Why Read? (7 page)

De Man's larger argument is that literature perpetually yields these moments of unreadability. And herein lies the clinching
point: this is what makes literature a particularly distinguished and enlightening form of discourse. Writes de Man, "A literary
text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode." That capacity simultaneously to affirm and
to deny is, according to de Man, really all that literature yields that is of consequence. People, human beings who in other
regards were not noticeably brain befuddled, took this notion seriously.

It is reasonable to be attuned to such moments, to be sure (and I think Yeats does offer one here and that de Man explicates
it shrewdly); and it can be illuminating to ponder them. This de Manian moment is not unrelated to Buddhist accounts of self-annulment,
the achievement of egolessness through meditation. But Buddhists reflect constantly on the reasons for such a quest and on
what might be achieved by a human being once the ego is annulled. In de Man, there is no such reflection on ends. His findings,
such as they stand, are never put to existential work.

De Manian suspension between alternatives may be a good place to begin, or to rebegin, serious literary inquiry. But to imagine
that such doubt is all that literature yields, or the best that literature yields, that all those marvelous books, marvelous
vision, can be reduced to a moment that balances on the head of a pin, well, as Huck Finn put it, that's too many for me.

But de Man need not be singled out here. Rather, virtually every critic or school of criticism that matters has worked to
reduce literary experience, vast and varied as it is, into a set of simple terms. They've turned contingent literature into
delimiting philosophy (or, one might say, "metaphysics"), which says that there is one mode of happiness, one kind of good,
one form of ideal life for everyone.

Salient in the process of transforming literary variety into philosophical uniformity has been psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis
lets the critic become a temporary therapist, diving into the inner life of the work, finding its hidden chambers, telling
a story about the work and the author that the author could not herself tell. Now the power of the critic grows exponentially,
as he configures himself as the wise analyst and the author as the patient, on the scene for needful therapy. Whatever the
benefits of psychoanalysis to living patients who elect to become part of the process—and I think that they can be real—there
is nevertheless little indication that psycho-literary analysis does anything for the patient. It does, however, enrich the
analyst with no little power.

Why did these approaches, these forms of translation, catch on? For many reasons, not insignificant among them the teacher's
will to power over the texts that she teaches. But these translating approaches work in part because they're good at school.
They give the teacher something coherent to teach. They give the students a portable knowledge, something to take away from
the scene. And they give them an illusion of potency over works far more potent than they. Current literary analysis allows
students to take up the stance of cool complacency that they, and all of us, have become accustomed to from living in a spectatorial
culture. The knowing literary-critical stance may be more difficult to achieve than the TV watcher's accustomed disdain, but
the two positions are not unrelated. In both, one assumes an unearned and potentially debilitating superiority. We will not
have real humanistic education in America until professors, and their students, can give up the narcissistic illusion that
through something called theory, or criticism, they can stand above Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante.

If the latter-day Dionysus is the god of humanities entertainment, the new Apollo is the god of humanities analysis, the one
who confers power and skills on his devotees. When you hear a literary critic repeating terms over and over, whether they
be "ideology" and "class struggle," or "repression" and "neurosis," or "patriarchy" and "oppression," you know that you are
in the hands of a writer who is devoted to the soft institutional usurpation of literary power, the better to create other,
less varied kinds of writing—and fewer vital options.

Practitioners of all disciplines must promise something, implicitly or overtly. They tell their students that eventually they
will possess a certain sort of knowledge. To thrive in a university, a department must promise some kind of desirable prowess,
whether it be understanding of the physical world, knowledge of history's laws, or, in this case, a capacity to analyze and
describe works of art as though they were species of fauna. We have made literary study fit in, be good at school. But true
humanistic study is not geared to generalized, portable truths; it is geared to human transformation. And that is something
that catalogues cannot describe and to which the writing of detached literary critical essays is more or less irrelevant.

Works that matter work differently. Such works, in history, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, and literature, can
do many things, but preeminent among them is their capacity to offer truth. So far we've left the quest of truth to Falwell
and to faith. We, the supposed heirs of Socrates, have fled from our authentic vocations. Perhaps it is time again to confront
the Sphinx, who now, as always, poses the riddle of life: What use will you make of the world? (And what use might it make
of you?) How do you intend to live? It is time, perhaps, to help our students look into the Sphinx's eye (and to look there
ourselves); time to see what we see.

Truth

LITERATURE AND TRUTH? The humanities and truth? Come now. What could be more ridiculous? What could be more superannuated
than that?

We read literature now for other reasons. We read to assert ourselves, to sharpen our analytical faculties. We read to debunk
the myths. We read to know the other. We read, sometimes, for diversion. But read for truth? Absurd. The whole notion of truth
was dispatched long ago, tossed on the junk heap of history along with God and destiny and right and all the rest. Read for
truth? Why do that?

For the simple reason that for many people, the truth—the circle, the vision of experience—that they've encountered through
socialization is inadequate. It doesn't put them into a satisfying relation to experience. That truth does not give them what
they want. It does not help them make a contribution to their society. It does not, to advance another step, even allow for
a clear sense of the tensions between themselves and the existing social norms, the prevailing doxa. The gay boy can't accept
the idea that his every third thought is a sin. The visionary-in-the-making isn't at home with her practical, earth-bound,
and ambitious parents. Such people, and I believe most people who go to literature and the liberal arts out of more than mere
curiosity are in this group, demand other, better ways to apprehend the world—that is, ways that are better
for them.
And the best repository for those other ways are the works of the poets, as Williams said, and of the painters and composers
and novelists and historians. Here one may hope for a second chance, a way to begin the game again, getting it closer to right
this time around.

But how do we find this truth? How do we begin to extract it from literature? Well, to begin with, we must read and interpret
the work.

