Monday
Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve shared chapters from the book I’ve been writing. I will be sending it off this week. Today’s post is the conclusion, which I’ve just revised for the umpteenth time. Enjoy and don’t hesitate to send me feedback.
Conclusion: Activating Literature’s Power
from Better Living through Literature: The Power of Books to Change Your Life
During the 1950s and 1960s when I was a child, people believed that reading literature made one a better person. Between fiction and drama’s unique abilities to immerse us in imaginary worlds and poetry’s power to affix our minds with powerful images, literature appeared to have life-changing potential. Granted, my own view of the matter was skewed, raised as I was by bookish parents in the hometown of the Sewanee Review, but that faith wasn’t limited to the college educated. My wife’s family, small farmers in southeast Iowa, subscribed to a Book of the Month club, from which they would regularly receive literary classics. Meanwhile, nationwide, Reader’s Digest found an audience for a series of masterpieces made easily digestible through abridgement.
The country may well have turned to literature in those post-war years out of hope that the creative imagination would counterbalance what had been one of the most traumatizing half centuries in human history. At some deep level, people recognized that poems and stories could help us push back against, or at least provide a counter perspective to, the bloodlettings of two world wars, a worldwide influenza outbreak, a worldwide depression, and murderous dictators in Italy, Germany, Spain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. Because literature provides special insight into what it means to be human even in difficult circumstances, we thought that literature, perhaps, would help us rebuild a better world.
As we have seen in these pages, those hopeful readers have had plenty of company throughout the ages. Many of history’s greatest thinkers have seen the life-changing effects that poems and stories have had on their own lives and then explored the impact they can have on the lives of others. We’ve seen Plato, who was shaken to the core by The Odyssey, warning about the danger posed by such passions running unchecked in civil society. We’ve seen Aristotle, a brilliant political scientist, counterarguing that tragedy-induced catharsis prepares citizens for good governance. The Aeneid so inspired Sir Philip Sidney that he regarded it as must reading for men going to war, and he may well have conjured up Virgilian battle scenes as he fought his last battle in the Spanish occupied Netherlands. Samuel Johnson attributed much of his profound understanding into human nature to his visceral encounters with Shakespeare’s tragedies, King Lear especially.
And so it has been with the others profiled here. As he witnessed men and women fighting for individual rights in the early 19th century, Percy Shelley recognized energies that are also at work in poets who wrote centuries earlier, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare. Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, paralyzed by depression when his vision of a more just and egalitarian society appeared to have reached a dead end, found a way forward thanks to the poetry of William Wordsworth, especially his poem Intimations of Immortality. (Mill would go on to become one of the pioneers of a liberal arts education.) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s attributed many of their history-changing insights into the nature of 19th century capitalism to Balzac’s Human Comedy novels, which they deeply admired, and if Sigmund Freud is the founder of modern psychology and the primary developer of the process of psychoanalysis, it is in part thanks to the impact that Oedipus and Hamlet had upon him. Sandra Gilbert made major contributions to the feminist movement, especially the articulation of female anger and determination, thanks to her love affair with Jane Eyre, and Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum’s compelling accounts of how literature can promote multicultural democracy are rooted in their own immersive reading experiences, especially Jane Austen and Mark Twain for Booth and Sophocles, Euripides, Henry James, and Ralph Ellison for Nussbaum.
We’ve discussed some of the reasons why, despite the surge of interest in literature following World War II, scholars downplayed its practical effects upon readers, a view too often passed on to future English teachers. But while some of that skepticism continues to linger on literature classrooms, many believe that literature can play a vital role in creating a more diverse and tolerant society. That poems and stories can move us out of our narrow confines and provide us with a more expansive view of the world is why former colonized populations, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LBGTQ folk, the physically and neurologically challenged, and other members of historically marginalized groups have found it so powerful.
Literature’s success in opening minds to multicultural pluralism is also a major reason why certain noteworthy authors became the target of conservatives in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s and why rightwing forces today are increasing their attacks on school libraries and classroom curricula, not to mention public schools themselves. Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed. While rightwingers and liberals don’t agree in much, they both regard literature as potentially lifechanging.
The question before us, then, is less whether literature can change lives, but rather how and to what end? The thinkers surveyed in this book provide a variety of answers, and if I have done justice to their ideas, you can draw on them in formulating your own view of the matter. Speaking for myself, two thinkers in particular stand out. Riffing off a Charlie Chaplin observation, I use Percy Shelley for long view, Wayne Booth for close-up. As Shelley sees it, great literature helps bend the long arc of history towards freedom while Booth believes that literature is the ideal friend for negotiating our day-to-day challenges. Between them, they provide a powerful account of how literature can make our lives better.
Shelley, you will recall, claims that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” His underlying assumption is that humans long to step into their full potential, which is thwarted by various social and historical factors. The greatest literature understands this longing and gives voice to it—and in the process, helps make change happen. To be sure, as Shelley openly admits, sometimes the process is agonizingly slow. It may take centuries, if not millennia, for literary vision to be legislated into social practice. That’s one reason why poets are unacknowledged.
