Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  One might part company with Burke on the subject of how much power the individual mind can hope to possess—and I do—yet still listen respectfully to what he has to say about the "latent wisdom" that can inform conventional thinking. We need to be open to the possibility that our current students, who are less rebellious than any group I have encountered, may well know things that we do not.

  History Now

  THE METHOD OF teaching I affirm begins with the self and its own sense of who it is and what its destiny might be. But it is important not to end there. Humanistic education has to go beyond individual being. Emerson remarked once that there is no history, only biography. Admire Emerson as I do, here I think that he is trapped in outrageous error.

  History has many uses for life. It begins as a branch of literature: Herodotus is determined to tell us about the great deeds of the Greeks who fought against the Persians, so that those deeds will not fade from human memory. He sets up his major figures, as Plutarch does his noble Greeks and Romans, as people worthy of emulation. In this respect, his work is in line with Homer and the epic poet's desire to preserve great deeds and great words for posterity. Herodotus offers the kind of exempla that literature, too, can give. From Plutarch to the present, Pericles to Rosa Parks, history is full of individuals who offer true inspiration.

  But history doesn't only provide ideals. Its virtues are multiple. History too, one might say, is the noblest form of blackmail. Every leader of consequence knows that the eyes of the future will eventually fasten on him, and that he will pay with his reputation for even the best-hidden crimes. When Richard Nixon breaks through his manifold limits and opens up a dialogue with China, he's being responsive to history's noble blackmail.

  In history, we also encounter large-scale narratives where we can find a place. Having made a commitment to, say, the teachings of the Savior, the future of socialism, or the progress of democracy, "an average unending procession," as Whitman described it, we want to locate the movement's origins. We want to see how the movement was born and what form its infancy and early growth took. And we want to join in the collective trajectory. By studying history we can attach ourselves to human efforts and human energies larger than ourselves and bring our personal force into the great wave of unfolding, collective hopes.

  Literature, Aristotle tells us, is more philosophical than history; or, as Frye glosses him, philosophy presumes to tell us what must happen, history what has happened, and poetry what happens. There is the purportedly essential (philosophy), the contingent (history), and something in between (literature). But I would prefer to see in literature not so much a diagnosis of what happens but a prophecy of what can happen—a prophecy of how we can touch our version of that immortal freemasonry Keats describes. We are still trying to become the contemporaries of the great authors. Literature does many things. It puts us in contact with earthly hell, as we can best render it. But it also shows us the world we wish to live in, the place Blake and Frye think of when they use the word Golgonooza.

  The cities that history unfolds are usually far different places. There what is most refractory about human experience reveals itself. Rome is built on slavery. Even exalted Athens burns with strife. Hegel refers to the slaughter bench of history; Marx talks about class struggle, but he might also have said class war, in which the descending classes are food for the upstarts. History, despite its glorious moments—despite the civil rights movement in America, despite the revolution that Jefferson and Washington led—is often a chronicle of misery. It shows where the best-laid plans tend to go.

  History is frequently a cautionary antithesis to the hopes that literature ignites. For if Lear depicts horrors, one leaves the play nonetheless knowing that a human being wrote the play, a human being did that—and such achievement is a basis for hope. There is no such shaping force discernible behind history, despite the efforts of Hegelians of all stripes to reveal one. If literature and the arts can superbly render human freedom, history gives us the world of fate. And the student needs to measure every hope he has for self-creation, engendered by the poets and artists, against the realities of the recorded past. Not to be willing to engage this dialectic of power and limitation early on in life often condemns one to be the idealist in youth who becomes the disillusioned reactionary in old age. Without history to teach how hard it is, how ferociously fate can conspire against freedom, one is likely to be content with mere literary half-truths. Though the rise of democracy has injected a heretofore unimaginable hope into humanity's story, it still pays to consult history for a sense of how far we can fall and how fast.

  In a liberal arts education, history is the necessary and profound rejoinder to the liberating arts—which is not to say that it cannot itself be a liberating art. But the literary comes first. Students need to be offered what hope they can accept, and to take it into a perilous future. Without a literary education, they may never find that hope. Fate, on the other hand, does not need to be sought and found. Fate will find you. History will find you. You can learn history from books, or life will teach it to you more intimately.

  Always Historicize?

  HISTORICIZING IS NOW the most influential intellectual fashion in the liberal arts. To qualify as a respectable scholar, one needs to put the work at hand into its historical context. That is, one must relegate it to the past. One must identify its analogues, its context, its conditions of engendering, the "social energies" that made it what it is. By no means should the real scholar see what the work can do in the present. That might open him up to criticism; it might make him look silly to actually profess something, rather than merely to affirm doubt and call it knowledge.

