Why Read? (10 page)

Yet exactly how far is one to go in expanding literary meanings to make them apt for the present and future? It's unlikely
that Homer ever imagined a pervasive cult of the warrior, however sublimated, that would be comprehensively open to women.
By what right do I, or my students, enlarge his sense to fit our needs? I think that, having established the author's vision,
insofar as it's possible, and having been as true to him as, say, Bowra seems to me to be true to an aspect of Homer, we are
free to enlarge the work, always being aware of what it is we do. The test of the reading that leaves the provinces of the
author's vision is use. What can we do with this work? What aspects of our lives does it illuminate? What action does it enjoin?
We test the work, then, against the template of experience, as my students did. They wondered what would happen to them if
they brought Homer's vision to life here and now. The ultimate test of a book, or of an interpretation, is the difference
it would make in the conduct of life.

But Shakespeare?

DOES THE WORK contain live options? Does it offer paths one might take, modes of seeing and saying and doing that we can put
into action in the world? How, in other words, does the vision at hand, the author's vision, intersect with—or combat—your
own vision of experience, your own Final Narrative?

Do you want to second Wordsworth's natural religion? It's not a far-fetched question at a moment when many consider ecological
issues to be the ultimate issues on the world's horizon. Is it true, what Wordsworth suggests in "Tintern Abbey" about the
healing powers of Nature and memory? Can they fight off depression? Not an empty question in an age when antidepresant drugs
have become unbearably common. Is Milton's Satan the shape that evil now most often takes—flamboyant, grand, and self-regarding?
Or is Blake's Satan—a supreme administrator, mild, bureaucratic, efficient, and congenial, an early exemplar of Hannah Arendt's
"banality of evil"—a better emblem? Or, to strike to the center of the tensions that often exist between secular and religious
writing, who is the better guide to life: the Jesus of the Gospels, or the Prometheus of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who learned
so much from Christ, but rejected so much as well—in particular Jesus' life of celibacy?

All right, one might say, but those are Romantic writers, polemicists, authors with a program. Even Henry James might be considered
part of this tradition, albeit as an ambivalent anti-Romantic. What about other writers? What about, for instance, the famous
poet of negative capability, who seems to affirm nothing, William Shakespeare? The most accomplished academic scholars of
Shakespeare generally concur: they cannot tell what Shakespeare believed about
any
consequential issue. How can you employ Shakespeare in a way of teaching that seeks to answer Schopenhauer's question "What
is life?" And if you can make nothing of Shakespeare, greatest of writers, then what value could this approach to literature,
this democratic humanism as we might call it, possibly have?

If Sigmund Freud drew on any author for his vision of human nature—right or wrong as that vision may be—it was Shakespeare.
The Oedipus complex, to cite just one instance of Freud's Shakespearean extractions, might just as well be called the Hamlet
complex, as Harold Bloom has remarked. From Shakespeare, Freud might also have gathered or confirmed his theories of sibling
rivalry; of the tragic antipathy between civilization and the drives; of bisexuality; of patriarchal presumption; of male
jealousy; of all love as inevitably being the love of authority; of humor as an assault on the superego; and a dozen more
psychoanalytical hypotheses. Shakespeare may not have affirmed these ideas out and out—he is not, it's true, a polemicist
in the way that Blake is. But the question remains: Does Shakespeare/Freud work? Does their collaboration, if it is fair to
call it that, illuminate experience, put one in a profitable relation to life, help you live rightly and enjoy your being
in the world?

Readers of Freud's
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego
will recall the daunting image of the leader Freud develops there. The leader, from Freud's point of view, is a primal father.
In him the crowd places absolute trust, the trust of the child as it was aimed at his own father early on in life. Here is
how Freud describes the primal and primary figure: "The members of the group were subject to ties just as we see them today,
but the father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his
will needed no reinforcement from others . . . He loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served
his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary . . . Even to-day the members of a group stand in
need of the illusion that ihey are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else,
he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent."

