Why Read? (11 page)

Later on, Jacques Derrida undermined Jean-Paul Sartre's humanism by pointing out the metaphysical, which is to say the subtly
coercive, base on which it rests. Asked to provide a standard that could guide the individual in his choice of actions—with
action understood to be at the core of the existentialist's philosophy of life—Sartre makes the mistake of responding in a
generalizing and delimiting way: Act always in such a manner that you are working to create a self that could serve as a model
for others. We are back with Kant, back under the shadow of the categorical imperative, and back to a coercive form of pedagogy
that is not at all consistent with hopes for self-reliant freedom. Even Heidegger, who in the "Letter on Humanism" tries to
distance himself from Sartre, is accurately criticized by Derrida for propounding a kind of philosophical monotheism. Derrida
sees that Heidegger himself has a preordained ideal to which all human development should aspire. Heidegger celebrates something
called Being and, more precisely, the individual's apprehension of and identification with a pure state of existence. For
Heidegger, the highest human destiny is to be the "shepherd of Being." Yet Derrida himself, as shrewdly as he may write in
"The Ends of Man," has nothing of a positive nature to offer. He has no vision of possible human development. Derrida limits
himself to the work of clearing away superannuated and delimiting modes of humanistic thinking, and then can do no more.

T. S. Eliot, in the great essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," tried to found a humanism by positing the existence
of literary monuments that could be modified by the intervention of this or that newly canonical writer. Encountering Eliot
on the canon, I think of Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that the
Phenomenology
would rank as one of the greatest of all works if only its author had the sense to finish by saying that it was merely a thought
experiment, only one idiosyncratic version of the way that it all is. One might say something similar of Eliot. If only the
monuments were explicitly and joyously
his
monuments, his and no one else's. If only he told us all to go out and make, from the profusion of magnificent works that
surround us, something on the order of a quotidian liturgy, a secular scripture, as Frye liked to call it, of our own. "I
must Create a System," as Blake, Frye's great teacher, put it, "or be enslav'd by another Mans." Eliot, the potential liberator,
becomes a creator of what Blake, hyperbolist that he sometimes was, called "mind-forg'd manacles." Even Frye, author of the
greatest book of visionary literary criticism yet written—for it takes visionary powers to make a past writer's vision live
in the present—eventually throws his wonderful energy and intelligence into forming a system. The master system of
Anatomy of Criticism
reveals all of literature's meanings; in it all readers should believe. But such systems pass quickly away. They will always
be replaced by other coercive and exclusionary intellectual organizations that offer the comforts of collective, institutional
religion—at least, until we can discover what Blake knew: that all deities ultimately reside in the individual human breast.

Disciples

IT IS SOMETIMES hard for us critics to see that we are disciples. Or that we ought to be. The fact does not sort well with
our dignity. But in fact the true T. S. Eliot scholar is not a grubber after Eliot-related facts, or the creator of ingeniously
baroque readings of Eliot. He is not the source of minutiae for the Eliot newsletter or any other such thing. No, he is far
more important than that, and also far less.

He is, or ought to be, Eliot's disciple. He is responsible for so immersing himself in Eliot that only he and very few others
can plausibly bring Eliot's vision alive in the current world, which, as the critic deeply believes (or why would he have
become a deep student of Eliot to begin with?), has sore need of it. He is the one who will know instinctively—as Frye knew
of Blake, as Bate knew of Keats and Johnson, as Orwell knew of Dickens—precisely how his author would feel in response to
virtually any event that comes to pass around us.

We fancy we are saying something merely rhetorical when we talk about how authors who matter live on forever. But it is not
figurative speech at all, if a literary culture is unfolding as it should. No, the scholar by dint of hard work and imagination
can, at will, merge himself with the authors who matter to him. By the exercise of his own heart's intelligence, he manages
to keep them alive in the present. By sacrificing some of his individuality to the thoughts and feelings of another, by giving
up himself, he becomes a light of knowledge to all around him. And when the scholar does not do so, our common culture suffers.

