Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  So by all means, give the young black student who's barely heard of Malcolm a copy of the Autobiography. But we shouldn't assume that an African American is inevitably going to be more responsive to Malcolm than to Marcel Proust. If, on getting to college, I had encountered professors convinced that I needed to read James T. Farrell, Mike Gold, or some other designated "proletarian writers," I would have rebelled instantly. At the same time I was glad to read Farrell, among many others, and found in him something of an ally. One's literal identity—the product of race, class, gender, and socialization—is not the sole, and very often not even the central, ground for literary identification.

  Multiculturalism

  KNOW THE OTHER, says the multiculturalist. I agree. A segment of the humanities curriculum should be devoted to studying the literature and arts of cultures that are so resolutely different from the West's that what we confront is less likely to be live options than it is bracingly different modes of being. It is a good thing to know and respect difference, if it is worthy of respect, and to understand other cultures in their own terms.

  Such knowledge may impede cruelty and exploitation, granted. But shall we know the other without knowing ourselves? If we learn only of difference, without taking the time to find, or begin to compound, the inner being, we risk being walking voids, readily taken up by, say, commercial interests, ever ready to use our college-won knowledge of others for the purposes of exploiting them. Where the inner void was, the unbearable lightness was, there the corporation may well drive its roots. Knowledge of the other without a corresponding self-knowledge is a supremely dangerous acquisition.

  There may be no better training for the global economy than multiculturalism. Students who are immersed in this curriculum will find that they are able to pose as "citizens of the world," moving among many sorts of people. But in whose interest? Who benefits? Will the world?

  Writing on the rise of multicultural education, David Rieff asks a sharp question: "Are the multi-culturalists truly unaware of how closely their treasured catchphrases—'cultural diversity,' 'difference,' the need to 'do away with boundaries'—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation: 'product diversification,' 'the global marketplace,' and 'the boundary-less company'?" Later in his essay, Rieff observes: "The more one reads in academic multi-culturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world . . . Both CEOs and Ph.D.'s insist more and more that it is no longer possible to speak in terms of the United States as some fixed, sovereign entity. The world has moved on; capital and labor are mobile; and with each passing year national borders, not to speak of national identities, become less relevant either to consciousness or to commerce."

  Martha Nussbaum, one of the few thinkers now who is willing to suggest that literature and art matter because they can help people to live better than they do, argues that becoming a citizen of the world is the objective of liberal arts education. This goal she attributes to the Greeks. But what Socrates, primary among Greek thinkers, taught first is to know yourself. And when you do, through literature and history, you will begin to see whether being a citizen of the world is the right thing for you to aspire to be at this point in time. Perhaps the goal of world citizenship is too abstract. Maybe we need to be more pragmatic. How, precisely, does one wish to connect to the world at large? Maybe the best relation to the existing world, if global capitalism is the prevailing game, will be pure opposition, anti-world-citizenship as it were.

  But multiculturalism, well understood, remains one of the joys of current humanistic study. The scholarly work of bringing together East and West, for instance, is of the greatest consequence. The religious thought and the medical knowledge of the East have a great deal to teach us in our present state. Never have we had a chance to learn so much from the study of others, including a humane, but not a blindly comprehensive, tolerance. And some texts that initially seem embodiments of pure difference will turn out to be exactly the ones that future students respond to with a shock of recognition. The young upper-middle-class woman from Ohio may turn away from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a book she's supposed to adore, and find that Chinua Achebe sees the world almost precisely as it is. Once we've opened up the possibility of direct literary connection—connection with great authors in the search for truth—all sorts of marvelous and unexpected meetings of mind become possible.

  Pop

  THE SPIRIT OF education I affirm is well expressed by Harold Bloom: "We all of us go home each evening, and at some moment in time, with whatever degree of overt consciousness, we go back over all the signs that the day presented to us. In those signs, we seek only what can aid the continuity of our own discourse, the survival of those ongoing qualities that will give what is vital in us even more life. This seeking is the Vichian and Emersonian making of signification into meaning, by the single test of aiding our survival." This is what we do, or ought to do, with books—turn their signification into meaning, and so into possibility, in the hopes that so doing will better our lot.

