Why Read? (6 page)

When you apply Foucault to Dickens and don't turn in the direction of Foucault and interrogate his reach and value—his application
to life—you lose what benefit Foucault may bring. When you translate Dickens into Foucault, you lose what benefit Dickens
might have had to deliver. You leave with precious little, when there was so much that you might have had.

There is another disadvantage in applying theory to literature. To adapt a distinction made by Richard Poirier: literature
tends to be dense; theory tends to be difficult. I can take my children, ages twelve and fourteen, to a production of Hamlet:
no doubt they'll sleep through some of it, daydream through some more. But they'll also wake up at times—be shocked, puzzled,
tickled, and occasionally illuminated. The best literature tends to be a layered experience. Even a beginning reader can get
something from it. Then there's further to go, into legitimate complexity, true density and depth. Theory, on the other hand,
tends to be an all-or-nothing affair. You get it or you don't. Face young people with a page of Derrida, whose reflections
on the defining limits of Western thought are anything but valueless, and they're likely to depart with no benefit at all.
Nothing is available for them. They don't get it, period. Then, once you've surmounted the difficulty, Derrida, like most
theorists, tends to be a bit too available—theorists tend to have an astounding capacity to say the same thing over and over
again.

If you set theory between readers and literature—if you make theory a prerequisite to discussing a piece of writing—you effectively
deny the student a chance to encounter the first level of literary density, the level he's ready to negotiate. Theory is used,
then, to banish aspiring readers from literary experience that by rights belongs to them.

The hasty reader might mistake my view for the "antitheory" position. For there are any number of professors of humanities
who simply detest any and all far-reaching analytical work. I've written a book about contemporary theorists that's not at
all unadmiring, and on occasion I teach their work. But experience has shown me that there are more viable and more varied
options for students in literature itself, and that contemporary theory, though not without its appeals, tends to be implausibly
extreme in its vision of experience and, accordingly, untenable as a guide to life. Can you live it? Alas, it's generally
the case that no one can live out the latest version of theoretical apostasy and that, just as depressing, no one, even the
theory's most devoted advocates, is even mildly inclined to try.

Interpretation

INTERPRETATION IS THE name of the game, says Stanley Fish, and all humanities professors must play. Fish is probably the best-known
American literary critic at work today. His books on literary theory and on Milton are much consulted in the academy. To Fish,
interpretation is a test of ingenuity. It's a way to demonstrate intellectual prowess. Often interpretation is a chance to
push your reader's and student's credulity as far as possible, then a step further. Fish has observed that his aim as an interpreter
is not to find truth but to be as interesting as he can be. Emphatically, the objective is not to make past wisdom available
to the uses of the present, however badly such wisdom may be needed. For Fish, what literary critics do is inevitably without
consequences: it changes nothing in academia or in the public world. Interpretation, for Fish, is a self-delighting and self-promoting
game. He cites with full approval the view that "literary interpretation . . . has no purpose external to the arena of its
practice; it is the 'constant unfolding' to ourselves 'of who we are' as practitioners; its audience is made up of those who
already thrill to its challenges and resonate to its performances."

I suspect that Fish finds the seriousness with which he's regarded to be supremely amusing. I suspect that as a brilliant
satirist unfolding one piece of performance art after another, he takes delight in pushing his academic readers as far into
the ridiculous as possible. I've no doubt that Fish will be greatly relieved when people stop taking him literally, begin
regarding him as the stern moralist that he actually is, and understand that he has always hoped we would do the opposite
of what he recommended. In reading Fish on interpretation, one should become disturbed by one's own practice—by the practice
of interpreting for the sake of interpreting, as something to do, because one is good at it, as a way to advance one's career—and
try something better. By pretending to endorse things as they are, in their current near-absurdity, Fish is no doubt trying
to stir professorial rebellion. But to Fish's probable surprise, professors have not seen that he is the closest thing the
academy has to a Jonathan Swift.

But isn't it a good thing, this exercise of mind that students undergo when they interpret texts with ingenious rigor? Doesn't
it strengthen the intellect, improve the powers of discernment, enhance capacities for what's called critical thinking?

Critical thinking is now much revered in humanities departments. We pride ourselves on dispensing it. But what exactly is
critical thinking? Often it is no more than the power to debunk various human visions. It is, purportedly, the power to see
their limits and faults. But what good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are
not open to having these beliefs modified? What's called critical thought generally takes place from no set position at all.
There is no committed vantage, however transient. Rather, one attacks from any spot that one likes, so everything is susceptible
to denunciation. "One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened," as Nietzsche puts it in his passage on the Last
Man, "so there is no end of derision." For the critical thinker there is no end of derision. When one thinks critically in
behalf of creating a Final Narrative, that is something else again. Then you are sifting visions for their applications to
life. A great deal is at stake. But most of what now passes as critical thinking takes place in a void.

In general, critical thinking is the art of using terms one does not believe in (Foucault's, Marx's) to debunk worldviews
that one does not wish to be challenged by.

What happens when you teach critical thinking unattached to some form of ethics, or some process of character creation? What
you help inculcate, I believe, is the capacity to use the intellect in ever more adroit ways. This kind of education does
make the student smarter, in some abstract sense. It makes him more adept at the use of what the Frankfurt School thinkers
liked to call instrumental reason. This sort of reason conceives the world in terms of problems and solutions. It is prone
to abstraction, to the release of the intellect from the emotions, to extreme forms of detachment. The development of instrumental
reason is good preparation for doing work in a corporation in which you look only at means and not at ends. You see processes,
but not the ultimate performance. Then you go off, the better to enjoy Saturday night.