In Shakespeare, whose work he read intensely from early on in life to the end, Freud could have seen precisely such a dynamic
of leadership unfold. When we first encounter Prince Hal, later to become the mighty Henry V, he seems to be something rather
different from the leader that Freud describes. He is mischievous, witty, and dissolute, and bosom friends with the prince
of dissipation, Sir John Falstaff. In the three plays in which Hal appears, developing into King Henry V, we see a metamorphosis.
However free-form he may be in the beginning, by the time he invades France in the last play of the trilogy, Hal has become
as cold and self-contained as the figure Freud describes. Hal banishes Falstaff, who has taught him so much, and he hangs
his old drinking buddy, Bardolph By the end of the play, Hal, a little like Michael Corleone at the end of Francis Ford Coppola's
masterpiece,
The Godfather
Part II,
truly loves no one but himself. Despite some subdued ironies directed against the king in
Henry V,
the play suggests that, as humanly off-putting as the self-loving Hal may be, he is nonetheless a superbly effective monarch.
For the people need such rulers. With kings who can also jest, who can take themselves lightly, if only at times, they can
have nothing serious to do. Such figures do not command allegiance. Falstaffian figures cannot activate the fantasies of omnipotence
that we all, Freud argues, attached to our fathers when we were children, and that we still nurse in the unconscious. Northrop
Frye observes that men will die for a brutal autocrat, but not for a joking backslapper. Freud, and Shakespeare as well, can
offer reasons why this might be so.

Freud believed that in reading the book of Shakespeare, he read the book of nature. Even if he did not draw his theory of
the leader directly from Shakespeare's pages, he could at least have found it corroborated here. In fact, Freud's vision of
the leader and Shakespeare's are barely distinguishable, except that Freud is rather disgusted by the human weakness the vision
reveals, and Shakespeare seems to see Hal's sort of kingship as simply necessary.

From
Hamlet,
Freud draws much of the material he needed to formulate the Oedipus complex. He does so directly. But all through Freud there
are instances of convergence with Shakespeare. What these instances indicate, at least to me, is that Freud effectively acts
as a literary critic of Shakespeare. He takes the work at hand and draws a theory of human nature and of human social life
from it. Freud has seen that Shakespeare poses the question "What is life?" and he has done his best to construe his answer.

And this, in fact, is what literary criticism ought to do. A valuable literary critic is not someone who debunks canonical
figures, or who puts writers into their historical contexts, or, in general, one who propounds new and brilliant theories
of interpretation. A valuable critic, rather, is one who brings forth the philosophy of life latent in major works of art
and imagination. He makes the author's implicit wisdom explicit, and he offers that wisdom to the judgment of the world.

When he encounters works that are not wise but foolish, what he does, in general, is to leave them alone—he doesn't teach
them, or write about them, or give them any more notice than they already have. The world is aflood with bad ideas and flawed
visions: the true critic seeks and finds live options; he heralds forgotten news that is still new. He discovers the discoveries
of art.

The truest example of literary criticism I know of is this one: one July day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by far the preeminent
man of letters in America, received by post a volume of poetry from an absolutely unknown carpenter living in Brooklyn, New
York. The volume had been privately printed, since no commercial publisher would touch it. Its author sold it door to door;
he also reviewed it himself, anonymously: "An American bard at last," one of the reviews began. Emerson, who in himself concentrated
the prestige of all of our current literary Nobel Prize winners rolled into one, did not do what one might expect. He did
not take the volume and toss it into the trash.

He took it into his home, read it, and immediately, with a shock of recognition, felt its genius. He called it the greatest
piece of wit and wisdom that America had yet produced. He overwhelmed the unknown author with praise. He endorsed the book
to everyone he knew.

Emerson himself had always hoped to matter preeminently as a poet. In his essay on the uses of poets and poetry, he described
the kind of writer he thought America most needed and that he himself aspired to be, someone responsive to the variety, energy,
and promise of the new nation: "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our
boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting,
the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the
imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." It was clear to Emerson that, much as he wanted to fill that role, he
never would. He was a poet of the inner self, not of teeming democracy. But when he saw someone else rise to the task, he
didn't turn away with resentment, or offer measured, feline praise. When Walt Whitman sent Emerson the first volume of
Leaves of Grass,
Emerson forgot himself and embraced a new hero.