Yet audiences can at least catch a glimpse of human possibility within our poems and stories. Greek spectators at 5th century BCE Athenian plays, for instance, witnessed titanic female characters, even though women at the time were still being legally treated as second-class citizens. And yes, universal suffrage was still 2400 years away in the West. But when socio-economic conditions finally changed, feminist activists discovered that dramas that once seemed harmlessly entombed in dusty museums suddenly spoke with oracular power. Performances of Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Medea in the 1970s, speaking a deep human truth, assured women that they could command the world stage. To apply the words of literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, they seized hold of memories that flashed up at a moment of danger and opportunity. Literature transcended time and place as past works were “blasted out of the continuum of history” and became “charged with the time of the now.”
Shelley, then, was right about literature tapping into a timeless yearning for freedom. By capturing humanity’s “essential being,” to use Allan Bloom’s phrase, the great authors of every age uncork a power that can never be entirely put back in the bottle. The human truths they convey are universal because they cross racial, ethnic, gender, national, and other boundaries. Through these pages, we have been noting one instance after another of literature stepping up when history has sought to keep people down: Anna Karenina for an unjustly imprisoned doctor, Little Women for an abducted Pakistani girl, various Shakespeare plays for the members of South Africa’s African National Congress imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid authorities. Black poet Maya Angelou turned to Charles Dickens’s abused Oliver Twist when figuring out how to process a particularly gruesome lynching, and W.E.B. Du Bois probably recalled his beloved Three Musketeers—and the slogan “All for one and one for all”—as he was founding the NAACP (1909), an organization that brought Blacks together so that they could resist the White terror that was undoing Reconstruction’s gains.
Citing these specific instances begins to move us from Shelley’s framing to Booth’s. The Chicago theorist’s vision of literary works as friends allows us to rethink our relationships to them. As he puts it, poems and stories call for us to practice “ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than [we are] likely to meet anywhere else in the world.” Elsewhere he observes that they prompt us “to desire better desires.” I’ve recounted my own story of using Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird to negotiate my way through race hatred in the 1960s; of my former marine student using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to work through his Afghanistan War experiences; of a student lacrosse student deciding to change his college behavior after identifying with the young man in Rime of the Ancient Mariner; of a student raised by Alabama fundamentalists using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to come to a more balanced view of reason and faith.
The notion of books as friends also makes it incumbent on us to figure out whether they are good for us. Is this an acquaintance who has our best interests at heart and words of useful advice or a friend whom we link up with because we just want to have a fun night out. Is this possibly a friend who is actually bad for us? It requires judgment and experience on our part to tell the difference. We must be critical in our reading just as we must be critical in our friendships.
Of course, caveats are always in order when discussing literature’s transformative power. Books by themselves can only do so much and, as revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon notes, sometimes they must work in conjunction with other forces to bring about meaningful change. And of course, given the bewildering range of responses that any individual work will elicit, it’s not always clear how the change process works. That’s why literature doesn’t lend itself readily to anyone with specific political goals, why it doesn’t submit itself tamely to outside agendas. Perhaps the most we can definitively say is that, if the literature is good, we can be confident of the results: it will move us emotionally in healthy directions and shape our thinking in positive ways. As we have noted, thinkers from Aristotle to Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Johnson Percy Shelley to Friedrich Engels to W.E.B. Du Bois to Martha Nussbaum have noted that the best authors are those who are most true to experience and do most honor to humanity’s richness. In a 2018 New Yorker essay, Indian author Salman Rushdie, responding to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House, pointed out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. At a time where political con artists face few constraints to manufacturing their own realities, we find in good literature a “no bullshit” zone, a friend that will have our deepest interests at heart.
And because this is the case, then a special responsibility is laid upon those who connect others with books, whether they be teachers, librarians, parents, critics, therapists, social workers, clergy, book discussion group leaders, or just friends recommending a good read. If you fit into one of these categories, as I suspect you do, then see yourself as one handling a rare, precious and, yes, sometimes dangerous substance. Sure, there are risks involved, but the risks are worth it because the potential payoff is so great. Your job, as a literature coach, is to listen closely to your charges’ concerns, steer them to the books that you think will do them the most good, listen closely to their reading experiences, and then help them interpret and apply what they have read. Oh, and then to get out of their way. Having linked them up with the power source they need and directed their attention to the switch, you must leave the rest to them.
As I write this, women across Iran are tearing off their head scarves, risking injury, imprisonment, and death to stand up for their freedom. And I think of how, around 40 years ago in Iran, literature professor Azar Nafisi turned her apartment into a classroom after she and her students were expelled from the university and forced into veils. One of the works they read was Lolita and another Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know whether Nafisi could have predicted that they would find, in Nabokov’s novel, a depiction of the tyrannical men who were entrapping women in their own fantasies and, in Austen’s work, a radical call for women to resist social and parental pressure and to stand up for their right to make their own marital decisions. While these women might not have seen the road to effective political action at the time, maybe they are doing so now—or maybe they have passed some of that vision along to children and grandchildren. As Shelley notes, literature’s vision of freedom serves to keep the flame of hope alive in dark times, providing a space where the impossible can seem possible.
Throughout the centuries, great thinkers have understood the tremendous energies at work in literary language—which is to say, language at its most thoughtful and intense. From personal experience and from observation, they know that losing oneself in a great poem or story can turn one upside down and inside out, while tapping into and harnessing this force can lead to foundational change. One of the most powerful tools for leading us to the individual and the social transformation we crave is at our fingertips. We have but to immerse, reflect, and act.