  The test of a book lies in its power to map or transform a life. The question we would ultimately ask of any work of art is this: Can you live it? If you cannot, it may still command considerable interest. The work may charm, it may divert. It may teach us something about the larger world; it may refine a point. But if it cannot help some of us to imagine a life, or unfold one already latent within, then it is not major work, and probably not worth the time of students who, at this period in their lives, are looking to respond to consequential and very pressing questions. They are on the verge of choosing careers, of marrying, of entering the public world. They are in dire need of maps, or of challenges to their existing cartography. Perhaps most of all, they seek ways to unfold their promise, to achieve the highest form of being they can. Works of art matter to the degree that they can help people do this. Books should be called major and become canonical when over time they provide existing individuals with live options that will help them change for the better. A democratic humanism can have no other standard for greatness.

  The most beautiful statement of this ideal of literary education that I know of is Oscar Wilde's and comes from "The Soul of Man Under Socialism": "So he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realized fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like than Wagner, when he realized his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realized his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men." Such perfections are the aim of literary education, and if perfection is rarely the actual result, the process is no less noble for that.

  Popular culture, which is more and more taught at universities, usually cannot offer such prospects. The objective of a good deal of rock music and film is to convey the pleasing illusion that people can live in the way that the singers and the actors do when they're on. Occasionally, I suppose, a performer comes through. Keith Richards seems to be, in life, the Keith he evokes when he's onstage. Most people probably don't have the guts or the constitution. When Terry Southern came to interview Richards, he laid three Quaaludes on him as a gift. Keith swallowed them all, took a slug of bourbon, and woke up two days later. No interview for Te
rry. But I'm not sure that this moment, taken as representative, can point to a plausible life for much of anyone except Richards himself.

  Yet what David Denby says about movie love—and by extension the love of popular culture overall—still strikes me as true: "Movie love puts people in touch with their own instincts and pleasures. Movies can lead to self-reconciliation, and that is one reason they have inspired an almost unlimited affection." Putting people in touch with their in stincts and pleasures: movies and many other popular forms tap into the fantasy life, and insofar as desire is being drowned by the gray waves of the reality principle, we need it to be restored. (Not to be able to fantasize at all is probably even less healthy than fantasizing all the time.) A little bit of tolerant thinking about the sorts of erotic and adventurous fantasies that we're drawn to can tell us a good deal about what's not present in our own lives. The message may be hyperbolical; fantasy is an exaggerated genre. But perhaps we need such exaggeration to be awakened from the spell of the day-to-day. Fantasy can inspire us to search for ways to satisfy hungers we didn't know we had.

  By far the best inquiry into pop culture I know of along these lines is Simon Frith's essay on the Stones' Beggar's Banquet. "I've always lived a decent, sober, careful life," says Frith, disarmingly enough, and then he goes on to describe what it means to him to be drawn to the woozy, reckless life the Stones purvey. By the end of the piece, Frith can say that "Beggar's Banquet, so intense in its pursuit of pleasure, lays bare the weight borne by our notions of love and sex, the secret melancholy of life in the consumer collective. These are as much effects of current capitalism as dole queues and boring jobs and material squalor[,] and the Stones' pleasure perspective gives us a new sense of them . . . In other words, the function of the Stones' rock and roll dedication . . . is not self-indulgence or escape but defiance. Beggar's Banquet celebrates the reality of capitalist pleasure and denies its illusions. No expectations, a lot of laughs—the Stones' strength derives from their prodigality, from their denial of consequence." That said, the "decent, sober, careful" author has probably got to think about some riskier, more pleasure-prone ways to live.

  Once we have made contact with fantasy, we need a new, larger self-synthesis that pays heed to refractory desires. Self-knowledge means knowing what we want, even if those wants are embarrassingly grandiose, or socially despised. But fantasies cannot generally be a direct blueprint for life, the way that the work of Henry James, say, can conceivably be.

  Denby's article on film is related to Freud's radically undervalued essay "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." Here Freud, always competing with literature, wants to associate it with the id, giving psychoanalysis pride of place as the best way to develop the sane ego. Freud says that creative writing is simply a form of wish-fulfillment. In fiction and poetry of every sort, we find pleasurable fantasies to enjoy. What keeps us from seeing literary texts—not some, but all—as the fantasies that they are is form. Form, to Freud, is a distancing device. It offers the ego something to occupy itself, a kind of fore-pleasure, preliminary to the id's immersing itself in wish-fulfillment. In other words, form plays the role for literature, and presumably the other arts, that the dream work—the mechanisms by which the desire at the center of the dream undergoes distortion—plays in dreams.