  This is not to say that historical scholarship is without value. One needs to know the political context of Whitman's "Lilacs" elegy for President Lincoln; one needs to understand something of the Bible and something of Restoration politics to read Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. But current scholars have gone far beyond that. To them, works of art are to be quarantined in the past, because living now we can't possibly understand them on their own terms. Good. We will understand them on what terms we can.

  Scholars who historicize comprehensively, who deny the bearing of past greatness on the present, are persecuting the prophets, imprisoning their spirits. They are the descendants of Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor, who would protect the people from the dangerous word of the Savior by locking him away. I value few things as much as historical interpretations that allow us to read a past text in more nuanced ways. All honor to the bibliographers and the annotators. But to those who would clap the past away from the present—to paraphrase Blake at the close of Milton, they murder the Savior time on time.

  True teachers of literature become teachers because their lives have been changed by reading. They want to offer others the same chance to be transformed. "What we have loved, / Others will love," says Wordsworth in The Prelude, "and we will teach them how." Literally the great poet is talking to his friend Coleridge, to whom the poem is written. But figuratively he speaks to all of us who have been changed by art and want to pay it forward, pass it along.

  Why do teachers, especially at universities, turn against this hope, and teach that great writing is something we need to hold at arm's length? Why do they tell students to put the writing that matters at a historical distance, when students need to bring it closer to them, perhaps merge with it? To be entirely honest, I do not know. It may be that the weight of learning scholars must carry to be qualified to teach so stifles the imagination—so weighs it down—that it loses the power of sympathetic flight. This was what Nietzsche believed deep historical learning could do, and why he believed it was a danger as well as a potential virtue. There's a scene in Spenser where a questing knight is pinned down by the weight of his own armor, stuck to the ground and unable to fight. And that, perhaps, is the situation of our historicizers, pinned down by the bulk of their learning. As Nietzsche puts it, "The historical training of our critics prevents their havi
ng an influence in the true sense—an influence on life and action."

  Or maybe institutional pressure for the conversion of imaginative power into academic knowledge is so strong that it forces the study of art to meet some high pseudo-scientific standards. Maybe we professors need to differentiate ourselves from grade school teachers (too feminine?) and show the investment bankers that we too are grown-ups, we too are mature? Does the need to be respected and respectable—the need to be beyond mockery—so infect university teachers that for it they sacrifice everything? Or are professors unwitting participants in the culture of cool, devoted to looking out at great art with the bemused, condescending detachment of the TV junkie? Have they taken up something not unlike the junkie's position, gazing down like slightly woozy gods on the passing show? Under the influence of dope (and its cultural equivalents), Ann Marlowe says, you can stem your anxieties. You can cultivate the illusion of having stopped time. But nothing Amazing will ever happen to you. (The changes that literature can bring on people are often just that, Amazing.)

  Canons

  ONCE YOU KNOW what purpose you want literature to fulfill—the purpose that all things that matter go to fulfill, as Emerson suggested: to inspire—then a span of questions that now bedevils the humanities becomes easier to answer. You can think much more clearly and to better effect about canon formation, about multiculturalism, about cultural studies, about academic research.

  The question of canon formation, despite all its fancy baggage, is really a question about what to teach. What books shall we get young people to read? Right now this is a terribly vexed issue for a number of reasons. Traditionalists like to go around snorting about how the new cultural studies types want to replace Bronte novels with bodice rippers off the supermarket racks. But when you ask the traditionalists exactly what makes a Bronte novel more worth reading than a bodice ripper, they often can't come up with much. They talk about subtlety and sophistication and depth, and they take up a condescending pose, the pose smug upper-middle-class types have greeted the unwashed with for hundreds of years. And of course, the cultural studies gang loves this kind of reaction. They're fulfilling their historical function of shocking hell out of the bourgeoisie.

  What the defenders of consequential writing need to do is to stand up and say that a Bronte novel can help you live better—can, to use the idiom of this book, better enhance your expanding circle of self than the bodice ripper can. Until the so-called humanists take this step, they're going to be easy prey to the prophets of ersatz novelty.

  For myself, I would largely leave the question of what to teach up to individual teachers, who could offer those books that they think can change their students' lives for the better. Let them select the books that are full of vital options. Let them choose the works that they themselves have been transformed by and that they think, now, can have the greatest effect on students. Some of the best classes I had as a student came when the professor went back to a book he'd read when young and became that young man again, fired by Woolf, or Joyce, or Mann.

