Why Read? (15 page)

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 having 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.

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.