Wednesday
I’m in the final stages of my book–Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old-Debate–and share today what I’ve written so far by way of a conclusion. I’ve put off this moment for a long time but used today’s post as a deadline that would kick my butt. The conclusion is not concluded yet but it’s getting there. As always, I am very desirous of feedback.
When assessing literature’s capacity to improve lives, it always good to keep Terry Eagleton’s caution in mind: some people who don’t read literature lead good lives and some who do don’t. The boldest claims made by literature advocates don’t always stand up.
The same caution goes for attacks against literature. Athenian youths who ran away in battle didn’t necessarily do so (despite Plato’s contention) because they had been softened up by Homer. Young 18th century men who drank and womanized didn’t necessarily do so because they had read Tom Jones. One can’t blame The Perks of Being a Wallflower for today’s young people experimenting with sex and drugs and questioning their sexual identities.
But while one should be wary of cause-and-effect claims regarding literature, there are reasons why, over the centuries, autocrats have consigned certain classics to the flames, why religious authorities have compiled lists of books that their members should not read, and why “concerned parent groups” have stormed school boards complaining about summer reading. By getting us to question prevailing wisdom, even if only by showing us alternative ways of thinking and being, literature plants seeds and starts conversations that can go in unpredictable directions.
In the introduction, I identified three sets of paired questions, and I think the answer to the first in all three sets is “yes.” Yes, great literature changes individual lives, yes it can change history itself, and yes, great literature does so better than lesser literature. Insofar as a broader perspective is good, then the change is for the better. Insofar as a more inclusive vision of humanity is good, then great literature is inherently progressive. And insofar as literature that refuses to sell out to our baser instincts is positive, then yes, great literature is better for us than lesser literature.
As we have seen in our survey of literary theorists, however, there is more to the discussion than simple yes answers. For instance, while great literature may well plant seeds, it’s not always clear where those seeds will take root and how long it will take them to germinate. Percy Shelley says hundreds of years in some cases.
As I’ve noted, this might seem to put into question his contention that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How seriously should we take the strong female characters in the ancient Greek tragedies if women are still second-class citizens two thousand years later?
Yet it is also true that, when the time is right, such works will suddenly seem to speak with oracular power, providing aid and comfort to readers of a later age. Dramas that may have seemed comfortably old-fashioned to one generation take on a new urgency for another when, to apply Hans Robert Jauss’s formulation, the horizon of expectations changes. At such times, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Medea take on a new urgency. To apply the words of Walter Benjamin, readers “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” as past works are “blasted out of the continuum of history” and become “charged with the time of the now.”
So perhaps Shelley is right after all. By showing us in our full humanity, the great authors uncork something that can never be entirely put back in the bottle. That the Greek tragedians did not support equal rights for women is no more relevant than the fact that America’s founding fathers didn’t intend women, slaves, and non-landowners to have full citizenship rights. Once you have said “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” these oppressed groups take those words to their bosoms and use them to direct future actions.
Shelley, Eagleton and others speak to what we are to make of great literature’s conservative or reactionary dimensions. While, at its core, great literature steps beyond local prejudice and identifies the universal, the local must still be accounted for. For Aristotle, this occurs when literature fails to follow “the law of probability and necessity”—when it behaves like idiosyncratic history—and for Johnson when it does not provide us with “a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Engels, Du Bois, and Eagleton all critique literature than sacrifices truth to a political agenda, and Shelley and Booth both provide frameworks of separating out the universal from the local.
Booth, for instance, finds himself revisiting beloved authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence after reading feminist and race theory and identifying areas where they surrender to the prejudices of their age, even though at their best they transcend them. Shelley names only a handful of authors he regards as truly transcendent, and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt notes how one of them, Shakespeare, explodes local stereotypes right before our eyes. For instance, because Shakespeare was constitutionally unable to create a one-dimensional character, Greenblatt says in Shylock he creates a character so multi-dimensional—so far beyond the anti-Semitic tropes of the day—that he had to be dropped in Act V before he took over the entire play.
This also means, however, that literature doesn’t operate in a vacuum but must work in conjunction with history if its full vision is to be realized. Marx and Engels’s distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure is important here. Economic and social conditions have to be such for literature’s progressive vision to come to fruition. At the same time, without literature’s images and narratives—without, say, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders providing indelible images of indefatigable entrepreneurs—the rising middle class might have had more difficulty stepping into its powers.
Thus Frantz Fanon welcomed authors as indispensable allies in the struggle against colonialism, speaking of a literature of combat. To free their minds of racial assumptions, Civil Rights activists applied W. E. B. Du Bois’s dictum “all art is propaganda” to recognize which literature aided their cause and which literature was covertly racist or unhelpfully sentimental. Similarly, literary scholars played a key role in the 1970s feminist movement, showing how women were trapped inside certain narratives and finding literature that showed them ways to protest. Jane Eyre may have chipped away at Victorian patriarchy when it appeared in the mid-19th century, but the novel erupted into a full-throated roar 120 years later when readers identified with the madwoman in the attic.
Great literature’s adherence to truth, finally, means that literature that settles for less will inevitably be less good for us, if not do us active harm. Jane Austen’s views of such works provide a good guide. By all means enjoy the gothics of Ann Radcliffe, the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and the love poetry of Robert Burns. Just recognize them for what they are and make sure you don’t neglect the works of, well, Jane Austen and others in her sphere.