  Surely, though, it's not only form that makes John Milton definingly different from the latest pop best-seller. One can still live out of Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem that has a word, however harsh, to say about virtually every subject that matters. What ought to make a work survive is that it can be lived, can function, as Milton very much wished his poem to do, as a Bible of sorts. Paradise Lost was Freud's favorite poem, and, like all of the major works Freud pondered, from Oedipus Rex to Lear, it is a basis for psychoanalysis. Those works are far too tough-minded to be written off as wish-fulfillments, just as psychoanalysis is far too sophisticated, at its best, to boil down to the worship of one more spectral figure of authority, Sigmund Freud. Pop culture is by and large where wishes thrive, and knowing as much reveals pop culture's great value, as well as its limits.

  Of course pop culture can be an area for productive disagreement. Given the work at hand, different people will respond differently to the question of whether you can live it out. Some will say yes to Bob Dylan (as I would, with reservations), yes to Muddy Waters and the blues tradition he works in, yes to Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick. But you'll find far fewer people, I think, who'll be able to say an unequivocal yes to the Rolling Stones or to Britney Spears. That doesn't mean that the Rolling Stones and, who knows, maybe even Britney, are without their value (fantasy matters). But teaching such work to people who're looking for answers to primary questions may not be the best way to use their time.

  Not long ago, I met a student who told me an illuminating story. The student, now in college, had a high school English teacher whom he'd greatly admired, and that teacher admired Faulkner above all writers. For his part, the student admired Stephen King. He read everything King wrote; he loved his work. The teacher detested King. Why? Because, the teacher said, unlike Faulkner, King did not write "works of universal human significance."

  The student walked away angry and unsatisfied, and I don't blame him. How does this teacher know what is "universal" and what is not? How does he know what something called the "human" might be? Only God—if he exists—knows what "universal human significance" is.

  What the teacher might have said is something like this: "King is an entertainment. King is a diversion. But when you try to take him as a guide to life, he won't work. The circles he draws on the deep are weak and irresolute. And this is so in part because King, for all his supposedly shocking scare tactics, is a sentimental writer. In his universe, the children (or at least the pack of nice kids, the ones the bullies prey on) are good, right, just, and true. (In Wordsworth, the child is a much more complex being, appealing but not without his dangerous limits.) When King's kids see It—whether It is a spaceship, a slasher-clown from the deep past, or a ravenous vampire—It is truly there. Just about all adults who are not in some manner childlike are corrupt, depraved, lying, and self-seeking. This can be a pleasant fantasy for young people and childish adults. Facile Rousseauianism has its temporary pleasures. But bring this way of seeing the world out into experience and you'll pretty quickly pay for it. Your relation to large quadrants of experience, in particular those where you have to encounter adult authority, will likely be paranoid and fated to fail. On the other hand, Faulkner's tragic humanism is tough; it could stand the test of time. There's a lot to be learned from Dilsey, the black woman in The Sound and the Fury, who above all things endures. But that's not because she illuminates some 'universal human significance,' but because she does her work and lives righteously in the world."

  When we teachers stop giving self-inflating answers to our students, and become clearly articulate about what the humanities can and can't offer—they may help you live better; they won't help you be a god—we'll be on our way to justifying our work to the public and attracting the students who most need us. Students now live in a bubbling chaos of popular culture. They need a way to navigate it. They need to know what's worth taking seriously, and what's a noisy diversion. We in the humanities can help them make this distinction. The mark of an educated person should be the ability to see the differences between entertainment and more nurturing, vital stuff. We need to help the public see how to make use of what great books offer. When people can do as much, they'll be able to take plenty of harmless pleasure in pop.

  Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet, and feel that what they have to offer—words, mere words—must look shabby by comparison.

  Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Thro
ugh words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we've said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day's end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they've said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the chance for new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don't permit.

  Our culture changes at an astounding velocity, so we must change or pay a price for remaining the same. Accordingly, the powers of self-rendering and self-revision are centrally important. These processes occur best in language. Surely there is something to be learned from the analysis of popular culture. But we as teachers can do better. We can strike to the central issues that confront students and the public at large, rather than relegating ourselves to the edges. People who have taught themselves how to live—what to be, what to do—from reading great works will not be overly susceptible to the culture indus try's latest wares. They'll be able to sample them, or turn completely away—they'll have better things on their minds.