Why Read? (5 page)

But Bloom, much, much more than Emerson and Rorty, believes that such risk and such change are only for the very few. Bloom
sees Socrates' path as exclusively for an elite. It is not so.

For Ignorance

" WHAT THAT YOUNG man lacks is inexperience": so said the maestro of the young prodigy. Part of what I hope to do by asking
students to brood publicly about God and ultimate commitments is to let them recapture their inexperience. They need a chance
to own what may be the most precious knowledge one can have at the start of an education, knowledge of one's own ignorance.

Plato and Aristotle both say that philosophy begins in wonder. But Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps closer to the point, thought
that people came to philosophy, to serious thinking about their lives, out of confusion. The prelude to philosophy was a simple
admission: "I have lost my way." The same can be true for serious literary study. At its best, it often begins with a sense
of dislocation; it begins with a sense that one has lost one's way.

The best beginning reader is often the one with the wherewithal to admit that, living in the midst of what appears to be a
confident, energetic culture, he among all the rest is lost. This is a particularly difficult thing to do. For our culture
at large prizes knowingness. On television, in movies, in politics, at school, in the press, the student encounters authoritative
figures, speaking in self-assured, worldly tones. Their knowingness is intimidating. They seem to be in full command of themselves.
They appear to have answered all the questions that matter in life and now to be left musing on the finer points. They demonstrate
their preternatural poise by withholding their esteem. Not to admire anything, Horace said, is the only way to feel consistently
good about yourself. Most of the cultural authorities now in place, in art, in the media, and in academia, are figures who
programmatically hoard their esteem and apparently feel quite good about themselves in the process.

Should one believe in God? What is truth? How does one lead a good life? All these questions the cultural authorities appear
to have resolved. Only the smaller matters remain.

But the true student has often not settled these matters at all. Often she has not even come up with provisional answers that
satisfy her. And finally, after years of observation and thought, she may be willing to wager that the so-called authorities
probably haven't resolved them either. They're performing a charade, dispensing an unearned and ultimately feeble comfort.
The true student demands more. And to find it, she is willing, against the backdrop of all this knowingness, to take a brave
step. She is willing to affirm her own ignorance.

Beneath acculturation to cool, beneath the commitment to training and skills, there often exists this sense of confusion.
And where it is, the student should be able to affirm it, and the teacher to endorse the affirmation.

"You must become an ignorant man again," says Wallace Stevens to his ephebe, or beginning poet. The same holds true for the
beginning student of literature, and often for the teacher as well. The student must be willing to become as articulate as
possible about what he has believed—or what he has been asked to believe—up until this point. He must be willing to tell himself
who he is and has been, and, possibly, why that will no longer quite do. This exercise in self-reflection, deriving often
from the sense of displacement, of having lost one's way, can start a literary education. And once a student has touched his
ignorance, he has acquired a great resource, for in such ignorance there is the beginning of potential change—of new and confident,
if provisional, commitment. As Thoreau puts it, "How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has
so often to use his knowledge?"

Again and again, the true student of literature will return to this ignorance, for it's possible that no truth she learns
in the humanities will be permanently true. At the very least, everything acquired-by immersion in literature will have to
be tested and retested along the way. It's for this reason that the teacher often enters a course with a sense of possibility
akin to the students'.

One of the most important jobs a teacher has is to allow students to make contact with their ignorance. We need to provide
a scene where not-knowing is, at least at the outset, valued more than full, worldly confidence. Thoreau heading to Walden
Pond almost empty-handed, or Emily Dickinson going up to her room in Amherst to engage in a solitary dialogue with God, are
grand versions of the kind of open and daring endeavor that we can all engage in for ourselves. Emerson says that power abides
in transition, in "the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim." We're most alive when we're moving from one set of
engagements to the next. We're in motion then, but not fully sure where we're going, feeling both our present ignorance and
the prospect of new, vitalizing knowledge.