Hamlet

POETRY, HORACE SAID, ought to give pleasure and instruct. And one need not look only to Freud to find instruction in the work
of Shakespeare. There are other ways to go.

The Romantics took Hamlet as the representative contemporary individual, and their instinct was in many ways just. Hamlet
stands between the Homeric figure that Bowra describes and the Christian ethos. He feels impelled by his father's ghost to
take revenge and murder King Claudius. Hamlet the Elder is a figure steeped in the old heroic code. He would have looked to
Achilles as an exemplar. When someone kills a member of your clan, you don't turn the other cheek, or even call on God to
deliver just punishment. You strike, in as quick and deadly a way as you can.

Hamlet is responsive to this warrior code. Yet at the same time, he feels constrained by a Christian sense of right and wrong.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not take revenge. Hamlet is a thinker, a deeply inward man with a Christian conscience. But along with that conscience
he possesses the residue of a Homeric drive for ascendancy. He wants preeminence.

The tension between these two ways of life, Christian and Homeric, informs the language of the play, the language tha Hamlet
himself speaks. No interpretation of the play is complete without a careful study of the protagonist's idiom. But such responsiveness
is only part of a full reaction to the play. At the beginning of his first solioquy, Hamlet makes his Christian commitment
clear, calling out "God, God," and wishing that "the Everlasting had not fix'd / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter." Suicide
can, of course, be a noble end in the classical world. In Christianity it is entirely forbidden.

Not much later, Hamlet moves from the idiom of Christianity to the idiom of classical antiquity. His dead father is "Hyperion,"
his usurping uncle a "satyr." Then his mother is weeping Niobe. He cries out against Gertrude for marrying his uncle—"my father's
brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules." In part, Hamlet wishes he could be Hercules, the better to rise
to his father's revenge. But to his Christian conscience, Hercules is a throwback, a barbarian ideal.

Paul Cantor, the source of this Nietzschean reading of
Hamlet,
summarizes the situation: "In some ways, the figure of the ghost encapsulates the polarities Hamlet faces. As the ghost of
his
father,
dressed in military garb and crying for revenge, it conjures up the world of epic warfare and heroic combat. But as the
ghost
of his father, rising out of what appears to be purgatory, it shatters the narrow bounds of the pagan imagination and opens
a window on the eternal vistas of Christianity. In short, the ghost is at one and the same time a pagan and a Christian figure,
and as such points to the heart of Hamlet's tragic dilemma as a modern Christian charged with the ancient pagan task of revenge."

Hamlet is caught between two worldviews, two circles or narratives—a state that may be the essential condition of tragedy.
He is looking toward both Jesus and Achilles, two dutiful sons whose piety is in dramatic opposition, to see which way he
needs to go.

The result is delay, irresolution. But, we must ask—and our students with us—is Hamlet's lot not sometimes ours, too? Many
of the crises that give us the greatest pain and that are, in their effects on our day-to-day lives, potentially tragic, involve
the collision of these two sets of values, Christian and pagan. Are we for or against capital punishment? Shall we follow
the old classical code of honor or the modern code of mercy when a fellow citizen has been wronged? And abortion? Shall we
do as the classical world did and, without excessive qualms, snuff out the newborn or unborn for our own advantage, or even
our own convenience? Or shall we go the way of the Gospels and be, like Jesus, shepherds of souls? (Not some souls, but all
of them.) Contemplating suicide, some of our contemporaries will also inevitably hear voices contending in a way that evokes
Hamlet. To the classical world, as Shakespeare accurately dramatizes it in
Julius Caesar,
suicide can be an honorable end. It offers a dignified exit from a life that would otherwise end in shame. To the Christian
mind, suicide is associated with acedia, or despair, the crime against the Holy Spirit, and the one unforgivable sin.

When these two worldviews, Christian and classical, enter conflict, it is unlikely that we will be able to find a satisfying
compromise. Hegel believed that tragedy began when two highly desirable and mutually exclusive courses of action collided
with each other. For Hegel, tragedy is two rights making a wrong. Two rights make a wrong for Hamlet, and often, I suspect,
for us as well, as we confront prospects for action—revenge, suicide, abortion—that dramatically divide our spirits. Encounters
of this sort will not offer satisfying resolutions. There is not likely to be any plan of action that can leave us fully at
peace. And frequently, the result will be grief of tragic proportions.

