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WHEN David Laurence approached me about the panel “The Function of Literature in Liberal Education” at the 2003 ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar West, the cluster of questions he suggested included, “Can we any longer articulate persuasively and in good faith what the study of literature stands to contribute to students’ educations and intellectual and personal development?” He refined the inquiry by asking whether we could articulate our answer to parents, to students, to colleagues in the sciences and social sciences, and to ourselves. These plural audiences might in themselves heighten the question of good faith, because I suspect that few of us would give the same answer to all. Engaging in dialogue with each of these interlocutors or groups of interlocutors, we follow the problematic model of Plato’s Socrates, offering subtly or not so subtly different truths, depending on the situation.
Socrates was of course a supreme ironist, not exactly an exemplar of good faith or an educational democrat. Athens’s collective verdict on his activities suggests how popular we might become with parents (as a synecdoche for the larger nonacademic community) if we faithfully follow his method. Nevertheless, the more publicly palatable accounts of the value of literature in the curriculum do seem at odds with what I believe students actually learn from the study of literature.
Lauren Berlant, who was originally going to speak on the panel, told me that she had planned to explore the “resistance to literature,” playing off the title of Paul de Man’s famous essay “The Resistance to Theory.” In fact, the resistance to theory, as de Man defined it, is the resistance to literature or, as he says at one point, a “resistance to reading"—that is, theory reveals the scandal “that literature is not a transparent message” and “that the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived” (15). The work of reading is never done, and among those extensively conceived grammatical means, as I understand the argument, are history, ideological analysis, or any other critical discourse that attempts to fix the significance of a given text. (In de Man’s posthumously revealed political history, assigning a low determinative value to historical scholarship might sound like an evasion of the judgment that lived history passes on all sorts of human choices. However, de Man is not the only critic to doubt that the text of history is instantly legible or that it can circumscribe the range of literary meaning, and his personal failures do not impeach the position.) The claim that reading is never done shouldn’t trouble those who profess literature; there will always be plenty for them do. But some will no doubt be troubled to have the enterprise of literary interpretation described in such Sisyphean terms. Note that de Man’s account of literary scholarship is more progressivist than one might expect:
Scholarship involves at least two complementary areas: historical and philological facts as the preparatory condition for understanding, and methods of reading or interpretation. The latter is admittedly an open discipline, which can, however, hope to evolve by rational means, despite internal crises, controversies and polemics.” (4)
Still, it should be easy to see why the prospect of interminable reading and an ever-receding interpretive finality is scandalous to colleagues in other fields of study, to nonacademics (including those on whom we depend to fund both our activity as teachers and our inconclusive inquiries), to administrators who must constantly find ways of justifying the enterprise of teaching literature and perhaps the humanities more generally, and to most students. Students, for example, will frequently appeal to the fact they have “covered” certain books and topics in advanced placement classes, at other institutions, or with other instructors. Some may believe that this experience allows them to encounter familiar-sounding assignments with less effort, but most will be annoyed at the suggestion that their previous acquaintance is not wholly adequate and definitive: they have already “done” Milton or Mary Shelley or Salman Rushdie, and they have been attending the local Shakespeare festival for years. Indeed, we concede their point through a whole array of institutional arrangements: we waive requirements, accept transfer credits, and enable students’ rapid passage to whatever professional goals they seek on the far side of our programs. Students’ parents would be even more annoyed if they thought that either they or their children were being asked to purchase certain kinds of knowledge twice; administrators would be unhappy to disturb the fiction of equivalence on which their diplomatic relations with other institutions of higher learning rely (especially in state systems).
Not that students’ previous instruction in works of literature is necessarily inferior to what they receive in college or at a particular institution, but the literary curriculum has inevitable and often deliberate redundancies, in which we have a professional stake and which implicitly assert a literary ideology not too remote from the theoretical perspective de Man articulates. Students’ pragmatic impatience with such backtracking, such compelled revision and repetition, raises questions about how we define literary knowledge. Does knowledge, for instance, mean knowing what happens in a given play by Shakespeare? While one might protest that plot is precisely the element of his dramas that Shakespeare borrows from predecessors and less culturally prestigious sources, I suspect that most students would be content to claim this form of cultural literacy as a major asset of their undergraduate studies—and perhaps there is some Aristotelian justification, in the preeminence of action over character, thought, and diction, for doing so.