  I think that canonical works, the ones you read as part of a major—the books of which there may be many or few, depending on the teachers' views at a given time—ought to be the testing and transforming books that have influenced people in exciting ways over a long period. Teachers must not be guided by what they find "interesting," or by what they sense might become the subject of a bracing essay for PMLA, but on what could inspire their students to change, or to solidify their own commitments. We all get socialized once by our parents and teachers, ministers and priests. Studying the humanities is about getting a second chance. It's not about being born again, but about growing up a second time, this time around as your own educator and guide, Virgil to yourself.

  Scholarly discourse should be more and more about the educational, or self-developing, properties of great writing. An essay on Shakespeare and love ought not to unfold the "ideology" of Shakespearean love, but let us know what, if anything, the author thinks that Shakespeare has to teach us about Eros. Scholarly knowledge will still be at a premium, but its objective will be to bring forward the author's vision, to make explicit what is implicit, to show the way to successful teaching.

  So absurdly removed from day-to-day life is professional literary study that there is no major journal, on the order of Raritan, Representations, or Critical Inquiry, where teachers write to each other about ways they've found to teach this or that book. One has to look long and hard simply to find accounts of pedagogy. There are very, very few prominent scholars who have spent time writing about the actual dynamics of class exchange. In the waves of prose about the humanities that come out every year, students go virtually unmentioned. They are not quoted. They are not described. Anyone attending an academic conference or reading a professional journal for the first time would be forgiven for not knowing that what most of us spend most of our energies doing is teaching.

  There is a sense among humanities professors that the field is drying up. All the major work has been done. Who wants to read yet another book on Alexander Pope? Well, I do, and students and common readers may as well, so long as the critic is willing to show what actual bearing Pope might have on the world we hold in common and on our individual lives. What human difference does he make? A brilliant book about Pope and the conduct of life could be of the highest value, and surely it is yet to be written. If what I am saying here is so, and literary criticism is not only a matter of interpretation, but a matter of reflecting on value, then the field is just opening up. The great bulk of meaningful work remains undone. And that, at least, might give some comfort to young people entering a field that must look utterly strip-mined.

  I can't stress enough how despondent graduate students in the humanities often are at this point. They're some of the most admirable people to be found in their generation. With their prestigious undergraduate degrees, their splendid grades and board scores, they could go on to big-money careers in business and law. But they refuse. They want to study something that they're passionate about. Yet over time, almost all of them see that to thrive in the profession, they must make themselves marketable, and that often means betraying themselves. It means picking a subject that fits into the current conformity. It means spending years writing things that, on some deep level, they do not believe to be true. The exertion involved in having to get up every day, repair to one's word processor, and set to work defying one's nature in the interest of future employment, is not conducive to the psyche's health, or to the body's, either. These impressively gifted young men and women deserve better.

  Their profession enjoins them to seek not what is true and humanly transforming but what is "interesting." That is, they seek out areas for research that are untouched, often untouched for very good reason. So the assistant professor begins a deep study of now unread and barely readable nineteenth-century domestic novels or boys' adventure books. Then he begins to teach those books, the better to get the monograph done, and in doing so becomes a waster of students' most valuable time and accordingly of students' lives. If a professor truly believes that nineteenth-century domestic fiction can expand the reader, make him more than he was, that is wonderful. I respect the daring. The independence of mind is to be admired. But to teach without the conviction that the book at hand might become someone's secular Bible is to betray the heart of the humanities.

  To some, it may seem that literary study is at its end. But I believe we may be at the inception. We can begin to come to terms with Arnold's view that in the absence of faith in transcendental religion, poetry may have to do. We can begin learning to talk about poetry in order to render it as the secular scripture that it needs to be.

  Do students, in order to be changed, need to read books that touch on their own experience, and in particular their own identity? Sometimes. If you are to adapt the world of a book to your own, to be influenced by it, it's probably helpful for the book to intersect with your past experience. So occasionally it will only
be sensible for the young black man to start with Malcolm X, for the young black woman to pick up Zora Neale Hurston.

  But identification also moves across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. I, growing up in the white working class, found no book more fascinating when I was seventeen than The Autobiography of Malcolm X. From Malcolm I learned a good deal about race relations in America; I learned about the forms of racism endemic to the South, but also, more shockingly, to the North, where I was growing up. (We were virtuous, we white northerners, especially compared with the mad Confederates we saw on TV hurling rocks in Selma—or so I imagined before I read Malcolm X.) But I acquired other things from that book as well. Malcolm X learned to read and write well in prison, relatively late in life. In page after rhapsodic page, he describes the joys of reading, the pleasures of expression, the lure of knowledge. Malcolm was persuaded, and persuaded me, that you could use the powers you acquired from books to live better yourself and to do something for the people around you. In terms of literal identity, Malcolm X and I had virtually nothing in common, but reading his book shaped me in ways that continue to matter thirty-five years after the first encounter.