Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  Thoreau and Emerson do not wish to throw out the past. Emerson, for his part, wrote a book on representative individuals, historical figures from whom we might learn. And Whitman said, in his preface to Leaves of Grass, that America does not repudiate what is done and gone. Rather, we draw on it for fresh life, ingest it and make it new, as the body does its food. If you've become a teacher, you've already entered the game on the Emersonian side; you're there to change people, help them live better. The scholar Andrew Delbanco quotes Emerson to exactly this effect: "The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening."

  My first real teaching job was at a place called the Woodstock Country School, a tiny boarding school in Vermont. The headmaster, Robin Leaver, who was an educational genius after his fashion, worked chiefly from one premise. "Every kid who enters this school," he'd often say, "has something that he can do at least half-well and probably a lot better; it's something he can take joy in; and it's something that he can use to make the world better. Your job as a teacher is to help each kid find that thing." We had marvelous students at Woodstock; some of them seemed to have a dozen or so gifts ready to unfold. But the ones who got the most tireless and affectionate attention from the teachers were the ones who seemed to have little or maybe nothing going for them. These were the kids that the world outside liked to call losers. In fact, their parents sometimes told us precisely that: "My kid's a loser. Good luck with her." Leaver, who had an affection for, and understanding of, sixteen-year-olds that I've never seen surpassed, would have to work hard to stop himself from detonating when he heard this sort of talk; usually he succeeded.

  Every week, we got together in a faculty meeting and discussed each student. There were as many as seventy-five, so the meetings would sometimes go for three hours or more. The kids in the most trouble got the most time. I can still see Robin leaning over at us, vast smile, blond hair, movie-star good looks, nearly absurd for someone head mastering a school in outer nowhere, saying somewhat ironically (somewhat): "You call yourselves teachers and you can't find anything in the world that Michael Long is interested in? Nothing? Nothing?" Someone might observe that he'd seen Michael following Bruce around. Bruce was the farmer who grew crops on the school grounds and kept up the land. "Then what are we waiting for?" Leaver would say, "Let's put him to work with Bruce. He can study English and math next term."

  Sometimes these shots in the dark worked, sometimes not. But what did have an effect was the students' developing awareness that the people who taught at the school would do anything, anything, to deliver them from wasted lives. Given that affirmation, the students were often inspired to start searching on their own.

  Twenty-five years after Woodstock closed, at a reunion on what had been the school property, Robin and I talked about why the place had finally run aground. I said it was because to make ends meet we had to take too many kids who had too many problems. They were impossible. No, said Robin. Those kids would have come along. But some of them needed years and years at the school; we just didn't have enough time. In some empirical, practical sense, what I said may have been true. A few of the kids we were accepting at the end were borderline dangerous. But the one who spoke then in the true spirit of democratic education was surely not me.

  Proust

  PERHAPS THE LAST century's most persuasive theorist of positive influence is Marcel Proust. In luminous passages, he tells us how he developed as a reader, and then how, having himself become a writer, he hoped that he might affect others.

  Proust observes: "The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgment of part of its independence. 'What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.' Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralyzed . . . There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our own thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his."

  In a society that loves technique and training, but is wary of emotion not routinized by the newspaper or the sitcom, one must be willing to learn how to feel, then frequently to be reminded. This was the gift that Wordsworth gave to John Stuart Mill, who was, when he encountered the poet, dead in his life of feeling; a perpetual inner frost seemed to have taken hold. From this condition Wordsworth delivered him. Eliot tells us that one of the main functions of poetry is to give names, however complexly metaphorical the names might be, to emotions that have abided for a long time unspoken in the heart. To name feelings with poetic sensitivity, Eliot suggests, is to make them live yet more strongly. So, learning to feel with Ruskin, Proust learned to feel as himself.

  The contemporary novelist Robert Stone describes his goal as a writer this way: "I want my reader to recognize what I've made and say, 'That's it. That's the way it is.'" No one describes this process of recognition, this benign literary influence, more gracefully than Proust, in the passages I cited in part at the beginning of this book: "But to return to my own case," Proust writes, "I thought more modestly of my book, and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as 'my' readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be 'my' readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book but with it I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' I should ask whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written (though a discrepancy in this respect need not always be the consequence of an error on my part, since the explanation could also be that the reader had eyes for which my book was not a suitable instrument)."