When I was in graduate school, I became a student of Freud. It seemed necessary then to learn absolutely everything I could
about him. I read his works numberless times; I read everything about him that I could get. And his vision fully infiltrated
my mind. On any given subject, then and now, I can offer a plausible Freudian response, though by this time I believe at best
a significant fraction of what Freud did. This kind of study involves a certain self-annulling, not unrelated to the annulment
of self that Eliot describes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." There, Eliot speaks of the poet's surrender of personality
in order to make way for the influence of past poets. "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment
to something which is more valuable." Such learning—and I don't mean to single myself out here; many people have it—is part
of what a scholar's education is about. My job as a Romanticist is not primarily to say unprecedented things about the Romantics,
or to go to conferences and impress my fellow scholars, most of whom actively dislike the authors they teach, anyway. My job
is to continue the lives of the poets on in the present, to make them available to those living now who might need them.

It's not necessary to be a lifelong scholar of this or that writer to make his work available to the uses of the present and
future. Learning surely helps a great deal, but energy, imagination, and a little judiciousness go a long way, too. What's
most important, I think, is to find the writer at the peak of his potential for life. You can dwell on Dostoyevsky as the
writer who conveys an astounding and just portrait of a certain sort of murderer in
Crime and Punishment.
But ultimately, one probably does more for students by helping them to understand Dostoyevsky's vision of life as an insane,
ever-blackening turbulence that we can only navigate humanely by recourse to religious faith.

A given age is likely to be infused to the core with standard prevailing opinion, which is the product of the moment. The
day is generally suffused with—recall William Carlos Williams's lines—"what passes for the new." One way to break through
that prevailing opinion is to have recourse to the best that has been known and thought in the past. Offering past wealth
to the present is what a scholar is supposed to do.

Sometimes someone steps from our ranks whose own vision of matters is worthy of consideration in its own right. But most of
us cannot lay fair claim to that power. Rather, we are the powers that keep Chaucer and Spenser and Milton from fading into
oblivion. This is a noble task. And rightly universities give people security, relative calm, and a solid sustenance to let
it unfold.

Are you so original? Such an adept translator or rewriter of texts? Come out from behind the pretense. Write us your own novel
or poem or essay, take up matters where there is more pressure on the individual to compound his way of apprehending things,
and let us see what you have on offer. Then we may judge whether you might not have been better off with the genuinely noble,
if also more modest, process of discipleship. And if you stay with true discipleship, who knows? Does Plato not go at least
as far as Socrates? Does Frye at his best not do more than complete Blake? Such achievement must come naturally, through a
process that begins in some measure of self-annulment. Yet it is a self-annulment that can be amply rewarded. As Camille Paglia
puts it, "Great teachers live their subject. The subject teaches itself through them. It uses them and, in return, charges
them with elemental energy."

Exemplars

THE KIND OF teaching I endorse entails impersonation. The teacher temporarily becomes the author, valuing what the author
values, thinking as the author would. George Orwell does this for Dickens in his wonderful essay on the novelist. Marilyn
Butler does it for Jane Austen; Harold Bloom for Wallace Stevens; Geoffrey Hartman and Walter Jackson Bate for Keats. Helen
Vendler has done it for many contemporary poets in her review-essays. With unparalleled brilliance, Northrop Frye does it
in his book on William Blake,
Fearful Symmetry.
These critics merge with their authors and by doing so become more than who they are.

Such critics are not only valuable in themselves, but valuable in dialogue with one another. Consider what is to be gained
by juxtaposing Butler and Frye on the subject of the Romantics. For years, Frye immersed himself in Blake's work; he thought
and probably even dreamed as Blake would. And the result is a remarkable transfiguration. Frye becomes Blake, or at least
a highly plausible version of Blake. It is a Blake who is alive to the needs of Frye's present, an available, cogent Blake
who speaks to Frye's society and, I believe, to our own.

