Yes, Stanley, Lit Can Change Lives

George Herbert  George Herbert

I’m trying to figure out why Stanley Fish bothers me so.  Maybe it’s because I’m already worried that our society doesn’t take poetry seriously enough.  Then an English professor with a national forum comes along and confirms that people should consider the study of literature as an arcane study yielding satisfactions only to a tiny group.  And that what reading specialists do is of an entirely different order than what readers do.

Fish wrote a follow-up column to the one I’ve been discussing entitled “The Uses of the Humanities, Part II.”  Perhaps to reestablish his literary credentials following the onslaught he received following his first column, Fish begins by interpreting an image in a 17th century George Herbert poem.  Here’s the poem:

 MATINS

I cannot ope mine eyes,
But thou art ready there to catch
My morning-soul and sacrifice:
Then we must needs for that day make a match.

 My God, what is a heart?
Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
Or star, or rainbow, or a part
Of all these things, or all of them in one?

 My God, what is a heart?
That thou should it so eye and woo,
Pouring upon it all thy art,
As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?

Indeed, man’s whole estate
Amounts (and richly) to serve thee:
He did not heaven and earth create,
Yet studies them, not him by whom they be.

Teach me thy love to know;
That this new light, which now I see
May both the work and workman show:
Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.

Herbert, one of my favorite poets, was deeply religious, a man who turned his back on the court to become an Anglican rector.  He was not complacent about his faith and suffered from paroxysms of self-doubt and low self-esteem.  In many of his poems, he talks about how he does not feel worthy of God’s love.  Some of his most powerful poems are those where, after monumental inner struggle, he catches a glimpse of divine grace and is dazzled.  Two poems where this drama is particularly pronounced are “Love (3)” and “The Collar.”

The tension also exists in “Matins,” although more quietly.  Herbert talks about how hard it is to open his eyes and heart to see God, even though God is always there waiting for him and even though God has poured Himself into Herbert’s heart (as though He had nothing else to do).  Herbert says that we keep on being distracted by the world (God’s works) while forgetting about the workman behind them. 

Fish does a good job of identifying the conflict in the concluding stanza.  What does it say about us as creatures of free will if we need God’s help to experience God’s love?  Here is what Fish says, followed by the satisfaction he gets from his interpretation:

In a poem titled “Matins,” the 17th century Anglican poet George Herbert says to God, If you will “teach me thy love to know . . . Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.” But the dynamics of the proffered bargain – if you do X, I’ll do Y – are undercut by the line that proposes it, and especially by the double pun in “sunbeam.”

“Sun” is a standard pun on Son; it refers to Jesus Christ; “beam” means not only ray of light, but a piece of wood large enough to support a structure; it refers to the cross on which a crucified Christ by dying takes upon himself and redeems (pays the price for) the sins of those who believe in him. So while “by a sunbeam” seems to specify the means by which the poem’s speaker will perform a certain act – “I will climb to thee” – the phrase undercut his claim to be able to do so by reminding us (not him) that Christ has already done the climbing and thereby prevented (in the sense of anticipating) any positive act man mistakenly thinks to be his own. If the speaker climbs to God, he does so by means of God, and cannot take any personal credit for what he “does.”  If he truly knows God’s love, he will know that as an unconditional and all-sufficing gift it has disabled him as an agent.

This brief analysis of a line of poetry that simultaneously reports a resolution and undermines it is an example of the kind of work and teaching I have done for almost five decades. It is the work of a humanist, that is, someone employed in a college to teach literary, philosophical and historical texts. . . .

Why do I do it? I don’t do it because Herbert and I are co-religionists. I don’t believe what he believes or value what he values. I don’t do it because it inspires me to do other things, like change my religion, or go out and work for the poor. If I had to say, I’d say that I do it because I get something like an athletic satisfaction from the experience of trying to figure out how a remarkable verbal feat has been achieved.