  Here Proust is remarkably sanguine about the possibility of the reader recognizing himself precisely in the mirror of the book's words. But often there is more to it than that. Recall Emerson: he that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies. Or, more dramatically, Kierkegaard: he who would give birth to himself must know how to work. And so the visions of even the poets often need to be brought into line with our own aspirations and with the tempers of our times. Timeless in their uses as they may be, it can take skill to make them work here and now. As Proust in a more skeptical mood puts matters: "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it."

  Form and Feeling

  WORDSWORTH SAID THAT he sought knowledge, but knowledge not purchased through the loss of power. Part of what makes literary education so important is that it offers something more than abstract knowing. It gives us wisdom that is replete with emotional force. The emphasis on form is what preserves art from the programmatic detachment that often informs more intellectualized ways of rendering experience.

  There are many ways of thinking about form, from Kenneth Burke's Aristotelian view that form is the setting up and satisfying of expectations in the reader, to Kant's idea that form lifts the art object out of the push and toss of daily life and makes it a source for disinterested contemplation. But to me, form is best understood as the primary way that writers infuse their words with feeling. It provides the music of the work. Form is the sequence of notes that a sentence plays out, thus giving an emotional content to what could otherwise be a merely cognitive experience. And form is also the grander, symphonic structure of the work that lets us know in larger-scale terms what it would be like to live this vision—not moment to moment, as sentences do, but month to month, year to year. Where are the highs, where the despondencies?

  The astounding comic buoyancy of a Dick
ens novel, its unflagging episodic invention, sprawling variety, and highhearted tone, all contribute to a sense of what liberalism of Dickens's kind can be. For Dickens, liberalism isn't condescending, nor is it ever grudging; rather, it confers a vitality on the believer that makes him affirm life and hunger for more. And this is a function of the rambunctious form—sometimes it's an antiform, I suppose—of Dickens's major novels. Preeminently, form creates and reveals emotion.

  The archetypal literary plot, the one adumbrated by Aristotle in The Poetics, can itself summon strong feelings. Many of us see ourselves in the protagonist who enters the world with strong desires, meets opposition and reversal, changes through struggle, and emerges richer—if in nothing else than in breadth of consciousness. For many, this pattern illuminates life. As Robert McKee, a thoughtful analyst of film, says, "Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence [s]; that their existence [s] operate through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality, events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons." An adroit deployment of conventional (or one might call it "archetypal") plot brings these convictions about life home to the reader with considerable impact—though the work need not articulate them overtly. Balzac's sense of what life is about—struggle, rivalry, triumph, bitter failure—is almost perfectly in tune with the values implicit in traditional novelistic plotting, and that is one of the reasons that his books read as satisfyingly as they do. In his best novels (I think of White Noise in particular) Don DeLillo departs from most of the assumptions that McKee lays out, not only in the way he renders character but also by shaping his books without readily apparent beginning, middle, and end. His cogent rebellion against novelistic form is, at least to me, as fruitful as Balzac's affirmation. It remains for the reader to say what form or antiform might put him into the best relation to his own experience. What is gained and what lost when you map your life according to the archetypal plot—or when, in DeLillo's fashion, you refuse that mapping?

  It's quite possible that attempting to shape one's life, or interpret it, in conformity with traditional plot will lead to nothing but frustration. All of the relevant assumptions about character and cause and effect might lead to self-idealization and the failure that often attends it. But such a shaping could also offer intensity and focus. The individual who shares DeLillo's sense of the relatively haphazard way of the world may be better tuned to withstand life's vagaries, though for him, the dangers of fading toward entropy abide.

  Literary beauty, to my mind, is the effective interfusion of feeling and thought. At the point of interfusion, though, there is no sentiment and there is no form—they have disappeared into each other, in the way that Apollo and Dionysus disappear into one another in Sophoclean drama, as Nietzsche understood it.

  Form tells us how it feels to live the author's truth. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is Man." Pope's opening lines from the Second Epistle of "An Essay on Man," with their vigor, point, and strong but contained energy, make modesty—"presume not God to scan"—into a source of extreme self-assurance. Awareness of human limitation can quicken the spirit more, the lines suggest, than commitment to impious daring. In the music of the lines, in the form, is an entire attitude, a bearing. Form conveys to us how someone who spoke these lines feelingly might comport herself, how she'd move and talk and sit. Wordsworth's phrase "hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity" exudes a tentative melancholy evocative of the loneliness that suffuses a poem from which God has departed. The poem's view of the world is as much in its sonorous vowels as in its overt sense. Both Pope's lines and Wordsworth's are studies in perfect interfusion, both studies in literary beauty. "That's how it is. That's true." A reader could say as much of either of them.