It may seem radical to be studying Foucault and Adorno. But students now do not study these figures, if by "study" we mean
deciding after careful interpretation and long questioning whether the figures at hand have it right, whether the students
ought to try to live with these writers as guides to life. On the contrary, students learn to apply the terms of analysis,
like painters applying pigment to a house, or like systems analysts applying their standards to a particular disposition of
persons and tasks. The values involved mean virtually nothing. You can be a close observer, you can write well, you can be
brilliantly ingenious in making your terms appear to square with the poem at hand, you can even be someone on whom little
or nothing is lost, and you can still be the sort of person who does what he is told without thinking much about it. You can
still be someone who lives to follow orders.

What interpretation as currently taught encourages is a highly skilled, highly negotiable form of expertise that will often
be prized by future employers in that it comes without inconvenient ethical baggage. Despite the rhetoric of subversion that
surrounds it, current humanities education does not teach subversive skepticism (I wish that it did); rather, it teaches the
dissociation of intellect from feeling—something that can be a prelude to personal and collective anomie. True education,
as Friedrich Schiller rightly saw it, ought to fuse mind and heart. Current education in the liberal arts does precisely the
opposite. At the end of this road lies a human type bitterly and memorably described in Weber: "Specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

"I'll die before I give you power over me," Narcissus liked to say to his many wooers, before he offended the goddess Hera
and was forced to fall in love with his own image in a pool. The analysis of great works now often takes place beneath the
auspices of Narcissus. The student is taught not to be open to the influence of great works, but rather to perform facile
and empty acts of usurpation, in which he assumes unearned power over the text. Foucault applied at industrial strength is
an automatic debunking agent. But the process leaves the student untouched, with no actual growth, just a reflexively skeptical
stance that touches the borders of nihilism. Such activity, prolonged over the course of an education, is likely to contribute
to the creation of what the philosopher James C. Edwards calls "normal nihilists." Normal nihilists are people who believe
in nothing (except the achievement of their own advantage), and we may be creating them in significant numbers by not counting
the ethical costs of our pedagogy. "It's easy to be brilliant," Goethe said, "when you do not believe in anything." And it's
easy, too, to be brilliantly successful.

The sense of superiority that current liberal arts education often instills rhymes with some of the least creditable trends
in our culture. It rhymes with a superior and exploitative relation to the natural world, with condescension to the poor,
with a sense that nothing in the world matters unless it matters to Me. Analytic pedagogy, the pedagogy of instrumental reason,
does not create these trends; far from it. But such pedagogy contributes to wrongs that it should be contending against.

What's missing from the current dispensation is a sense of hope when we confront major works, the hope that they will tell
us something we do not know about the world or give us an entirely fresh way to apprehend experience. We need to learn not
simply to read books, but to allow ourselves to be read by them.

And this process can take time. Describing his initiation into modern literature, into Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and their contemporaries,
Lionel Trilling writes: "Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better,
they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has
been very intimate." "I bored them," says Trilling. Given the form of literary education now broadly available, it is almost
impossible that a student would say of a group of books, "I bored them." No, in the current consumer-driven academy another
word, differently intoned, would be on the tip of the tongue: "Booooooring." We professors have given our students the language
of smug dismissal, and their profit of it is that they know how to curse with it and to curse those things that we ourselves
have most loved and, somewhere in our hearts, probably love still.

Good at School

TRANSLATION HAS BEEN the order of the day for some time in the humanities, beginning with the relatively benign translations
of the New Critics and moving on to the more and more strained recastings now current. The objective of humanistic study seems
more and more to be the transformation of the best that has been known and thought into other, homogenizing languages, the
languages of criticism, which we rarely take the time to interrogate or consider putting to use day to day.

When I entered graduate school in 1979 the reigning terms of translation were philosophical or, more accurately, antiphilosophical.
These were the terms of deconstruction. When I was beginning at Yale, Paul de Man was working to propound a theory of antimeaning
that he believed would have application to all of literature. From his point of view, writing that mattered culminated at
points of undecidability. These are moments where two meanings come into play and it is impossible to make a determination
as to which one supersedes the other. Undecidability is different from paradox, which is ultimately resolvable, and different
too from oxymoron, in which the coupling of the terms reveals itself as an absurdity.

The end of Yeats's poem "Among School Children" asks us how we can know the dancer from the dance. The last four lines run
this way:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

To de Man, the final question is not resolvable. The poem at first seems to suggest that there is nothing so glorious as the
moment when the dancer and the dance, form and experience, creator and creation merge. Thus the final line can be read as
a celebration of full being outside of time. It's an affirmation of artistic transcendence. Yet, read somewhat differently,
the poem also suggests that this moment may be illusory. Maybe we ought to take the last line literally rather than figuratively
and try to figure out how we might actually achieve a skeptical detachment. Please instruct me: how
can
I separate the dancer from the dance? Perhaps the feeling of timelessness and interfusion is a delusory one that needs combating;
perhaps it is conducive to feelings of omnipotence, to godlike illusions. It is desirable to know the dancer from the dance,
for such knowledge might free us from mystification. Yet study the poem as one might, it does not affirm one reading at the
expense of the other. So we are suspended between assurances, committed neither to one side nor the other.