Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  When you apply Foucault to Dickens and don't turn in the direction of Foucault and interrogate his reach and value—his application to life—you lose what benefit Foucault may bring. When you translate Dickens into Foucault, you lose what benefit Dickens might have had to deliver. You leave with precious little, when there was so much that you might have had.

  There is another disadvantage in applying theory to literature. To adapt a distinction made by Richard Poirier: literature tends to be dense; theory tends to be difficult. I can take my children, ages twelve and fourteen, to a production of Hamlet: no doubt they'll sleep through some of it, daydream through some more. But they'll also wake up at times—be shocked, puzzled, tickled, and occasionally illuminated. The best literature tends to be a layered experience. Even a beginning reader can get something from it. Then there's further to go, into legitimate complexity, true density and depth. Theory, on the other hand, tends to be an all-or-nothing affair. You get it or you don't. Face young people with a page of Derrida, whose reflections on the defining limits of Western thought are anything but valueless, and they're likely to depart with no benefit at all. Nothing is available for them. They don't get it, period. Then, once you've surmounted the difficulty, Derrida, like most theorists, tends to be a bit too available—theorists tend to have an astounding capacity to say the same thing over and over again.

  If you set theory between readers and literature—if you make theory a prerequisite to discussing a piece of writing—you effectively deny the student a chance to encounter the first level of literary density, the level he's ready to negotiate. Theory is used, then, to banish aspiring readers from literary experience that by rights belongs to them.

  The hasty reader might mistake my view for the "antitheory" position. For there are any number of professors of humanities who simply detest any and all far-reaching analytical work. I've written a book about contemporary theorists that's not at all unadmiring, and on occasion I teach their work. But experience has shown me that there are more viable and more varied options for students in literature itself, and that contemporary theory, though not without its appeals, tends to be implausibly extreme in its vision of experience and, accordingly, untenable as a guide to life. Can you live it? Alas, it's generally the case that no one can live out the latest version of theoretical apostasy and that, just as depressing, no one, even the theory's most devoted advocates, is even mildly inclined to try.

  Interpretation

  INTERPRETATION IS THE name of the game, says Stanley Fish, and all humanities professors must play. Fish is probably the best-known American literary critic at work today. His books on literary theory and on Milton are much consulted in the academy. To Fish, interpretation is a test of ingenuity. It's a way to demonstrate intellectual prowess. Often interpretation is a chance to push your reader's and student's credulity as far as possible, then a step further. Fish has observed that his aim as an interpreter is not to find truth but to be as interesting as he can be. Emphatically, the objective is not to make past wisdom available to the uses of the present, however badly such wisdom may be needed. For Fish, what literary critics do is inevitably without consequences: it changes nothing in academia or in the public world. Interpretation, for Fish, is a self-delighting and self-promoting game. He cites with full approval the view that "literary interpretation . . . has no purpose external to the arena of its practice; it is the 'constant unfolding' to ourselves 'of who we are' as practitioners; its audience is made up of those who already thrill to its challenges and resonate to its performances."

  I suspect that Fish finds the seriousness with which he's regarded to be supremely amusing. I suspect that as a brilliant satirist unfolding one piece of performance art after another, he takes delight in pushing his academic readers as far into the ridiculous as possible. I've no doubt that Fish will be greatly relieved when people stop taking him literally, begin regarding him as the stern moralist that he actually is, and understand that he has always hoped we would do the opposite of what he recommended. In reading Fish on interpretation, one should become disturbed by one's own practice—by the practice of interpreting for the sake of interpreting, as something to do, because one is good at it, as a way to advance one's career—and try something better. By pretending to endorse things as they are, in their current near-absurdity, Fish is no doubt trying to stir professorial rebellion. But to Fish's probable surprise, professors have not seen that he is the closest thing the academy has to a Jonathan Swift.

  But isn't it a good thing, this exercise of mind that students undergo when they interpret texts with ingenious rigor? Doesn't it strengthen the intellect, improve the powers of discernment, enhance capacities for what's called critical thinking?

  Critical thinking is now much revered in humanities departments. We pride ourselves on dispensing it. But what exactly is critical thinking? Often it is no more than the power to debunk various human visions. It is, purportedly, the power to see their limits and faults. But what good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are not open to having these beliefs modified? What's called critical thought generally takes place from no set position at all. There is no committed vantage, however transient. Rather, one attacks from any spot that one likes, so everything is susceptible to denunciation. "One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened," as Nietzsche puts it in his passage on the Last Man, "so there is no end of derision." For the critical thinker there is no end of derision. When one thinks critically in behalf of creating a Final Narrative, that is something else again. Then you are sifting visions for their applications to life. A great deal is at stake. But most of what now passes as critical thinking takes place in a void.