The satisfaction is partly self-satisfaction – it is like solving a puzzle – but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use. “Isn’t that amazing?,” I often say to my students. “Don’t you wish you could write a line like that?”

I too have sometimes just stood back from a line and gazed at it in admiration.   But if that’s all there were to poetry, if I thought if were mostly about puzzle solving, I wouldn’t devote my life to it.  There’s even a danger that, in expounding upon such a line to our students, we are ourselves showing off.  Our interpretation gets to show them how brilliant we are.

I am much more interested in helping my students enter into Herbert’s dilemma.  Anyone who has prayed knows the struggle between will and surrender—we want to give ourselves over to God and yet we can feel trapped in our own sense of self.  The nature of ego (as the story of Faustus demonstrates) is that we strive to remain in control, even though that closes us down to what the universe has to offer.  When we are able to step beyond self, emptying ourselves of self, we achieve connection with the whole.  Christians calls this atonement, at-one-ment.   But as Fish points out, there’s a contradiction here: we ask for God’s help to do it ourselves. Maybe we also worry that we won’t be able to pull it off.  “Teach me,” Herbert says, perhaps pleading.

The drama can touch students of mine who are not religious  Those who are depressed, for instance, may long for the sunbeam that will lift them out of darkness, even though they know that it is themselves who must do the climbing.

Not all of my students relate to Herbert.  I offer a range of different literary works and can’t predict which poems will hit home with which students.  Maybe I could get them to be amazed at a virtuoso interpretation of my own, but the danger is that their admiration will come from the head only and not from the head working in conjunction with the heart.

Fish strikes me as all head.  Note how he concludes his column:

“[One reader] asks, “Dr. Fish, when was the last time you read a poem . . . that so moved you to take certain actions to improve your lot or others?” To tell the truth, I can’t remember a single time. But I can remember countless times when I’ve read a poem (like Herbert’s “Matins”) and said “Wow!” or “Isn’t that just great?” That’s more than enough in my view to justify the enterprise of humanistic study . . .”

Read through this blog if you want stories of people who have found in literature much more than occasions to say “wow” (although they often said “wow” as well).   As I read Fish, I have the vivid impression that he teaches very differently than I do and has had experiences with English departments very different from English departments at small liberal arts colleges.  Notice how he talks about the claim that is posted in my masthead:

The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) “no” – one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at – then the route of external justification of the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of measurable results, is closed down. The fact that some commentators, including a few of my former students, report life-changing experiences as a result of their studies is heartening (although I am sure that the vast majority would report something quite different), but it hardly amounts to a reason for supporting the entire apparatus of departments, degrees, colloquia etc. that has grown up around the academic study of humanistic texts.

I agree with Fish in one way: one should not teach literature to achieve a particular agenda.  When one does so, one narrows the work.  If I were to teach literary works with preset ideas of what students were to get from them, I would never have seen one student use Beowulf to understand the coldness of her father following the death of her sister.  And another student use Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to forgive herself for having submitted to an abusive boyfriend.  And Mary Spargo use Julian of Norwich to help her deal with a perpetual migraine.  And another student use Doctor Faustus to work through her conflicting feelings about her fundamentalist Christian upbringing and secular college culture (she felt torn, like Faustus, but unlike him opted for a balance between faith and reason).  And a newly widowed elderly student use Viola’s gender crossing (in Twelfth Night) to articulate her sense that she now had to be a “man” when it came to her finances.  And on and on.

So the “vast majority” of Fish’s students can’t imagine literature leading to a life-changing experience?  What if this is more of a comment on Fish than on literature.  In every class I teach, I look for opportunities to match students with books that may lead to a life-long relationship.  Like a dating service, some relationships take and others don’t.  And some relationships don’t take right away but do so years later (as alumni have reported).  

I can cite only stories, not “measurable results.”   Yet because I have listened to student concerns and showed students how versions of those concerns appear in different works of literature, most of them sense that they have engaged with issues and questions of great import.  That’s the use of the humanities.

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