So why do we disagree? (Or do we?) In the phrase “the resistance to literature” I hear almost instantly the complementary and partially explanatory phrase “the resistance of literature"—that is, its resistance both to comprehensive assimilation and to the various forms of public discourse that might proclaim the utility of literature. But how strong is our faith that some object of study remains once we have extracted the lesson, the theme, the insight, the empathetic perspective from the literary text? I suspect that at the high school level the text has all but disappeared—which is at least one reason we revisit it at a putatively more advanced level of study. The kind of pedagogical moment that gratifies me most is having students realize that they have never actually read a text they thought they knew (say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), that they have substituted a general concept—most frequently, a thematic statement—for any immediate and consecutive experience of the poem’s or story’s unfolding, and it is of course better if they derive this recognition from their shared conversation than from a performative interpretation by their teacher. The illumination is often palpable enough to run like a current through the classroom. I would like to think that it is sometimes a moment of conversion, since only if students acknowledge that they still have something to learn will they learn. There is also more than a trace of Socratic nastiness about this moment, since what I want my students to experience is their ignorance and their fallacious reliance on authority (that is, on whatever secondhand source, whether personal or written, that has given them an authoritative account of the poem’s or story’s message).
More generally, the value of literary education lies, for me, in such moments of blockage, in students’ discovery that the text frustrates facile apprehension and fails to deliver truths about experience—whether the universality of generational conflict, the inequitable relations between the sexes, the hierarchy of oppression enforced by economic disparity and racism, the enduring consolations of art, or the character of art—that they stood ready to receive. The repertoire of such truths is always shifting, and when the truths are oppositional, they may especially deserve the importance that humanists typically accord them, but they will seldom surprise: their form as detachable moral insights is unthreateningly familiar, and students are blasé or canny enough to anticipate and perhaps discount the social and political perspectives their teachers’ readings are most disposed to uncover. It is possible that as in certain Romantic narratives the blockage I have described is succeeded by sublimity—with the mind’s powers fully released when they can no longer find the channels worn by habit—but I don’t want to let go too quickly of the phenomenon of perplexity and uncertainty. Whereas most forms of instruction smooth and remove obstacles from the pathway of understanding, there is also room for a pedagogy that cautions us against understanding too quickly or that urges us, as the successive doorways in the House of Busirane admonish Britomart, “Be bold,” “Be bold,” “Be not too bold.”
While I was preparing this talk, my colleague Stuart Culver remarked to me that a praise of opacity might have had more viability during the cold war era: in contrast to the didacticism of Soviet aesthetics, the ludic resistance of literary artifacts to disambiguation signified the freedom of the West, and critical practice was encouraged to celebrate an excess of signification that could not be turned to immediate social uses. Now, having to all appearances won the political battle, the ideological state apparatuses of capitalist nations can declare their fundamental sympathy with socialist realism. What good is art that either frustrates widespread popular assimilation or refuses to disseminate worthwhile images of social good?
Perhaps the academy is fortunate that a new rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism, both domestic and international, has arisen to underwrite the humanities curriculum and seems to provide a palatable common ground for conservative and liberal opinion. Still, teachers to whom a diversity-centered curriculum sounds progressive should note how readily a toothless version of diversity, succeeding the civics-class rhetoric of the melting pot, can be co-opted by conservative politicians. It would not be hard to furnish the syllabus of a course on hyphenated ethnic or postcolonial literature with books that, deriving both their plots and values from family history and nostalgia for agrarian or at least nonurban existence, might receive the blessing of the Republican National Committee. Even more transgressive candidates for inclusion would probably present few difficulties to the student reader in quest of sociological, psychological, or moral insight. I digress, but I want to acknowledge that for good or ill we do at the moment have a public discourse of literary value that makes us “good citizens,” and I don’t make light of the possibility that a broadened literary curriculum may have enlarged, however gesturally, our students’ sense of the world’s variety. After all, I live and teach in Utah.
I’m prompted to a further digression by Barry Sarchett’s question at the ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar West about the place of the classics in foreign language instruction—or in the literary curriculum more generally—and by Dennis Looney’s subsequent suggestion at the seminar that classics might serve as one locus for area studies. For obvious reasons, course offerings in most literature departments are heavily weighted toward the contemporaneous; they focus on how the ideology and cultural practices of late industrial society, modernism, and imperial or nationalist politics have shaped the present and its reflections in literary representation. Not only the classical past but the pre-nineteenth-, perhaps pre-twentieth-century past of any linguistic or literary tradition is a foreign country to most students, far more culturally alien than the most geographically remote society today. Moreover, knowing that foreign country which is the past cannot readily produce a tangible or practically applicable gain, and it does not lend itself to programs of community outreach. Nevertheless, Mary Louise Pratt’s striking citation at the seminar of Achilles in Vietnam suggests the unexpected manner in which the distant past can suddenly illuminate the present. If we do not constantly revivify our sense of older texts, if we do not keep them alive on their own terms, the opportunity for such connections will be extinguished. I speak in defense of an apprehension of literature and of literary study that holds in reserve such occasions of revelation precisely because it is not bound to the particular historical or rhetorical moment in which our teaching occurs.