Here arises a problem. We all know that there is no such thing as a perfect interpretation. In fact, some of the more sophisticated
among us have come to believe that interpretation is by necessity interminable. It's a mark of shallowness to believe that
we can get to the core of the poem. Do I dare? Do I dare? So says the Prufrock of contemporary academia.

What I take to be worthwhile interpretation is centered on the author. I do not join my colleague E. D. Hirsch in affirming
that the author's intention ought to be the measure of the reading at hand. We can never discover as much. There are simply
too many levels of the mind that contribute to creation, not all of them responsive to analysis.

No, the art of interpretation is to me the art of arriving at a version of the work that the author—as we imagine him, as
we imagine her—would approve and be gratified by. The idea is not perfectly to reproduce the intention; that can never be
done. Rather, the objective is to bring the past into the present and to do so in a way that will make the writer's ghost
nod in something like approval. That means operating with the author's terms, thinking, insofar as it is possible, the writer's
thoughts, reclaiming his world through his language. In preparing to write
Fearful
Symmetry,
Northrop Frye did all he could to merge with William Blake, to relive and in so doing to re-create his vision. And he did
it with grand success.

The teacher's act of inspired ventriloquism need not be perfect. All that he needs to do is to supply a vision, based on the
work at hand, that is as ramified as possible and that offers a fertile alternative to what the students in class are likely
to believe, or are likely to believe that they believe.

But that's impossible, one might say. You can never satisfyingly reproduce an author's vision, or even come close. On the
contrary, we do this sort of thing all the time. We describe books and films to each other. We use all the resources we can
gather in order to explain one friend to another. We recount situations of almost unbearable complexity—the details of a long
illness, the dynamics of a divorce—in hopes of using our accounts to move forward, to make the best of life, or what of life
remains. Our powers of description, which need not stop at paraphrase, are often put to the test. They are among the most
humanly necessary powers we possess. Who should be in a better position to deploy such powers than the professor who has been
preparing for virtually all her life to do just that?

If this process of inspired re-rendering is impossible, why then do we freely apply various theories to texts? Shouldn't the
impossibility of adequately apprehending
them
also offend our sense of just complexity? If we can theorize about reading, we can also evoke the experience of reading per
se. All of the punctilious rhetoric about the impossibility of rendering literature, of making contact with it and adding
another voice to the author's voice, illuminating what may be dark, making explicit what is implicit, all of this resistance
may be nothing more than the timidity that stops us from turning a liberal arts education from a field for mind-sharpening
exercises, into what Keats called a "vale of Soul-making."

The punctilious want perfect interpretation. They want to score 100, as they have on all tests all of their lives. But what
presses us is too important to wait for perfection. What faces us is the prospect of a world where religious meaning withdraws
and people are left in the midst of soul-destroying emptiness, hopping and blinking and taking their little poison for the
day and their little poison for the night.

A comparison with truth as it is apprehended in religion can be illuminating. As the scholar Karen Armstrong observes, "Modern
New Testament scholarship has shown that we know far less about the historical Jesus than we thought we did. 'Gospel truth'
is not as watertight as we assumed. But this has not prevented millions of people from modeling their lives on Jesus and seeing
his path of compassion and suffering as leading to a new kind of life. Jesus certainly existed, but his story has been presented
in the Gospels as a paradigm."

The Gospels do not capture Jesus perfectly; the readers of the Gospels presumably do not capture their essence to perfection,
should such perfection exist. But that has not stopped many people from having their lives changed—and to their perception,
changed for the better—through encounter with Jesus and his much-mediated word.

The test of an interpretation is not whether it is right or perfect, but whether it leads us to a worldview that is potentially
better than what we currently hold. The gold standard is not epistemological perfection. The gold standard is the standard
of use.

Wordsworth's Truth

WHAT DOES IT mean to ask of a poem if it is true? What are we taking a poem—or any work of human intellect and imagination—to
be, if it is potentially a source of truth? Why don't we follow Kant, and all the idealists before and after him, in seeing
art as purely disinterested? Why are we unable to concur with Sir Philip Sidney in his oft-cited view that the poet "nothing
affirms and therefore never lieth"? Why not artistic purity? Why not art as purposiveness without any specific purpose?

What I am asking when I ask of a major work (for only major works will sustain this question) whether it is true is quite
simply this: Can you live it? Can you put it into action? Can you speak—or adapt—the language of this work, use it to talk
to both yourself and others so as to live better? Is this work desirable as a source of belief? Or at the very least, can
it influence your existing beliefs in consequential ways? Can it make a difference?

Let us say that the work at hand is Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of
the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798." The poem—it is anything but accidental—takes place not far away from a ruined abbey.
In the midst of the ruins of religion—or the ruins of
conventional
religious prospects for him—Wordsworth finds himself forced to compound a new faith. This faith will not be based on preexisting
scripture; it will not be a faith received from others. Wordsworth, spurred on by his return to a scene that was at the center
of his childhood, will gather to himself those memories that give him the power to go on living and go on writing.

The world as Wordsworth has lately experienced it is stale, flat, and profitless. He lives in a din-filled city, among unfeeling
people—and, worse yet, he senses that he is becoming one of them. He thinks of himself as abiding "In darkness and amid the
many shapes / Of joyless daylight." Time upon time, he says, "the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
/ Have hung upon the beatings of my heart." There is a dull ache settling into his spirit, one that the eighteenth century
would have called melancholy and we would now call depression. But rather than relying on religious consolation, as Dr. Johnson
tried to do when he battled his own terrible despondency, or on drugs, as Wordsworth's dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge
did, Wordsworth relies on himself. Laudanum, predecessor of today's antidepressant drugs, the serotonin reuptake inhibitors,
and Coleridge's preferred source of solace, is not what's wanted. The poet will find consolation in himself or not at all.