  In general, critical thinking is the art of using terms one does not believe in (Foucault's, Marx's) to debunk worldviews that one does not wish to be challenged by.

  What happens when you teach critical thinking unattached to some form of ethics, or some process of character creation? What you help inculcate, I believe, is the capacity to use the intellect in ever more adroit ways. This kind of education does make the student smarter, in some abstract sense. It makes him more adept at the use of what the Frankfurt School thinkers liked to call instrumental reason. This sort of reason conceives the world in terms of problems and solutions. It is prone to abstraction, to the release of the intellect from the emotions, to extreme forms of detachment. The development of instrumental reason is good preparation for doing work in a corporation in which you look only at means and not at ends. You see processes, but not the ultimate performance. Then you go off, the better to enjoy Saturday night.

  It may seem radical to be studying Foucault and Adorno. But students now do not study these figures, if by "study" we mean deciding after careful interpretation and long questioning whether the figures at hand have it right, whether the students ought to try to live with these writers as guides to life. On the contrary, students learn to apply the terms of analysis, like painters applying pigment to a house, or like systems analysts applying their standards to a particular disposition of persons and tasks. The values involved mean virtually nothing. You can be a close observer, you can write well, you can be brilliantly ingenious in making your terms appear to square with the poem at hand, you can even be someone on whom little or nothing is lost, and you can still be the sort of person who does what he is told without thinking much about it. You can still be someone who lives to follow orders.

  What interpretation as currently taught encourages is a highly skilled, highly negotiable form of expertise that will often be prized by future employers in that it comes without inconvenient ethical baggage. Despite the rhetoric of subversion that surrounds it, current humanities education does not teach subversive skepticism (I wish that it did); rather, it teaches the dissociation of intellect from feeling—something that can be a prelude to personal and collective anomie. True education, as Friedrich Schiller rightly saw it, ought to fuse mind and heart. Current educ
ation in the liberal arts does precisely the opposite. At the end of this road lies a human type bitterly and memorably described in Weber: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

  "I'll die before I give you power over me," Narcissus liked to say to his many wooers, before he offended the goddess Hera and was forced to fall in love with his own image in a pool. The analysis of great works now often takes place beneath the auspices of Narcissus. The student is taught not to be open to the influence of great works, but rather to perform facile and empty acts of usurpation, in which he assumes unearned power over the text. Foucault applied at industrial strength is an automatic debunking agent. But the process leaves the student untouched, with no actual growth, just a reflexively skeptical stance that touches the borders of nihilism. Such activity, prolonged over the course of an education, is likely to contribute to the creation of what the philosopher James C. Edwards calls "normal nihilists." Normal nihilists are people who believe in nothing (except the achievement of their own advantage), and we may be creating them in significant numbers by not counting the ethical costs of our pedagogy. "It's easy to be brilliant," Goethe said, "when you do not believe in anything." And it's easy, too, to be brilliantly successful.

  The sense of superiority that current liberal arts education often instills rhymes with some of the least creditable trends in our culture. It rhymes with a superior and exploitative relation to the natural world, with condescension to the poor, with a sense that nothing in the world matters unless it matters to Me. Analytic pedagogy, the pedagogy of instrumental reason, does not create these trends; far from it. But such pedagogy contributes to wrongs that it should be contending against.

  What's missing from the current dispensation is a sense of hope when we confront major works, the hope that they will tell us something we do not know about the world or give us an entirely fresh way to apprehend experience. We need to learn not simply to read books, but to allow ourselves to be read by them.

  And this process can take time. Describing his initiation into modern literature, into Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and their contemporaries, Lionel Trilling writes: "Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate." "I bored them," says Trilling. Given the form of literary education now broadly available, it is almost impossible that a student would say of a group of books, "I bored them." No, in the current consumer-driven academy another word, differently intoned, would be on the tip of the tongue: "Booooooring." We professors have given our students the language of smug dismissal, and their profit of it is that they know how to curse with it and to curse those things that we ourselves have most loved and, somewhere in our hearts, probably love still.

  Good at School

  TRANSLATION HAS BEEN the order of the day for some time in the humanities, beginning with the relatively benign translations of the New Critics and moving on to the more and more strained recastings now current. The objective of humanistic study seems more and more to be the transformation of the best that has been known and thought into other, homogenizing languages, the languages of criticism, which we rarely take the time to interrogate or consider putting to use day to day.

  When I entered graduate school in 1979 the reigning terms of translation were philosophical or, more accurately, antiphilosophical. These were the terms of deconstruction. When I was beginning at Yale, Paul de Man was working to propound a theory of antimeaning that he believed would have application to all of literature. From his point of view, writing that mattered culminated at points of undecidability. These are moments where two meanings come into play and it is impossible to make a determination as to which one supersedes the other. Undecidability is different from paradox, which is ultimately resolvable, and different too from oxymoron, in which the coupling of the terms reveals itself as an absurdity.

