To Read and to Live (Part 3)

This is an on-going feature...See Parts 1 and 2 for this to make the most sense.

One is tempted to suspect that belief in social constructionism, with its repudiation of the idea of a common human nature, is a luxury that many people can't afford; it is likely to be appealing only to self-professed skeptics in Western societies who, deep down and despite all their protests to the contrary, know their credentials as persons to be safe from interrogation. The really significant question here is whether the abandonment of the ideas of human nature and the human person might, in the long run, eventually put those credentials in danger. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has written in Feminism Without Illusions, "If we need a justice sensitive to the variations of gender, race, and class, we also need one that can transcend or at least discipline them. For without such an ideal, how do we expect to avoid Hobbes' nightmare of society as 'the warre of all against all'?"

If, then, the vast claims of social constructionism fail to compel, we might well consider whether a vocabulary that takes cognizance of personal agency might do a better job of describing how and why we really act-and in the process do a much better job of describing what happens in literary works, and of describing how those works can shape the lives of us, their readers.

Which brings up yet another difficulty for the ideologically and politically minded. That literary works can shape the lives of their readers is for many critics precisely the problem. For many teachers today understand their job to be the liberation of their students from the power that books have over them. A classic example of this impulse comes from Robert Scholes' influential book Textual Power, subtitled "Literary Theory and the Teaching of English."

"The students who come to us now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced. They are bombarded with signs, with rhetoric, from their daily awakenings until their troubled sleep, especially with signs transmitted by the audio-visual media...

What students need from us-and this is true of students in our great universities, our small colleges, and our urban and community colleges-what they need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in some appropriate manner...

In an age of manipulation...the worst thing we can do is foster in them an attitude of reverence before texts.... What is needed is a judicious attitude: scrupulous to understand, alert to probe for blind spots and hidden agendas, and finally, critical, questioning, skeptical."

Though his concern for the influence of the media is admirable, it would appear that the only kind of relationship Scholes can imagine between a text and a reader is one of power: either the reader is manipulated by a text, falls under its sway, becomes subject to its power, or he exerts his own power, the power of interpretation and analysis, over that threatening text. Scholes thereby provides a literary theory for Hobbes' "warre of all against all."

This makes sense as an account of how to respond to genuinely manipulative media, such as advertisements and political or social propaganda (in which category, one can certainly, especially nowadays, place many works of literature--if they deserve the dignity to be called literature), but do we really want to universalize this account of interpretation?

When I think about the books I read--looking at my "current reading" shelf and bedside table, I see E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Flannery O'Connor's Complete Works, an anthology devoted to Romanticism, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine--I find that Scholes' account of "textual power" simply fails to describe my experience and, I believe, that of most of my fellow students.

Scholes wants his students to be able to "make sense of their worlds"--but can't we all point to books that, far from threatening to undermine that effort, have actually been enormously helpful to it? Scholes wants his students to "determine their own interests" and "express their own views," but haven't we all read books that helped us to understand what our interests are and helped us to form our views? Clearly, we need to be able to think about our reading experiences in more ways than the exclusively militaristic one that Scholes offers.

Another example: in an essay called "When Eve Reads Milton," Christine Froula seeks to outline a feminist critique of Milton's Paradise Lost. She argues that we can employ new strategies of reading these canonical texts that expose the "structures of authority" deep inside them, thereby engaging in "a kind of collective psychoanalysis." "In so doing, we approach traditional texts not as the mystifying (and self-limiting) 'best' that has been thought and said in the world but as a visible past against which we can imagine a different future."

For Froula, we can learn from the past, but what we learn is strictly negative: the past is no more than a catalog of error which, through careful study and vigilant self-monitoring, we may be able to avoid repeating. And there is no doubt that Froula's catalog of Milton's sins and errors is pretty convincing: for all his greatness as a poet, his misogyny is obvious and repulsive. But surely the determination to understand all of literary history (or even all of Milton) in these prosecutorial terms is at least as "self-limiting" as the Arnoldian idea of exposing oneself to "the best that has been thought and said." Like Scholes' notion of textual power, Froula's conception of literary history fails to account for the elements of our reading experience that cannot be explained by reference to power relations.

By way of contrast to the thinking of Scholes and Froula, we might consider the belief of the Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry that the tragedy of literary education today is that "teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not learn from them." We talk and write about literature "as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true." Now in one sense Froula would agree with Berry: she too wants to learn from "the great songs and stories," but chiefly to learn what not to do.

Berry obviously means something different: he clearly believes that these "great songs and stories" have been called great because of the weight of truth that they carry. Whereas Froula and Scholes want us to test literature against our own personal standards, Berry wants us to test ourselves against the standards of great literature. Berry's willingness to be taught, his respect for the possibility that those who have walked the earth before him could have learned something valuable, marks an invigorating alternative to the dark visions of Scholes and Froula; nevertheless, one misses in Berry's picture an acknowledgment of the value of the reader's response, of disagreement and critique. No work of literature, however "classical," exhibits wisdom on every subject that it considers; to consider Milton again, one may rejoice in his brilliant evocation of the difference between unfallen and fallen sexuality, yet be dismayed by his belief that Adam was made "for God only," Eve, "for God in him."

Might it be possible, then, to avoid both Berry's temptation to excessive reverence and Scholes and Froula's tendency to cynicism, and to see the literary experience as a simultaneous testing, measuring, of the book and the reader? To ask this question, I believe, is to begin to think ethically about literature. In so doing, we go beyond a vague and essentially content-free reverence for "the classics"; beyond simplistic political polarities; beyond reductive Nietzschean assertions about Power. But what, then, are we getting into? Is there anyone who can describe for us, map out for us, this somehow familiar yet exceedingly complex terrain? As it happens, there has in recent years been a serious renewal of interest in the old and honorable discipline of ethical criticism; and the leaders of this renewal deserve our attention.

To be continued tomorrow with the help of Wayne Booth in his book, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.