Listen to Frye, in one of many memorable passages, matching the eloquence of Blake to bring him to us. "Inspiration," writes
Blake-Frye, "is the artist's empirical proof of the divinity of his imagination; and all inspiration is divine in origin,
whether used, perverted, hidden or frittered away in reverie. All imaginative and creative acts, being eternal, go to build
up a permanent structure, which Blake calls Golgonooza, above time, and, when this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding,
will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the new Jerusalem which is the total
form of all human culture and civilization. Nothing that the heroes, martyrs, prophets and poets of the past have done for
it has been wasted; no anonymous and unrecognized contribution to it has been overlooked. In it is conserved all the good
man has done, and in it is completed all that he hoped and intended to do. And the artist who uses the same energy and genius
that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it
at the same time."

This is Frye's version of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." For Eliot, most of us must live outside the world
of great works, looking on in awe. But Frye's imaginative world is a world for you and for me, a democratic world of art and
creation that we can enter by making an honest attempt to write with visionary integrity. We need to render what we see as
truly as we can. In so doing we can come into the world of genius—feeling, perhaps, the shock of recognition that Melville
said united all who deployed the energies of creation, whether they succeeded in worldly terms or failed. (Melville put his
own relation to worldly success memorably: "So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest
desire to write those sort of books which are said to 'fail.'")

What Frye offers, through reliance on the self, is entry into Keats's immortal freemasonry of intellect. The aim of a liberal
arts education, from this perspective, is to show us that, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it, "we need not be the passive victims
of what we deterministically call 'circumstances' (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking
ourselves through what Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer—freer to be ourselves, to
be what we most want and value."

Frye imagines opening the world of artistic freedom to ever growing numbers of people; he is self-consciously democratizing
where Eliot is exclusionary. But the energies of art do not belong to everyone simply by virtue of being born. One has to
strive to enter into the world of Homer and Isaiah and to draw on their powers. The most admirable individuals, for Frye and
Blake, will be the ones who throw themselves into the life of creation; those who refuse the opportunity have turned away
from what matters most in life. "The worship of God," wrote Blake, "is Honouring his gifts in other men each according to
his genius and loving the greatest men best."

As arresting as this affirmation of genius may be, it probably should not go without challenge in a classroom. For perhaps
there are other paths, and before the student is swept in by the attractions of Blake and Frye, and Keats and Bate, it's necessary
to look critically at them.

Taking a deep initial delight in a book or an author is a little like falling in love. There is a nearly rapturous acceptance
of all the author brings. The truth unfolds as if from above. But to adapt that vision to one's own uses, to bring it wisely
into the world, more than love is necessary. One also has to apply a critical scrutiny to the work—consider its connotations,
examine its antecedents, asking always: What would it mean to live this vision? The initial feeling of being swept off your
feet by a book has got to be followed by more thoughtful commitment, as marriage follows love. When you say yes to an author's
vision, you're entering into a marriage of minds. And such marriage ought not to take place without critical scrutiny.

In
Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries,
Marilyn Butler is generally about as detached from her subject as Frye is immersed in his. But at one point, she steps forward
and affirms her identification with Jane Austen, using Austen to contend against the self-generated visions that the Romantics
and their proponents worship. Here is Butler: "In all Jane Austen's novels, characters are judged by their manners. But one
is not born with manners, nor can one easily pick them up; one is taught them as a child by parents who had them. The issue
of manners is raised more explicitly in German literature of Jane Austen's period than in English. In that country of legalized
class distinctions, burger writers could not rise socially; they had to use their inner resources, and make a self-justifying
system out of solipsism—Romanticism is such a system—because their manners, or lack of them, would always exclude them from
the charmed circle of the hereditary aristocracy. For Jane Austen, the writer who expresses the ethos of the landed gentry,
manners are indeed the passport. But true to her function at its highest, she idealizes manners and endows them with all their
theoretical value . . . They proclaim that the old style of social responsibility is accepted,
duty
(the idealized reading of upper-class motivation) put before the new individualism."