I referred above to students’ substitution of a general concept for the immediate experience of reading a literary work as a loss, though arguably the whole value of critical analysis lies in awakening readers from unconscious absorption in the flow of language or the narrative momentum. Isn’t education a form of enlightenment, and doesn’t enlightenment entail precisely this progress toward generalization? Its goal is the mastery of nature through rationality, a kind of mathematical rationality that reduces “the multiplicity of forms to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter”; here am I quoting Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who paraphrase Bacon and Leibniz, among others. They go on to say, “Disqualified nature becomes the chaotic matter of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes mere possession” (10). (Also: “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract qualities” [7].) This end is accomplished through the “disenchantment of the world . . . the extirpation of animism” (5), and humanity of course pays a price for its mastery, whose gains are shared unequally, by alienation from that over which it exercises power. The particular takes refuge in magic, including the species of animistic superstition we call literature. “Magic,” Horkheimer and Adorno comment, “is utterly untrue, yet in it domination is not yet negated by transforming itself into the pure truth and acting as the very ground of the world that has become subject to it” (9). I hear an echo in this declaration of the defense of fiction that goes back at least as far as Philip Sidney, that the poet never lies because “he nothing affirms” (102), and I am also thinking of Stephen Greenblatt’s famous definition of the literary scholar as a middle-class shaman (1). Enlightenment, as Horkheimer and Adorno present it, is a self-deluded and oppressive juggernaut, promising liberation but delivering even more abject subjection to an unself-conscious technological machinery that calls itself “thought."
It would be too much to suggest that literature, preserving the ghostly knowledge of our discarded past, can somehow heal the breach that has opened up between human beings and the phenomenal world, but surely literature goes some distance in that direction. One should also keep faith with the readerly absorption that protects a space where the empirical world—the world of necessity, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s terms—does not press us to acquire some immediately profitable knowledge of its operations. I firmly believe that critical analysis can intensify rather than disrupt this relation. I enjoy reading art history, but I’ve realized over the years that its value for me lies less in the particular arguments it makes than in its making me look and look again at the images it is describing or decoding, and I distrust any literary criticism that does not make me want, indeed compel me, to reopen the book of poetry or fiction and let its language do its work again and perhaps differently. The primary business of literary instruction is to extend and enlarge the scope of rapt attention and to allow students to see that the effects of the text have not exhausted themselves at a first or even second or third reading.
It is an article of faith, perhaps a superstition, with me that I never teach a literary text, however familiar, without rereading it, but it also turns out to be necessary: the text is never the same as I remembered it. Somehow, magically, the text I am now reading is also the one my students have read. Whether by some subtle shift in the zeitgeist, some change in the institutional context, some invisible reconstitution of the community of readers, we meet on the same ground if not always with the same responses, questions, or enthusiasm. I do not feel an equal imperative to reread a theoretical text or an argument in cultural history; its contours are more recognizable and stable, although I may still reexamine it to reconsider my pedagogical strategy. My personal limitations may be involved here, and in principle the theoretical texts ought to strike me as more open. After all, as I tell my students, theory is a set of questions, not a fixed body of doctrine. Still, unlike literature, theory offers a promise of definite conclusions; it is part of the Enlightenment project of mastery by which the powerful subject can dominate the miscellaneous objects of knowledge, the “chaotic matter of mere classification.”
For advanced students—even and sometimes especially students devoted to creative writing—this project is increasingly seductive. Why try to encompass the burgeoning canon of world literature when one can grasp its general principles of signification? The economy of effort is appealing. In this sense Lauren Berlant is right to suggest that the “resistance to literature” may better describe the current situation of literary study than the “resistance to theory” (although she may well have had something entirely different in mind).
It is not especially difficult to produce publicly respectable justifications for the study of literature, and we have probably all learned to recite, almost reflexively, the ways in which critical reading and persuasive argumentation prepare students for a variety of careers. But I urge that we reanimate and value, in our own understandings and practice of literary education, the countercurrents of Socratic ignorance and deferred comprehension, the unproductive luxury of multiple readings, the resistance not to but of literature.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1997.
Sidney, Sir Philip. “A Defence of Poetry.” Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. 73–121.
© 2004 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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