To Read and to Live (Part 5)

Mikhail Bakhtin once argued that it is in literature, and particularly the great novels, that the most accurate and useful accounts of our moral lives may be found. A perfect example of what he is talking about may be found in that great English novel, George Eliot's Middlemarch. The moral agent here is the physician Lydgate, who is in charge of an infirmary that is in need of a chaplain. Lydgate is on the committee that will decide, by vote, who that chaplain will be. There are two candidates: one, Mr. Tyke, whom Lydgate does not know, but who is strongly supported by Mr. Bulstrode, the man who hired Lydgate and pays his salary; the other, Mr. Farebrother, whom Lydgate knows and likes, but about whose religious calling and moral seriousness Lydgate has some doubts. Now, when Lydgate arrives at the meeting during which the vote will be taken...

But clearly this is not going to work. In my description I have already had to leave out Lydgate's earlier conversation with Mr. Bulstrode on the subject, and though I have said that Lydgate likes Mr. Farebrother I have not explained how he came to know him, or what precisely his doubts about Farebrother consist of; nor have I said anything about what Mr. Farebrother's own attitude toward his candidacy is, or about his understanding of Lydgate's difficult position, or about what he has said to Lydgate on these subjects.

And George Eliot's account of the meeting itself is quite carefully drawn and takes up about a dozen pages, and any mere summary of it would be an injustice too. In the end, I could only use this passage from Middlemarch to illustrate Bakhtin's argument about the ethical power of great novels if I could cite the whole section of the book relating to Lydgate's decision; but of course, my very inability to squeeze Eliot's deep and subtle moral analysis into a few paragraphs of an essay proves as well as anything could Bakhtin's point.

Readers of Middlemarch know that, in the end, Lydgate's conscience cannot survive his society's constant pressure towards compromise and conformity--perhaps his vote for Mr. Tyke marks the beginning of his descent. And this is one of the reasons why another figure in the pantheon of ethical criticism, Robert Coles, assigns Middlemarch to his students at Harvard Medical School. One of his former students, after becoming a doctor, spoke to Coles about his recollections of his reading:

"There are days when I think of George Eliot and her Lydgate, and I come to the conclusion that lots of us doctors fool ourselves very easily, and that's what Middlemarch has to say to me now, just as it did back then. But maybe there's hope. I remember the end of the novel, when she pointed out that you never do know how a life will turn out. (I'm sure paraphrasing!) Well, maybe my friend Lydgate will help me turn the corner-go after what I think is right for me to do, for the sake of my wife and son, and for my own sake, too. I'd hate to end up a driven, driven 'success,' who is bored by what he does, but is always postponing any moral confrontation with himself!"

How easily such a response could be deconstructed. How quickly and surgically could one of those practiced critics expose the naivete of this doctor's unconfronted assumptions about meaning, textuality, and the dysfunctional logic of late capitalism. But the same critics who are so quick to dismantle the way Coles and his student think about literature are exceedingly reluctant to interrogate their own discomfort with and resentment of such naivete. Professors need to think about this: could such discomfort be that of the professional faced with the student "amateur"'s claim to use a book in a way not certified by the professional bureaucracy, such resentment that of the carefully trained specialist faced with Coles the so-called generalist?

These are certainly distinctions for which Coles cares little, and I applaud him for it. Literature for Coles is a wonderfully versatile tool, useful to him in any number of the tasks he takes on in his academic garden: stories can be counted on to stimulate ethical reflection when other texts seem helpless.

Now, the moral pilgrimage of Coles' former student cannot simply be endorsed to be sure: he speaks of what he thinks is right for him to do, but we don't learn what that is, or whether what's right for him is right for others. Nevertheless, it is clear that his comments place us in a wholly different, and far richer, world than the one invoked by Henry Louis Gates' "marionette theater of the political." The ethical, dialogical approach to reading and criticism fostered in their different ways by Booth, Bakhtin, and Coles is far superior to that marionette theater--superior in its comprehension of literary works, superior in its accounts of the human person and of the workings of moral agency.

Yet something may be missing. In the commitment that these writers share to dialogue, to conversation, there is a tendency to forget the matter of ends. Why are we conversing? What purpose will this dialogue serve? Will it even in a minor and indirect way help us to do justly, and love mercy? These are important questions, because even if the dialogical approach is conducive to ethical reflection, how happy can we be with that reflection if it in turn doesn't change the way we act?

This is a problem that Coles seems particularly sensitive to as well. He quotes a magnificent passage from Anton Chekhov's story "Gooseberries," in which the protagonist, Ivan Ivanych, talks about the despair that comes upon him when he confronts a genuinely happy man (who happens to be his brother):

"Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him-illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind-and all is well."

