John Singer Sargent, “Man Reading”
Thursday
Tim Parks has written a provocative essay for The New York Review of Books, asking,
Is literature wise? In the sense, does it help us to live? And if not, what exactly is it good for?
If you follow this blog, you already know my answers:
–Yes, literature is wiser than we are (and often wiser than the author);
–Yes, it can help us to live a deeper and richer life; and
–In addition to helping us to live, it delights us (which is another way of helping us to live).
While I disagree with much of what Parks says, I appreciate the conversation, which dates back to Plato and Aristotle. To get us thinking, Parks pokes us with some counterfactuals, such as the fact that many authors have been unhappy:
One way into that question might be to look at how great writers themselves have benefited. Or haven’t. The situation is not immediately promising, since the list of writers who committed suicide, from Seneca the Younger to David Foster Wallace, would be long; Nerval, Hemingway, Plath, Pavese, Zweig, Mayakovsky, and Woolf all spring to mind. But I suppose you could argue that there are situations where suicide is the wise decision, or that without literature these talented people might have gone much earlier. The list of those who have driven themselves to an unhappy death would likely be longer still. Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Henry Green, Elsa Morante, and Dylan Thomas arguably fall in that category. Not to mention those forever frustrated by insufficient recognition and other occupational hazards; the gloom of Giacomo Leopardi would appear to have been oceanic.
Parks then wonders if a literary sensibility is the cause of this unhappiness:
Is there, then, something in the nature of the literary that renders the author, but perhaps also the reader, more vulnerable than most people to unhappiness, being troubled, or perhaps simply to the kind of emotional turbulence that writers as far apart as Shelley and Simenon seem invariably to have created around themselves? In short, could it be that there is something about our conception of the literary that not only does not help us to live, but actually makes things more difficult?
The thought here is a literary variation of an age-old question: are dull people happier than intelligent people because they are less troubled by thinking? Parks, however, takes the argument in a different direction.
As he sees it, the essence of modern storytelling is “the struggling self…seeking some kind of definition or stability in a world that appears hostile to such aspirations”:
[L]ife is precarious, tumultuous, fickle, and the self seeks in vain, or manages only with great effort, to put together a personal narrative that is, even briefly, satisfying. Of course, the story can end in various ways, or simply stop at some convenient grace-point; happy endings are not entirely taboo, though certainly frowned on in the more elevated spheres of serious literary fiction. And even when things do come to a pleasing conclusion, it is either shot through with irony or presented as merely a new beginning, with everything still to fight for.
“They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed,” Dickens tells us of Little Dorrit and Clennam after their five hundred pages of misery, “and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.”
How promising is that?
I think Parks’s example gives his rhetorical question a different answer than he anticipates. Okay, so Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit may not live a life that is always pure bliss, but their lives together will be far richer than they would have been alone. Is Parks saying that, because there will be shade as well as sunshine, that negates the sunshine? Their hard-won love doesn’t fit what Parks says next:
In short, at the core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s great expectations. Life promises so much, but then slips through one’s fingers.
What if one were to reverse this observation and say that, although life may slip through one’s fingers, it also has transcendent moments? Perhaps we in a glass half full/half empty debate. In the end, we’re all going to grow old and die, but does this fact render life meaningless?
Actually, Parks seems to be saying as much with his idea that literature is nothing more than a
bitter pill dressed up or administered in such a way that, at least in the telling, it becomes a pleasure. There is the excitement of drama, of complex and unstable situations, there is immersion in fine description, that heightened sense of engagement that comes with recognizing an accurate portrayal of things we know, and, of course, there is the satisfaction of seeing the desperate human condition brilliantly dissected. Sometimes, the more brilliantly pessimistic the dissection, the more stimulating the reading experience, the greater the sense of catastrophe, the more noble, profound, and grand the writer who eloquently expresses it…
What is on offer, then, is the consolation of intelligent form and seductive style, but enlisted to deliver a content that invariably smacks of defeat, or at best a temporary stay of execution.
Having taken up this line of thought, Parks runs with it. Because we invariably lose our childhood optimism—he sounds like Wordsworth here—we need literature to help us cope. We become addicted to its beautiful depictions of our suffering:
[F]or all its magnificent achievements, [literature] becomes as much a part of the problem as the solution, an addiction that feeds the sufferings it consoles. One enjoys Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, one admires Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! or Bernhard’s Gargoyles, but one comes away with a heightened sense of how much more literature will be required to console such a desperate human condition.
By the end of the article, Parks has written himself into the absurdism of Samuel Beckett, with anything optimistic seen as nothing more than a vain illusion. Ultimately, his answer as to what literature is good for is (wait for it):
The pleasure the mind takes in dwelling on its downfall–
And because we become addicted to this masochistic pleasure, authors function as our suppliers, constantly coming up with new product.
So does this mean that, if we were to kick the reading habit, we would find a new peace of mind? Or at least not exacerbate our exquisite sensibilities, which do nothing other than make us miserable? Parks seems to hint as much. But if that’s the case, why not just take a cue from Brave New World and zone out on soma?
Speaking of “brave new world,” which appears in The Tempest, Parks thinks we should ditch Shakespeare’s shallowly optimistic romances (Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline) for Lear and Macbeth. In the romances, he says, “all becomes reversible, and seemingly ruinous behavior is set to right,” whereas the tragedies “are closer to the core of our narrative tradition.”
Notice how Parks has defined this narrative tradition, even Dickens, as invariably dark. To be sure, this would leave out such works as Tom Jones, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, War and Peace, and the Kitty-Levin half of Anna Karenina, not to mention many of literature’s comic masterpieces. But okay, let’s play on Parks’s turf and take a look at King Lear.
Of course the work is dark, featuring as it does Shakespeare’s most nihilistic ending. But in the midst of the tragedy, Lear discovers a love that is more powerful than anything he has ever experienced. Once he knows what love offers us, I can imagine him choosing 24 hours of that love over a lifetime of narcissistic self-absorption. From watching King Lear I don’t experience pleasure at dwelling upon my inevitable downfall. I get a sense of what is really important in life.
I get the same from many of the other works that Parks mentions, from Education Sentimentale to Catcher in the Rye. Writing of Emma Bovary, Frankfurt scholar Herbert Marcuse takes away her “great refusal” to accept the stultifying conventions of her day, not her defeat. The novel feeds his determination to work for a better world.
Why does Parks dwell so much on Beckett when he could be talking about the life force found in comedy, from Twelfth Night to Way of the World to The Importance of Being Earnest to Pygmalion? Or don’t they fit neatly into the tradition that he claims defines most of literature, a tradition where individuals are crushed by society?
As I see it, literature puts us in touch with our desire to grow into our deepest selves, even when it ends unhappily. We do not find some placid happiness by refusing to read. Instead, as Thoreau puts it, we live lives of quiet desperation.
Like Lear, we remain stuck in our narcissism.
