Friday
In Wednesday’s essay I shared the first part of the conclusion I’m writing for my current book project, Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. I share the second half here, only noting that this is still in draft form and that I’m looking for feedback. As I noted earlier, I am using my blog deadlines as spurs to finish my book, which means that, this week, you are mostly receiving excerpts of the latter rather than freshly minted essays.
Literature’s power, for good or for bad, has been the constant theme for our theorists, going back to Plato. What is different is the audiences, which have expanded. It was easier to talk about literature’s impact when readers and playgoers looked like you—Athenian male citizens for Plato and Aristotle, Elizabethan courtiers for Sidney. That all began to change in the 18th century, to the consternation of authors like Pope and Swift, as the newly affluent middle class began demanding narratives and characters that spoke specifically to them. The franchise expanded even further as the working class, women, people of color, members of developing nations, LBGTQ folk and others called for true universality. Their demands have often led to heated debates.
We also saw the rise of literature missionaries, with literary experts spreading the news of literature’s good effects and declaiming against the bad. Johnson taught new readers how to appreciate Shakespeare and various contemporary poets while warning them away from novels. Matthew Arnold, seeing the potential in universal education, thought that the arts, led by poetry, could replace religion and usher in a new Renaissance, transforming the “philistine” middle class and the anarchic working class into model citizens. Teachers in this vision were to be the new missionaries, bringing enlightenment where before there had been only ignorance and darkness, including to women’s colleges and worker universities. Cambridge professor F.R. Leavis and his followers, regarding literature as the quintessential means of achieving a civilized society, persuaded schools to make literature instruction an integral part of their curricula.
This had the effect of transferring the inevitable political battles to the schools. As faculties and student bodies became more diverse, the question arose as to what a model citizen looks like. In the 1960s, with the rise of the various liberation movements, activists saw in literature the chance to awaken minds to a liberated consciousness. In the reactive 1980s, conservatives pushed back, contending that the great minds of the past were being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. For all their disagreements, however, the one area of agreement between left and right was literature’s transformative potential, whether for good or for ill. Poems and stories were still seen to be firing bullets.
The ultimate threat to literature is not attack but indifference. That being acknowledged, literature has encountered indifference before and weathered the storm. Thomas Peacock, writing in the early days of utilitarianism (1820), voiced (albeit partially tongue-in-cheek) an early version of current STEM thinking when he contended that “the progress of useful art and science” was rendering poetry obsolete. (Shelley took the bait and responded with his magnificent Defence of Poetry.) Arnold shamed the money-obsessed middle-class with the “philistine” epithet, thereby triggering what Eagleton calls “the rise of English.” In 2018 Salman Rushdie, responding to the cascade of lies pouring out of the White House, pointed out that the classics will always remain powerful because of their commitment to truth. The STEM disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math may not be able to fight back effectively against assaults on evidence-based reality, including on science itself, but literature can.
Literature, in short, will remain a force for those who encounter it. Add film and television to that mix and few would argue, but even limiting ourselves to poetry, fiction, and drama, we will see their enduring impact. As long as there are books and people to read them, horizons will expand and lives will be changed, to the joy of some and the consternation of others.