Confronted with Ivan Ivanych's wish, Coles asks: "How do we find that 'hammer' for ourselves?...Perhaps (and this is a gloomy thought) the best of us are in the tradition of...Dr. Chekhov: we are seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness, but we are pliant as aspens in our capacity to accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit." And one danger of the dialogical/ethical approach to literature is just its tendency to accommodate itself to those "prevailing rhythms." We may enjoy the ethical conversation so deeply, and feel so strongly the need to defend the values of dialogue and conversation, that we forget to ask whether the conversation has a point other than its own continuation.

This is a question that we need to ask Wayne Booth, who, despite the importance of his defense of ethical criticism, has a distressing tendency to back away from the natural consequences of his own approach. As far as I know, and for many years, Booth has been an articulate and determined advocate of critical pluralism against what he believes to be the very powerful temptations to narrow-mindedness and dogmatism in literary criticism.

But, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, "pluralism" is a word with many meanings, and she contends that Booth uses the word in at least five different ways in The Company We Keep. Some of these usages Nussbaum finds acceptable, even admirable: for instance, Booth's claim that we should not try to limit the potential ways in which certain books can be good for us, because there are many different goods which it is legitimate to pursue. But Booth conceives of pluralism in other ways that Nussbaum finds troublingly inconsistent with Booth's emphasis on ethics. For instance, he is so careful not to appear dogmatic that he seems to refer even to his critique of racism as mere elements of his personal "ideology." To this tendency Nussbaum replies, quite rightly: "First of all, it will not work. Many people will hate this book and will call Booth a reactionary; that is the price he will pay for his defense of reason. Second, it sells out his position. Anti-racism, by Booth's own account, is not just his 'ideology.' It is an ethical position both defensible and defended by rational argument."

Perhaps one of the reasons both Nussbaum and Coles see the dangers of an overly pluralistic, a merely conversational, ethical criticism better than Booth does is that, quite simply, they are not English professors: Coles is a doctor, Nussbaum a philosopher. Neither of them has a professional investment in maintaining the reputation of literature or literary studies as such, and this is important: literature for each of them is a resource, a very valuable resource to be sure, but essentially a help, an aid--something to help them in their quest to think better about goodness and to act upon what they think.

This way of considering literature can make some English professors and students uncomfortable: they may feel that it debases literature, makes it the mere handmaiden of other academic disciplines. But is such service really so bad guys? What would George Eliot have preferred: to be the subject of more professional "readings" or to be read by medical students who find themselves confronted (perhaps for the first time) with the real moral consequences of their professional choices? What Nussbaum and Coles remind us is that literature is simply too important to be left only in the hands of literature professors and students!

Is there an inconsistency in that last paragraph? At one moment to call literature a mere "tool" and at the next to pronounce it too important to be left to literature professors? The contradiction is only apparent. W.H. Auden was right when he claimed that if a poet could make poems both beautiful and useful, he or she would be fulfilling a higher calling than any imagined by the priests of the autonomous imagination.

Similarly, Nussbaum contends not only that moral philosophy needs literature, but also that there is a very important sense in which literature needs moral philosophy, or rather, needs for its own fulfillment to be taken seriously as a vehicle of moral knowledge. Thinking of a favorite passage of hers, one in which David Copperfield remembers his unhappy childhood and the time he spent "reading, as it were, for life," Nussbaum writes:

"We do 'read for life,' bringing to the literary texts we love...our pressing questions and perplexities, searching for images of what we might do and be, and holding these up against the images we derive from our knowledge of other conceptions, literary, philosophical, and religious. And the further pursuit of this enterprise through explicit comparison and explanation is not a diminution of the novels at all, but rather an expression of the depth and breadth of the claims that those who love them make for them."

In other words, the best way we can demonstrate our love for great books is to use them in our search to discover "what we might do and be." Paradoxically, the elevation of literature to a quasi-sacred status, protected from the messiness of our historical lives and severed from "the great human family," diminishes literature just as much as the severely prosecutorial power-criticism of Scholes and Froula.

But Nussbaum's ethics makes no room for religious experience and belief; thus it too must be supplemented. Consider, therefore, a passage from the first book of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine:

"Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those things which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed. If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love."

The love of books is, in Augustine's scheme, an inferior love, but that does not mean it must be an inappropriate one. It is only when that love loses sight of its inferiority, and becomes an end in itself, that it "shackles" us. When we use that love and those books to pursue a better life, indeed to pursue blessedness--and there are many and varied ways in which we may use them in that pursuit--then our reading may be wondrously healthy and life-giving. The rigid orthodoxies of current political criticism, the obsessive wrestling over textual power by writers and readers, may seem to aid in that quest, but in fact they only impede it. The ethically-impelled reading championed by Booth and Coles and Bakhtin and Nussbaum is sloppy, uncertain, and often confusing, I know; it has no specific theoretical program nor a precisely calibrated methodology. But until literary theory produces its own Augustine, or until we start paying attention to the old one, these are our best instructors in the difficult art of "reading for life."