Not every interpretation geared to discovering usable truths leads us to happiness. Not every such reading answers questions.
Tragic awareness, which Shakespeare often bequeaths, can only reveal to us that certain griefs are not fully negotiable, cannot
be readily converted into happiness or tranquillity. (Robert Frost thought that a central element of a literary education
was learning to distinguish grief from grievances. Grievances may be remediable; griefs are to be suffered.) But perhaps in
the foreknowledge of such sorrows there is some consolation; at least one will not be taken entirely by surprise.

Good Medicine?

Is THE KIND of literary education that I'm endorsing here a form of therapy? Yes and no. Yes, in that this kind of teaching,
like Socrates', like Freud's, offers possibilities for change that are not only intellectual but also emotional. When we're
talking about Final Narratives, we're talking about ultimate values, and strong feelings inevitably come out; tensions similar
to the ones that proliferate in Freudian analysis can arise. (I sometimes preside over a raucous classroom.) But there is
also a crucial difference. Patients come to psychoanalysis because they suffer from the past. Their obsessions, in some measure
unconscious, with past events prevent their living with reasonable fullness in the present. The form of teaching that I espouse
assumes a certain ability to live now (that is to say, a certain sanity) and so aims itself not primarily at unearthing the
past, but at shaping the future. What will you be? What will you do?

There is a story about a psychoanalyst who, after the first day's intake interview, asked his patients an unexpected question.
"If you were cured right now, if you were well, what would you do?" There would usually come forth a list. "I'd get married;
I'd travel; I'd go back to school and study law." To which the therapist, trusting his instincts, sometimes replied, "Then
why don't you go off and do those things?" Assuming that he posed that question at the right moment, to the right patient,
then what the analyst had observed was that the analysand was not caught in the past, but was actually alive enough to the
promise of futurity (healthy enough) to expand out of his existing sphere.

In a marvelous passage in his book on Freud, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes the moment when the Oedipus complex stops
being a regressive trap for the individual and begins to be a sign of future promise, a provocation to do some fresh work
in the world. This is the moment when the father is no longer the mystical foe, but an ambivalent ally whose own contributions
to the world one can, however subtly, however strongly, revise. The person who stands on the edge, between regression and
progress, past and future, is the one who has made herself ripe for literary education.

So the approach to teaching the humanities I am describing is not therapeutic per se. Nor, as I hope the discussion of Hamlet
shows, is it to be written off as a way of dispensing elevating platitudes. It's not an exercise in cheering yourself up.
Teachers should feel free to introduce the most appalling visions to their students. To read the Marquis de Sade, with his
insistence that sexualized cruelty is the deepest desire of all men and women, is to encounter a way of apprehending life
that can qualify as a vital option, if only to some. The objective of this kind of teaching is not to pretend that the Marquis
does not exist, or that the disgustingly anti-Semitic Celine is not a writer worth serious study, or that Pound's fascism
puts him out of bounds. Rather, it is to encounter such works and put them to the test of imagined experience. What would
it be like to go Sade's way? What is to be gained and what lost in the life of the libertine?

It is not the professor's business to eradicate every form of what he takes to be retrograde and disgusting behavior. All
student perspectives are welcome in class; whether they are racist, or homophobic, or whatever, they must be heard, considered,
and responded to without panic. The classroom I am describing is a free space, one where people can speak their innermost
thoughts and bring what is dark to light. They may expect to be challenged, but not to be shouted down, written off, or ostracized.
Bitter, brutal thoughts can grow prolifically in the mind's unlighted cellars. But when we bring them into the world and examine
them dispassionately, they often lose their force.

