Why Read? (9 page)

The first time I discussed this book in class I was surprised by the result. Most of the students were outraged that, on reasonably
close examination, it was clear that James's sentiments about the young Isabel were, to put it kindly, critical. What made
this perception particularly difficult is that those harsh Jamesian sentiments had now to be seen as in some measure about
them, about their own possible naivete, about their own unthinking self-love—that is, about the aspect of themselves that
they had discovered in Isabel. Many declared themselves anti-Jamesian. "Henry James must be one of the cruelest authors ever
to write," one essay began. They saw James, I believe accurately, as the enemy of a certain kind of American spirit—though
by no means an unambivalent enemy.

But a few of the students felt differently. What they came to believe was that Isabel needed to be chastened. She deserved
it. She had found her apt fate as surely as a protagonist in a Greek tragedy finds his. Osmond was exactly what she needed
and exactly what she deserved so as to "suffer into truth," to use a Sophoclean formulation. Two of the students were candid
enough, and brave enough, to say that, in fact, they felt that the harsh discipline that James was applying to Isabel ought
well to be applied to them. They were like Isabel Archer in her earliest manifestation, and like her needed submission to
purgatorial cleansing. As the book burned away what was most noxiously self-assertive in Isabel, so they hoped that it might
do the same for them. Or at least it might begin the process. Such puritanical resolve on the part of early twenty-first-century
American students struck me as both a little frightening and quite moving.

As someone who far prefers Emerson to James, indeed who prefers the young Isabel to James, as a temperament, I was temporarily
saddened that people so young could be drawn to puritanical self-dislike. But I soon saw that my response was neither here
nor there. It didn't much matter. I had done my job, which was to put students in a position to read and then to be read by
the work at hand. Everyone who sat through that class was in a position to know himself better by virtue of the exchange.
In this discussion, the process of "identification," of seeing oneself in a literary character, was essential.

Few activities associated with literary study are in worse repute than identification. Teachers in middle school—grades six
to eight—by now caution against it, seeing it as a block to serious study. Surely it has no place in a college classroom.
Surely no professor should endorse it publicly.

Sometimes what worries teachers about identification is the belief that it's inseparable from wish-fulfillment. You become
one with a heroic figure and leave your small, timid self behind. What you have then is a mere daydream. I find both wish-fulfilling
fantasies, as literature provides them, and daydreaming to be precious human activities, for reasons that I'll later explain.
But the process of identification that went on with Isabel—by young men and by women both—was not a matter of wish-fulfillment.
On the contrary, in the identification process any simple narcissism underwent serious challenge by James. This is so because
in studying James, as in studying any consequential writer, the step that follows identification is analysis of a firm but
generous sort.

Still there's something about the process that can make the professional critic squirm. Perhaps it's the release of emotion
that's involved, the fact that when we work with identification we don't sound like scientists who command a rigorous discipline.
Perhaps we don't sound official or academic enough. Maybe we're worried about our authority. But as inspired religious teachers
and artists of every stripe demonstrate all the time, the process of human growth—when it entails growth of the heart as well
as of the mind—is never particularly clean or abstract. To grow it is necessary that all of our human qualities come into
play, and if some of those qualities are not pretty, then so be it. But to keep them to the side so as to preserve our professional
dignity—that is too much of a sacrifice. (Men and women die every day, perish in the inner life . . . for lack of what we
have to offer.)

In general, academic literary study over the past two decades has become ever colder and more abstract. But there is one area
of exception. Many feminist teachers have been willing to deal with emotion and the facts of daily life in their classrooms.
Against prevailing orthodoxies, these professors have insisted on speaking personally, and have made sure that their students
have had a chance to do so. Some feminists, it's true, have surrendered to pressure for high-toned theoretical respectability,
but many have stuck to their guns and talked intimately and immediately about experience. It's in classrooms of this sort
that students can at times connect the books they read to their own lives. Something similar can be true in classes on race,
at least when students can talk candidly. (For a variety of complex reasons, though, they almost never can be direct and honest
on this subject, even with the best-intentioned professors presiding.) But such classrooms are, alas, just about the only
places where bringing together word and world is still the objective.

Milan Kundera speaks about novels as being populated by "experimental selves." These selves are persons whom we might be or
become, or who signify aspects of the self. The novelist—with our assistance—sends them forth into the world, to see what
the world will make of them, and they of it. They are the Active human embodiments of what Nietzsche would call thought experiments.
These selves are not after a long-lasting truth. Rather, they engage in an inquiry; they try, in good Emersonian fashion,
to expand their particular orbits on the deep, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Dickens's Pip needs to surrender his
great expectations and expand into a life of humane, well-measured decency; Austen's Emma needs to see that the world has
more living and feeling beings in it than herself and those few she holds in high regard. But part of what those characters
learn is that no way of seeing things is final. They don't look, and cannot look, for a final resting place sanctioned by
a larger authority than themselves. As Kundera puts it, "The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of
the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can
never accommodate what I would call the
spirit of
the novel."

The rise of the novel coincides with a realization expressed, or perhaps created, by the development of democracy. That realization
is of the great span of individuals to be found in the world, of the sheer proliferation of divergent beings. The commonplace
that we each have a novel within us actually touches a consequential truth. It suggests that there are as many mysteries,
as many ways of being, as there are lives. Whitman asserts this idea by being a deeply inward lyric poet who also recognizes
the divergence of human lives around him—the balance he strikes between the intensity of the personal lyric and the breadth
of the novel is part of what makes him a major figure, and one who speaks to the movement of his times. I think that a humanistic
education begins in literature because, unlike philosophy, literature does not assume that one or two or five paths are enough
to offer human beings. There are too many of us, and we are all too different; we all have our open-ended truths to pursue.

