For more plausible examples than can be found in novels by Henry James of how the literary imagination might humanize the legal profession, Nussbaum turns to three social novels-d.i.c.kens"s Hard Times (which she discusses at great length), E. M. Forster"s Maurice, and Richard Wright"s Native Son. From the first she asks us to learn that the instrumental rationality celebrated in economic theory is incomplete52 and from the second and third that h.o.m.os.e.xuals and blacks deserve our sympathy. Her choice and treatment of these books support the observation that "despite her repeated affirmation that the autonomy of literary art must be recognized and respected by the interested moral philosopher, say, or legal theorist, Nussbaum fails to persuade . . . that her concern with literature is a concern with something more than drawing a moral lesson from it."53 She calls d.i.c.kens an author "who demands to be read ethically, and ethically in a very specific sense, with attention to the equal worth of human beings and the misery caused human beings by social inst.i.tutions."54 An author can"t "demand" anything of his readers, least of all that they value his works for their political content. The social criticism in d.i.c.kens"s novels-dated, superficial, and sentimental-is not their most valuable aspect. As an attempted refutation of the economic approach to human behavior, Hard Times cannot be taken seriously. Gradgrind, the b.u.t.t of the satire, comes to grief by treating everyone with whom he deals, including members of his family, on the model of spot-market transactions, banishing every element of trust and affection from both personal and commercial relations. Insofar as Gradgrind is a stand-in for Bentham, the satire may have a point. Confusion of the different spheres of human activity was a feature of Bentham"s thought, though as he himself never married we do not know how far he would have carried this confusion into his own personal life. It has been many years since any responsible social scientist was confused in that way, so that to preach against Gradgrind See also Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life 13136 (1996). Leavis, note 46 above, at 236, describes Hard Times as "the confutation of Utilitarianism by life."
53. David Gorman, Review of Poetic Justice, 21 Philosophy and Literature 196, 198 (1997).
Nussbaum, "Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism," 22 Philosophy and Literature 343, 360 (1998).
*has as little point as preaching against slavery (the safest of targets, since it has no advocates). There are h.o.m.ologies between firms and families, and these are stressed by economists and other social scientists in quest of general theories of social behavior.55 But no social scientist recommends that family members incorporate and conduct themselves as shareholders. Market relations are subst.i.tutes, in activities conducted among strangers, for the affective ties of the family. Even market relations are not invariably impersonal. Market relations within close-knit groups are different from the relations of buyers and sellers in spot markets. When people deal with one another on a continuing basis, trust supplements or even supplants reliance on law. Recall the relational contract discussed in chapter 3.
Echoing White and Teachout, Nussbaum claims that "d.i.c.kens"s economic opponent [in Hard Times] is not a straw man: it is a conception that even now dominates much of our public life, in a form not very different from the form presented in this novel."56 A straw man is just what it is; she cites no public policy advocated by academic economists that is flawed by Gradgrindian thinking.
She has stronger grounds for her belief that many heteros.e.xuals lack an empathetic awareness of the problems, or even the humanity, of h.o.m.os.e.xuals and that many whites lack an empathetic awareness of the problems, or, again, even the humanity, of the poorest black men and boys in our cities. As should be apparent from chapter 10, I accept in principle that literature can provide background knowledge valuable to judges and lawyers. But literary works dealing with h.o.m.os.e.xuality or race are not good candidates for that project. The portrayal of traditionally subordinated or marginalized groups, not only blacks, other nonwhites, and h.o.m.os.e.xuals but also Jews, women, and people afflicted with physical or mental disorders or insufficiencies, is largely negative, reflecting the cultures in which the works were written. As implied by the test of time, almost all works of literature accepted as such are at least several decades 55. See Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (enlarged ed. 1991); Richard A. Posner, Economic a.n.a.lysis of Law, ch. 5 (7th ed. 2007). We saw in chapter 9 how the economic model of the family can yield feminist insights into family law.