  Disciplines

  The kind of reading that I have been describing here—the individual quest for what truth a work reveals—is fit for virtually all significant forms of creation. We can seek vital options in any number of places. They may be found for this or that individual in painting, in music, in sculpture, in the arts of furniture making or gardening. Thoreau felt he could derive a substantial wisdom by tending his bean field. He aspired to "know beans." He hoed for sustenance, as he tells us, but he also hoed in search of tropes, comparisons between what happened in the garden and what happened elsewhere in the world. In his bean field, Thoreau sought ways to turn language—and life—away from old stabilities.

  Consider Proust, at the beginning of his career, writing to an editor to inquire if he might care for a piece of art criticism, one that would unfold the world view of the artist in something of the way, presumably, that Orwell unfolded Charles Dickens's: "I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones 'by whom our eyes are opened,' opened that is, on the world. In this study, I use the work of Chardin as an example, and I try to show its influence on our life, the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into the life of still life. Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire ?''

  The editor of the Revue Hebdomadaire thought not. But it would have interested me. For I think that in the works of all the consequential painters there is an answer to Schopenhauer's question "What is life?" That answer is difficult to coax forward, and few art critics have been able to do so. (Arnold Hauser comes most immediately to mind.) Such visions are easier to derive from words, from writings, in part because for most of us the prevailing medium, moment to moment, is verbal. We talk to ourselves. We talk to others. The circles that expand on the deep, or don't, are probably, for most of us, composed of words. Thus a critical part of making the nonverbal arts into the stuff of human expansion is verbal description. Criticism, acting in Proust's spirit, can turn the visions of the painters and composers into words, and so give us the chance to make better use of them. In humanistic criticism, there are few more difficult tasks than simply re-presenting a sculpture or a piece of music—describing the work and making it live.

  I have chosen literature as a central source of vital words for a number of reasons. Since the Romantic period, literature has offered us a latent hypothesis. This is the view that there are simply too many sorts of human beings, too many idiosyncratic constitutions, for any one map of human nature, or any single guide to the good life, to be adaptable for us all. Such a realization, which coincides with the foundations of widespread democracy, as well as with the flourishing of novels, holds that there are multiple ways of apprehending experience, and multiple modes of internal organization, or disorder. Accordingly, there are many, many different ways to lead a satisfying, socially valuable life. This, as I've suggested, is what Milan Kundera is getting at when he calls the characters—and, by implication, the narrating voices—rendered in fiction "experimental selves." There are multiple ways to go, and confining theories of self, even those as penetrating as, say, Plato's and Kant's, cannot encompass the range of human difference.

  The teacher begins the secular dialogue with faith by offering the hypothesis that there is no one human truth about the good life, but that there are many human truths, many viable paths. To set his students on them, he offers them multiple examples of what Arnold called the best that has been known and thought. This multiplying of possibilities—a condition enhanced by the rapid diffusion of culture around the globe—makes literature, which is inevitably the effusion of an individual mind, the most likely starting place, I would even say the center of humanistic education. As literary works are multiple, so are the number of potentially usable human visions of experience.

  Beginning with this hypothesis,
the teacher's task is often one of inspired impersonation. Against her students' Final Narratives, against their various faiths, she, with a combination of disinterest and passion, hurls alternatives. Impersonation: the teacher's objective is to offer an inspiring version of what is most vital in the author. She merges with the author, becomes the creator, and in doing so makes the past available to the uses of the present. The teacher listens to criticisms, perhaps engenders a few herself—but, always, ultimately, is the author's advocate, his attorney for explication and defense.

  In this process it's important for the teacher to respect the possibility that however marvelous the books she puts before her students, some will in the end decide to stay as they are. They will wish, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, to repose upon the stability of truth—their own prior truth. Like Dr. Johnson, his contemporary Edmund Burke held certain conventional ways of thinking in the highest regard. Both men considered a nation's fund of common sense to be something like a slowly evolving epic poem, in which generation after generation deposited the wisdom it won through trial, success, error, and ensuing consideration.

  In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke writes an homage to common wisdom, which he refers to under the name of prejudice, a word here devoid of its current racialist connotations. Teachers too eager to effect conversion should probably read Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke regularly on the matter of conventional thinking at its best. Here is Burke addressing a sympathizer with revolutionary France: "We [in England] are generally men of untaught feelings;. . . instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."