Wednesday
I’m in the final stages of my book Does Literature Make Us Better People? Surveying a 2500-Year Debate and today share the introduction. I kick the book off with a Bertolt Brecht epigraph—“Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living”—and go from there. I’m still in the revision stage and am open to all reader suggestions.
Introduction
For at least as far back as Plato, people have been debating whether or not literature is good for us. Plato, worried that Hesiod and Homer would incite immoral behavior in young people, banned poets from his ideal republic while his younger colleague Aristotle countered that tragedy would help audiences psychologically manage dangerous emotions. Both philosophers agreed on one thing, however: literature is a powerful force that profoundly affects the people it touches.
Throughout the ages, the terms of the debate have varied but the same paired questions keep coming up:
–Does literature in fact change individuals’ lives?
–If so, does it change them for the better or can it also change them for the worse?
–Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and lightweight literature?
–If so, is great literature good for us and lightweight literature bad?
–Can literature change not only individuals but history itself?
–If so, is great literature necessarily progressive or can it have a conservative or even reactionary impact?
Or course, these questions lead to many others. For instance, how do we characterize literature in the first place? Then, once we have a working definition, how do we determine whether a work is great or lightweight and whether its effects are good or bad? For that matter, is it the literature itself that changes behavior or might readers have changed as they did without literature?
With regard to audience subjectivity, what does it mean that different readers can respond to the same work in widely different ways and that, even if they respond similarly, they behave differently? Which readers should we study to determine impact? How do we measure change? Are generalizations about literary impact even possible?
There are also practical considerations. If the work is old, where do we find evidence of how audiences responded. For instance, can we determine if and how the behavior of Anglo-Saxon warriors was influenced by public recitations of Beowulf?
Questions of literary impact can get pretty murky, which is why many scholars have shied away from discussing them. In the period after World War II, the New Critics thought they had could skip readers altogether, dismissing their experiences as irrelevant. (They also dismissed as irrelevant authorial intentions and historical context.) W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley said that to judge a work based on its emotional affect was to commit “the affective fallacy.” They found it cleaner to look only at the text.
In so doing, they mimicked 1950s scientists, who employed a seemingly clean tool, the scientific method, to uncover the secrets of the natural world. If scientists’ thoughts and feelings were deemed irrelevant to the process, then couldn’t literary scholars be regarded as scientists of the text, coolly and dispassionately examining poems and novels to discover poetic laws? The New Critics thought so, as did a fair number of the structuralists and deconstructionists who followed them.
Regular readers, however, refuse to regard their literary encounters as irrelevant, and if so many over the centuries have insisted that literature has changed their lives, we should at least look into the matter. New Criticism may have temporarily put the issue on hold, but in the years that followed scholars took it up again. Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, queer theorists, and other literary activists have made the case for literature’s impact, and so have various religious and so-called values-oriented conservatives. Reader Response Theory and Reception Theory have become respected approaches, studied along with other schools of thought in literary methods classes.
The special challenges haven’t gone away, however. Look at Plato’s claims that Homer corrupts young people, for instance. How does he know that young Athenians, after hearing talented orators recite Achilles’s lament to Odysseus about being dead, will turn cowards on the battlefield? Plato, after all, hasn’t conducted surveys, and even if he is relying on anecdotal evidence, that would have the drawbacks of all such evidence. Perhaps he is just raising a theoretical possibility—what philosophers call a thought experiment—that may or may not reflect actual human behavior.
Whether or not it does, Plato has had a lot of company in the centuries that have followed. Sir Philip Sidney battled a Plato-citing opponent who attacked poetry, Samuel Johnson worried that novels would corrupt the morals of young people, and today we see religious groups and others wishing to censor English teachers and school libraries.
Even empirical studies of literary impact may not settle the matter. Although various social scientists have indeed taken up that challenge, some going so far as to conduct brain scans of people reading novels, the results are still inconclusive. Sometimes the more one attempts to pin down literary impact, the more elusive it appears.
Perhaps the best we can do is examine the arguments that have been put forth over the ages and dig into the various claims. That is the approach I have taken here. By summarizing major thinkers on the subject and scrutinizing the assumptions that undergird their theories, I seek what Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream calls “a great constancy.” Hippolyta finds a connecting thread in the lovers’ accounts of the night’s events—a coherent picture emerges when they are all assembled together—even though Theseus compares them to poetic delusions. I have followed Hippolyta’s lead here, looking for patterns in what has been written on the subject.
As for what constitutes literature, the definition has shifted over the centuries. When it comes to reader impact, however, one aspect of literature has figured more prominently than all others: its ability to pull us into its imaginary worlds. Cervantesfamously dramatizes this power in Don Quixote, taking it to an extreme, but all great works and plenty of bad ones demonstrate it as well. Phenomenologist Georges Poulet dramatically captures the phenomenon as follows:
As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.
Indeed, we can say that, without this power, literature would not have generated the controversies it has, leaving most to regard it as a harmless past-time. It’s because literature threatens to change human behavior that people take it seriously. To borrow a line delivered by a character in the film Grand Canyon when confronted by a gang member, “You don’t have the gun, we’re not having this conversation.”
If Plato hadn’t witnessed Homer reciters (rhetors) holding the same kind of sway over audiences as political demagogues did, he might have accepted them into his republic. If Aristotle hadn’t seen audiences emotionally wrenched by Oedipus Rex and Iphigenia in Aulis, he might not have placed tragedy at the center of his Poetics. If a London bishop, 18th century German parents, and an evangelical congregation in Lewiston, Maine hadn’t watched young people disappear into the novels of Henry Fielding, Goethe, and J.K. Rowling respectively, they wouldn’t have (1) accused Tom Jones of causing the 1750 London earthquakes, (2) blamed The Sorrows of Young Werther for adolescent suicides and (3) publicly burned copies of Harry Potter.
For that reason, I focus my attention on those literary genres that take over our minds, immersing us in their worlds and, at least for a moment, persuading us to accept an alternate reality—which is to say, fiction, drama, and poetry. Percy Shelley may have labeled certain philosophers, historians and scientists as poets but, for the purposes of this study, I do not. While we can lose ourselves in creative non-fiction, it may not be clear whether we are moved more by the language or what the language points to. When Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland is enthralled with Anne Radcliffe’s gothics, it’s a different conversation than if she were swept away by, say, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays.
It is because of their hypnotic sway that poetry, drama, and fictional prose have figured prominently in theoretical debates. Time and again, one of these three has been selected to represent literature in general. Theorists have generally chosen whichever genre was most popular at the time so that, just as Plato singled out epic and Aristotle tragedy, Sir Philip Sidney focused on heroic poetry, Percy Shelley on lyric poetry, and Bertolt Brecht on drama. Since the 18th century, the novel in particular has held sway, although its primacy has been challenged in the past one hundred years by other narrative art forms, such as cinema, radio drama, television, comic books, video games, and various internet fantasies.
Always, however, audience immersion has been at the center of the discussion. Literature casts its spell, people applaud or panic, and theorists rush in to understand. In Part I of this book, I survey what the major theorists have had to say about literary impact. In Part II, I use Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a test case for their theories, reflect upon what Jane Austen had to say about the impact of lightweight literature, and conclude by discussing various ways that you, dear reader, can assess how literature has changed you.