  The end of Yeats's poem "Among School Children" asks us how we can know the dancer from the dance. The last four lines run this way:

  O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

  Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

  O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  To de Man, the final question is not resolvable. The poem at first seems to suggest that there is nothing so glorious as the moment when the dancer and the dance, form and experience, creator and creation merge. Thus the final line can be read as a celebration of full being outside of time. It's an affirmation of artistic transcendence. Yet, read somewhat differently, the poem also suggests that this moment may be illusory. Maybe we ought to take the last line literally rather than figuratively and try to figure out how we might actually achieve a skeptical detachment. Please instruct me: how can I separate the dancer from the dance? Perhaps the feeling of timelessness and interfusion is a delusory one that needs combating; perhaps it is conducive to feelings of omnipotence, to godlike illusions. It is desirable to know the dancer from the dance, for such knowledge might free us from mystification. Yet study the poem as one might, it does not affirm one reading at the expense of the other. So we are suspended between assurances, committed neither to one side nor the other.

  De Man's larger argument is that literature perpetually yields these moments of unreadability. And herein lies the clinching point: this is what makes literature a particularly distinguished and enlightening form of discourse. Writes de Man, "A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode." That capacity simultaneously to affirm and to deny is, according to de Man, really all that literature yields that is of consequence. People, human beings who in other regards were not noticeably brain befuddled, took this notion seriously.

  It is reasonable to be attuned to such moments, to be sure (and I think Yeats does offer one here and that de Man explicates it shrewdly); and it can be illuminating to ponder them. This de Manian moment is not unrelated to Buddhist accounts of self-annulment, the achievement of egolessness through meditation. But Buddhists reflect constantly on the reasons for such a quest and on what might be achieved by a human being once the ego is annulled. In de Man, there is no such reflection on ends. His findings, such as they stand, are never put to existential work.

  De Manian suspension between alternatives may be a good place to begin, or to rebegin, serious literary inquiry. But to imagine that such doubt is all that literature yields, or the best that literature yields, that all those marvelous books, marvelous vision, can be reduced to a moment that balances on the head of a pin, well, as Huck Finn put it, that's too many for me.

  But de Man need not be singled out here. Rather, virtually every critic or school of criticism that matters has worked to reduce literary experience, vast and varied as it is, into a set of simple terms. They've turned contingent literature into delimiting philosophy (or, one might say, "metaphysics"), which says that there is one mode of happiness, one kind of good, one form of ideal life for everyone.

  Salient in the process of transforming literary variety into philosophical uniformity has been psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis lets the critic become a temporary therapist, diving into the inner life of the work, finding its hidden chambers, telling a story about the work and the author that the author could not herself tell. Now the power of the critic grows exponentially, as he configures himself as the wise analyst and the author as the patient, on the scene for needful therapy. Whatever the benefits of psychoanalysis to living patients who elect to become part of the process—and I think that they can be real—there is nevertheless little indication that psycho-literary analysis does anything for the patient. It does, however, enrich the analyst with no little power.

  Why did these approaches, these forms of translation, catch on? For many reasons, not insignificant amo
ng them the teacher's will to power over the texts that she teaches. But these translating approaches work in part because they're good at school. They give the teacher something coherent to teach. They give the students a portable knowledge, something to take away from the scene. And they give them an illusion of potency over works far more potent than they. Current literary analysis allows students to take up the stance of cool complacency that they, and all of us, have become accustomed to from living in a spectatorial culture. The knowing literary-critical stance may be more difficult to achieve than the TV watcher's accustomed disdain, but the two positions are not unrelated. In both, one assumes an unearned and potentially debilitating superiority. We will not have real humanistic education in America until professors, and their students, can give up the narcissistic illusion that through something called theory, or criticism, they can stand above Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante.

  If the latter-day Dionysus is the god of humanities entertainment, the new Apollo is the god of humanities analysis, the one who confers power and skills on his devotees. When you hear a literary critic repeating terms over and over, whether they be "ideology" and "class struggle," or "repression" and "neurosis," or "patriarchy" and "oppression," you know that you are in the hands of a writer who is devoted to the soft institutional usurpation of literary power, the better to create other, less varied kinds of writing—and fewer vital options.

  Practitioners of all disciplines must promise something, implicitly or overtly. They tell their students that eventually they will possess a certain sort of knowledge. To thrive in a university, a department must promise some kind of desirable prowess, whether it be understanding of the physical world, knowledge of history's laws, or, in this case, a capacity to analyze and describe works of art as though they were species of fauna. We have made literary study fit in, be good at school. But true humanistic study is not geared to generalized, portable truths; it is geared to human transformation. And that is something that catalogues cannot describe and to which the writing of detached literary critical essays is more or less irrelevant.