is this true? If so, what is there to do about it? What is there to do, in particular, if you are someone who, while using Foucault as the creator of your master narrative, at the same time is working in an institution, giving grades, collecting data, compiling reports, that effectively assault all that Foucault would seem to stand for?
This is not an unanswerable question. But surely it is the sort of question one must ask of one's own Final Narrative. In my experience, teachers of the humanities rarely do so. They rarely put the class's master terms on display, rarely make them the object of scrutiny and criticism.
If Foucault is your patron saint of wisdom (suggestive as I sometimes find him, he is not mine—to me he is a builder of dungeons in the air), then by all means bring him to the fore. Teach him directly. Let us see what language he has to unfold, what his Final Narrative entails. And if a language is also a way of life, we want to know what kind of life Foucault enjoins. A language, once taken on as an ultimate narrative, is not a set of markers, not merely a map, but a set of commitments, however contingent those commitments might be. It's necessary to test the author at hand, that is, as the source for a way of life.
Why Read? Page 4