A few sessions into studying Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
I asked a question that touched on the students' sense of self. "If you woke up tomorrow in Orwell's world, what path would
you take? Would you try to blend in, as most people do? Or would you resist, in Winston Smith's way, defending truth as you
perceived it, against all the surrounding lies? Or would you go Julia's route and live for pleasure in the midst of an insanely
puritanical world?" (Julia, it's said, is a "rebel from the waist down.") The first answer I got shocked me. "Pd be O'Brien,"
a young woman said. O'Brien may be the most memorable character in the book: he's a gifted intellectual and high functionary
of the inner party, who has become a horrible sadist. He takes a nearly sexual delight in reducing Smith from a resister to
a cringing lump. "I'd try to put myself on the top, just like I try to now," Elizabeth went on. "And I think a lot of people
here would do the same thing." As soon as Elizabeth said as much, we weren't having an ordinary conversation anymore, but
a dialogue about the way we ought to live our lives.

A good classroom is a free-speech zone, where everything can be expressed, and where, at times, one will read authors who
are not, in the teacher's opinion, conducive to a form of the good life, but are prophets of cruelty and hatred. We will explore
their visions. We will bring to the fore the experimental selves they provide, and ask ourselves: what would it mean to live
like that?

Most of the books we teach, especially to the young, will contain, implicitly or overtly, versions of the good life that we
can endorse. But not all. We will, I hope, have faith that, given fair hearing, those imaginative voices that lead to health,
generosity, energy, humor, and compassion will win out over the other sort. But we will also know that such a victory is not
foreordained.

Not long ago I met a very likable and generous professor of humanities. He was mild-mannered, but no pushover. What he had
to say about his own way of teaching fascinated me.

"It seems to me," he said, "that every generation of humanities teachers has worked, subtly and quietly, to make students
into more progressive people. We've encouraged them to be skeptical about religious belief. We've helped them to be more open-minded
in their response to others, particularly when they're different. And we've particularly worked to persuade the guys that
their masculinity won't be lost if they become more sensitive than they were before. We've tried to suggest that a no-holds-barred
capitalism isn't the best thing for everyone and we've tried to push in the direction of more and more social and economic
equality. We've tried to change the way people get pleasure out of life. We've shown them that there's more than TV; they
can enjoy poetry and opera and philosophy. You can probably say that we've tried to make them more civilized."

I found this well put and plausible. Maybe America would be a better place if this professor's educational goals came to fruition.
It would be a more humane country if we all became more sensitive, more community minded, less materialistic, more civilized.

"So," I said, "it's as though what you're trying to do is make them into honorary Europeans, postmodern, postreligious citizens
of Paris or Brussels?"

He agreed. That was exactly what he was shooting for. But thinking further on the matter, it strikes me that it's a very bad
idea for us teachers to have a preexisting image of how we want our students to turn out, even as potentially attractive an
idea as this teacher was offering. No, I think that what we need is for people to understand who and what they are now, then
to be open to changing into their own highest mode of being. And that highest mode is something that they must identify by
themselves, through encounters with the best that has been known and thought. We all have promise in us; it is up to education
to reveal that promise, and to help it unfold. The power that is in you, says Emerson, is new in nature. And the best way
to release that power is to let students confront viable versions of experience and take their choices.

It will come as little surprise when I say that what I have been endorsing here is a form of humanism. Humanism has a long
and complex history, but for the purposes of this book, I want to describe humanistic education in a relatively condensed
way. To me, humanism is the belief that it is possible for some of us, and maybe more than some, to use secular writing as
the preeminent means for shaping our lives. That means that we might construct ourselves from novels, poems, and plays, as
well as from works of history and philosophy, in the way that our ancestors constructed themselves (and were constructed)
by the Bible and other sacred texts.

To me, the drawback of significant past versions of humanism is that they have all come with latent and overt ideas about
the person they wanted to see emerge from the process of reading and thinking. Like my friend the kindly professor, humanists
have known from the start what sort of person they hoped to create. The New Critics, with their emphasis on those qualities—a
capacity for irony and ambiguity, the power to maintain inner tension—that they saw as conducive to maturity, did precisely
this, encouraging their devotees to be responsive to a preexisting model. Matthew Arnold, who usefully announced to the world
that in the time to come poetry might have to replace religion as the source of spiritual sustenance, was himself narrowly
committed. Arnold gave us the touchstones, passages at the heart of true literature, passages that all of us needed to grapple
to our souls so as to become genuinely educated. But Arnold's stoical resignation, the discourse of tempered middle age, will
not do for everyone.