Down the Hall

WHILE I'M ASKING my questions about God and what makes a good life, and affirming, when need be, a certain sort of ignorance,
what's going on in the classrooms of my colleagues down the hall, and for that matter, in humanities classrooms across the
country? A number of things, all well worth remarking upon. There is training, there is entertaining, no doubt. But many professors
go at least some distance in resisting the ethos of the corporate university and of American culture overall. What they do
can pass well beyond the university's ad brochures, where the students bask on the grass in all-approving sunlight, or hover
around a piece of machinery that's high-tech, high-priced, and virtually unidentifiable.

Many professors of humanities—professors of literature and history and philosophy and religious studies—have something of
consequence in common. Centrally, they attempt to teach one thing, and often do so with real success. That one thing is reading.
They cultivate attentiveness to written words, careful consideration, thoughtful balancing, coaxing forth of disparate meanings,
responsiveness to the complexities of sense. They try to help students become more like what Henry James said every writer
ought to be, someone on whom nothing is lost. Attentiveness to words, to literary patterns and their meaning-making power:
that remains a frequent objective of liberal arts education.

It was the New Critics who brought the phrase "close reading" to the fore in American education. Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth
Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, and a number of other influential scholars pioneered an approach to reading that continues on,
in various forms, into the present. The well-wrought students of Brooks and Warren were ever on the lookout for irony, tension,
ambiguity, and paradox. To find these things, they had to scrutinize the page in front of them with exacting care. All to
the good.

But what happens in most New Critical readings is that the master terms themselves—call them, if you like, elements in the
New Critics' Final Narrative—take precedence over the actual poem. So rather than measuring the particular vision of John
Donne, with all his manifold religious commitments and resistances, his sexual complexities, his personal kinks and quirks,
the New Critic reworks Donne into a collection of anointed terms. Donne's "maturity"—to put matters in a compressed way—becomes
a function of his capacity to cultivate paradox and irony.

Some writers are more responsive to New Critical values than others, and surely Donne is one of them. His work is replete
with irony and ambiguity. Yet with the imposition of the rhetorical terms—terms that have no significant place in Donne's
own Final Narrative—the poet becomes a function of New Critical values rather than a promulgator of his own.

The New Critical student, by encountering the right poems in the right way, undergoes a shaping, a form of what the Greeks
called paideia. For the qualities that he learns to value in poems can also be cultivated in persons. So the ideal student
(and the ideal professor) of New Criticism is drawn to the ability to maintain an ironic distance on life, the capacity to
live with ambiguities, the power to achieve an inner tension than never breaks. The ideal New Critical student, like the ideal
New Critical poem, is prone to be sophisticated, stoical, calm, intent, conventionally masculine, and rather worldly. What
such a student is not likely to be is emotional, mercurial, rhapsodic, or inspired. The New Critical ethos—what we might call,
after Keats, an ethos of negative capability, the capacity to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason"—surely has its value. But it is one ethos among many. To reduce literature to that one ethos,
when it contains a nearly infinite number, robs great writing of its diversity, and life of its richness.

The Harvard University scholar Walter Jackson Bate purportedly used a Marx Brothers style routine to capture what he thought
of as New Critical close reading. "Close reading," he'd mutter, and push the book up near his nose. "Closer reading": with
a laugh, digging his face down into the book. Then finally, "Very close reading," where nose and book kissed and not a word
of print was legible. Bate's routine suggests that with a certain kind of exclusive attention to the page, life disappears.
The connection between word and world goes dark (or becomes somewhat deviously implicit). The reader is left adrift, uncorn-passed,
in a sea of sentences.

Foucault, Industrial Strength

THERE WAS THIS much to be said for the New Critics: they were prone to specialize in reading and teaching works with which
they were spiritually aligned. Donne and the New Critics genuinely do have something in common, though they also part company
at important points. The violence of applying the anointed terms to Donne or Marvell or Keats's odes, or Shakespeare's sonnets
is real, though hardly overwhelming. But down the hall in the humanities building now—and on the shelves of the library devoted
to recent literary and cultural study—one finds work that is best described as out-and-out rewriting of the authors at hand.
In fact, we might call these efforts not so much criticism as transformation.

Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic drawing on the work of Pierre Macherey, describes a good deal of current criticism as quite
simply an exercise in rewriting. One approaches the work at hand, and recasts it in the terms of Foucault, or Marx, or feminism,
or Derrida, or Queer Theory, or what have you.

So a current reading of, say, Dickens's Bleak House is not so much an interpretation as it a reworking and a revision of the
novel. Dickens is depicted as testifying, albeit unwittingly, to Foucault's major truths. In Bleak House, we are supposed
to find social discipline rampant, constant surveillance, the hegemony of the police, a carceral society. Whatever elements
of the novel do not cohere with this vision are discredited, or pushed to the margin of the discussion. (In a Foucaultian
reading of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Stephen Greenblatt, often a fine critic, manages to leave Falstaff virtually unmentioned.)
Thus the critic rewrites Dickens in the terms of Foucault. One effectively reads not a text by Dickens, but one by another
author. Dickens's truth is replaced by the truth according to Michel Foucault—or Fredric Jameson or Helene Cixous—and there
the process generally ends.

It may be that the truths unfolded by Foucault and the rest are of consummate value. It may be that those authors are indispensable
guides to life, or at least to the lives of some. If so, all to the good.

If so, they, the critics, ought to be the objects of study in themselves. Let us look at Foucault, for instance, and see how
one might lead a life under his guidance. What would you do? What would you do, in particular, as a denizen of an institution
that produces precisely the kind of discipline that Foucault so detests? For a university, in Foucaultian thinking, is a production
center, a knowledge-producing matrix which creates discourses that aid in normalizing people and thus in making them more
susceptible to control. In fact, if you are a university citizen, you live in the belly of the beast. How, given what you've
learned from Foucault, will you work your way out?

But these questions are virtually never asked. What usually happens is that professors apply the terminology to the work at
hand, to Dickens or Emerson or Eliot, then leave it at that. The professor never measures the values and the shortcomings
of the ruling critical idiom itself. For what authors who create comprehensive views of life offer is what Frost thought of
as grand metaphors. "Great is he who imposes the metaphor," the poet said. But then it is the task of the reader, on encountering
such metaphors, to see how far one can ride them out. At what point do they stop putting us in an illuminating relation to
life? Where do they break down? Darwin's thinking about natural selection may help us to understand the animal kingdom. But
should we use it to justify a society where all-out competition reigns? Perhaps this is a point where the grand Darwinian
metaphor fractures.

Foucault would teach us that all disciplines discipline. That is, that every area of intellectual inquiry—psychology, sociology,
history, literary criticism—tends toward providing reductive norms for human creations and for human behavior, thus delimiting
possibility. Is this true? If so, what is there to do about it? What is there to do, in particular, if you are someone who,
while using Foucault as the creator of your master narrative, at the same time is working in an institution, giving grades,
collecting data, compiling reports, that effectively assault all that Foucault would seem to stand for?

This is not an unanswerable question. But surely it is the sort of question one must ask of one's own Final Narrative. In
my experience, teachers of the humanities rarely do so. They rarely put the class's master terms on display, rarely make them
the object of scrutiny and criticism.

If Foucault is your patron saint of wisdom (suggestive as I sometimes find him, he is not mine—to me he is a builder of dungeons
in the air), then by all means bring him to the fore. Teach him directly. Let us see what language he has to unfold, what
his Final Narrative entails. And if a language is also a way of life, we want to know what kind of life Foucault enjoins.
A language, once taken on as an ultimate narrative, is not a set of markers, not merely a map, but a set of commitments, however
contingent those commitments might be. It's necessary to test the author at hand, that is, as the source for a way of life.