Gender and Identification

As I MENTIONED, some of the students who identified themselves with Isabel Archer were male. They did not read as men. Rather
they read as human beings, finding in Isabel some of their own griefs and hopes. More and more I see this happening.

I frequently teach the
Iliad,
generally derided as the most outmoded of books, something to be tossed onto the junk heap of history. When I was teaching
as a graduate student at Yale, the book was chiefly considered as an opportunity to reflect on the way that women were regarded
in the Homeric period, and then to reflect on how much had changed or was changing.

Is the
Iliad
a book replete with vital possibilities, or is it a mere historical curiosity? Is it locked in the past, or a potent guide
to the present and the future? A number of my students—men and women both—initially thought that it was a period piece and
nothing more. The way the poem treated women disgusted them. In the
Iliad,
they said, a woman has the status of a few bullocks or a bronze tripod or two. True. Some, like Helen, are beautiful, and
that beauty is a sort of power, but it is a limited, debased power compared to what the men wield. This is all well worth
saying, well worth pointing out.

What the men have is the heroic life, with all its possibilities for glory. As C. M. Bowra describes it: "The essence of the
heroic outlook is the pursuit of honour through action. The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of
body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk
in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his exercise of them. His honour is the centre of
his being, and any affront to it calls for immediate amends. He courts danger gladly because it gives him the best opportunity
of showing of what stuff he is made. Such a conviction and its system of behaviour are built on a man's conception of himself
and of what he owes to it, and if it has any further sanctions, they are to be found in what other men like himself think
of him. By prowess and renown he gains an enlarged sense of personality and well-being; through them he has a second existence
on the lips of men, which assures him that he has not failed in what matters most. Fame is the reward of honour, and the hero
seeks it before everything else."

The class was about ready to concur that such a worldview was a thing of the past, or should best be, when one of the women
students, usually quiet, spoke up. She said that the poem mattered to her because she could see things from Achilles' point
of view. The moment that caught her attention first was the one in which Achilles' father tells him that he must be the best
in every undertaking. He can simply never accept the second place. "I'm an athlete," she said, "and that's how I was raised
by my parents and my coaches. I was told that I had to win at everything. I had to come in first all the time. After a while,
though, I had to stop living like that. It's too much."

"Have you ever wanted to go back to it?" someone asked.

"Yes," she said, "all the time. It makes life incredibly intense." By which she meant, I suppose, that such a life provides
ongoing energy; it allows for full, unambivalent human exertion, in the midst of a culture that often encourages self-dividing
responses. If Wordsworth's meditative return to childhood is one viable answer to melancholia, then surely unbridled competitiveness
is another. Competition can be a way to give what's vital in you more life. You could see that what had once been closed off
and left behind for this student began to open again. The life of competition, the
agon,
is not for everyone, and it will not be approved by all. But if it is your highest aspiration, the thing you most want, then,
whether you take the path or not, it is worth knowing about your attraction to it. Homer's heroic life is the life of
thymos,
the thirst for glory, and if you are, at whatever depths, an individual driven by
thymos,
by the desire for glory and praise, despite the moral censors you've thrown up against that drive, you need to deal with the
fact in one way or another. I know no better way to begin doing so than through Homer.

Another classroom scene can help to illustrate the kind of teaching I want to endorse. A student in the same class, a young
African-American woman, professes in her opening essay on the good life to be an ardent Christian. She believes in doing unto
others as you would have them do unto you, in turning the other cheek. She believes Jesus to be the most perfect of mortals.
But she reads the
Iliad
and, after a period of indifference, she's galvanized by it. What sweeps her in is a life where triumph matters above all
else. She is fascinated by the fact that the warriors in the poem always seek victory. Envy is not a vice to them; it goads
them to glories. The young woman, who, it comes out, wants to be a well-to-do corporate lawyer, has no trouble seeing some
of herself in the unapologetic ambitions of Homer's heroes.

But then, too, she wants to be a Christian? Jesus' originality lies partly in his attempt to supersede admiration for the
ambition and self-vaunting of Homer's heroes—an admiration very much alive in the Roman empire Jesus is born into. Which will
it be, my student needs to ask herself, Jesus or Achilles?

Of course, what she really needs is a live synthesis of the two. And it is her task to arrive at it. But without the encounter
with Homer, and without our raising the simple and supposedly elementary question of identification—Is there anything in you
that is Achillean?—she might not have had access to her own divided state. With such self-knowledge achieved, she is in a
position for productive change. This was an instance not only of reading and interpreting a book—we spent a long time coming
to understand the heroic code and considering Homer's highly equivocal attitude toward it—but of allowing the book to interpret
and read the reader.

Some teachers say that we must teach books like the
Iliad
because they show us a world so different from our own that it presses the values of this, our world, into sharp contrast.
On the contrary, I teach the
Iliad
because in many significant ways, Homer's world is ours, though we are not always able to see as much immediately. In a passing
remark about Homer, Nietzsche observes that part of what makes his world hard to assimilate for moderns is that to Homer's
heroes, jealousy is not a negative emotion, not a feeling to be suppressed. Rather, one's desire for the first place is proudly
announced. One revels in the hunger for dominance. In a culture where pagan values contend with Christian values—that is to
say, in our culture—often the Christian aspirations to modesty and grace serve to cover over lust for glory and other kindred
drives. Reading Homer can peel the cover back and allow us to see ourselves as we are. This great book—among the greatest
and the most disturbing in the Western tradition—is anything but a period piece. Rather, it is a book that lives very much
in the present. It is news that stays news, to cite Ezra Pound's still valuable, still newsworthy description of what makes
literature literature.