56. Nussbaum, note 10 above, at 18.
old, and most are far older. The sensitivities behind efforts to induce in legal professionals a sharper awareness of the problems of discrimination against traditionally subordinated groups are recent. This temporal mismatch makes it difficult to find literary exemplars of Nussbaum"s concerns.57 Forster was a novelist of great distinction, but Maurice is his weakest novel, with all the earmarks of special pleading, and is made esoteric by the author"s preoccupation with competing and now-forgotten schools of Edwardian h.o.m.os.e.xual thought.58 Frank Kermode has called it "a fairly simple wish-fulfilling fantasy; it has symbolic patterns in the usual Forster way, and these will no doubt be made much of, but they seem to be relatively inert and self-indulgent."59 "Maurice reveals a tortured dividedness over h.o.m.os.e.xuality, a complexity that belies Nussbaum"s simple contrast between "flourishing" and "stunting.""60 Native Son (1940) is a landmark in the history of the black novel. Its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black from the Chicago slums who is already a hardened criminal, kills a white woman, Mary Dalton. The killing probably is accidental, but afterward Bigger decapitates her and stuffs her body into a furnace in an effort to conceal what he"s done. Later he rapes and murders his black girlfriend. He pleads guilty to killing Mary Dalton (he is not even charged with the murder of his girlfriend-a commentary on white indifference to black life) and is sentenced to death. The novel ends, like The Stranger, a near-contemporaneous work to which Native Son bears a resemblance,61 with Bigger awaiting execution. We are invited to believe that his smothering of Mary, from which all else follows inexorably, is due to her patronizing efforts, and those of her Communist boyfriend and limousine-liberal father (a slumlord of course), to befriend Bigger as part of a program of helping blacks, 57. Difficult, but not impossible. There is no more affecting picture of mental r.e.t.a.r.dation than Part I of The Sound and the Fury and no more harrowing depiction of s.e.xual a.s.sault than the attempted rape of Lena by the psychopath Martin Ricardo in Conrad"s novel Victory.
58. Claude Summers, "The Flesh Educating the Spirit: Maurice," in Critical Essays on E.
M. Forster 95 (Alan Wilde ed. 1985).
Kermode, note 6 above, at 271.
Seaton, note 29 above, at 487.
Wright moved to France after World War II, became acquainted with Camus, and wrote a novel that he called The Outsider and that was influenced by his reading of L"etranger.
*and that his p.r.o.neness to violence is the consequence of "a mode of life stunted and distorted"62 by white bigotry. At the sentencing hearing his lawyer goes so far as to argue: "The truth is, this boy did not kill! ...He was living, only as he knew how, and as we have forced him to live"
(p. 366). The pervasiveness of bigotry is further emphasized by the unshakable belief of the legal establishment that Bigger raped Mary63 and by threats of lynching.
Native Son is a period piece. Its picture of race relations is accurate for the 1930s, but not for today. The persistence into the present of violence among young black males (the black murder rate is seven times the white murder rate) may be a legacy of racism, but if so the causal linkage is subtle and the remedy obscure. Nussbaum argues that the moral teaching of Native Son is that "the stigma of racial hate and shame" is "fundamentally deforming of human personality and community."64 This is not exactly news, and anyway it is not well presented in Wright"s novel. The early chapters, with their striking portraits of mutually uncomprehending poor blacks and liberal whites, promise a superb novel of manners. But beginning with Mary"s dismemberment, implausibilities crowd in on the reader, the tone becomes strident, the black characters lose their three-dimensionality, the energy of the writing flags. "Wright, in Native Son, essentially the son of Theodore Dreiser, could not rise always even to Dreiser"s customarily bad level of writing."65 "Either Bigger Thomas is a responsible consciousness, and so profoundly culpable, or else only the Page 358 of the 1966 paperback edition. The pa.s.sages I quote from this edition are unchanged in the uncut version of the book. See next note.
Yet at the insistence of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Wright cut out several s.e.xual scenes, in one of which Bigger is s.e.xually aroused by Mary shortly before he smothers her (see pp. 9697 of the HarperPerennial paperback edition, 1993). These cuts were not restored until 1991. See the Rampersad, Tuttleton, and Kinnamon essays in The Critical Response to Richard Wright 163, 167, 173 (Robert J. Butler ed. 1995). The restoration was made after Wright"s death, so we cannot be certain that the restored text is more authentic than the originally published one. This is another example of the difficulty, discussed in chapter 8, of determining authorial intention.
64. Nussbaum, note 10 above, at 9697.
65. Harold Bloom, "Introduction," in Richard Wright"s Native Son 1 (Harold Bloom ed. 1988). There are many parallels between Native Son and Dreiser"s "legal" novel, An American Tragedy.
white world is responsible and culpable, which means, however, that Bigger ceases to be of fictive interest and becomes an ideogram rather than a persuasive representation of a possible human being. Wright . . . was not able to choose."66 The reason Nussbaum chose Native Son as her racial novel rather than Oth.e.l.lo, an incomparably superior work (not a novel, but so what?), may lie in the politics of a multiethnic society. Oth.e.l.lo has more than enough traces of the bigotry that permeated Shakespeare"s society to poison any attempt to use it as a vehicle for instilling an empathetic awareness of the problems of blacks and women, or for denouncing racial prejudice and s.e.xism.67 It is true that the play equivocates between Oth.e.l.lo as Moor and Oth.e.l.lo as Negro ("thick lips" [I.1.68]). Elizabethans applied the word "Moor" indiscriminately to Africans rather than distinguishing as we do between North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans.68 But this equivocation simply multiplies the prejudices against Oth.e.l.lo, whose cultural as distinct from racial "Moorishness" is signaled by "his uncontrollable pa.s.sion . . . , his superst.i.tious interpretation of the handkerchief, [and] his ritualistic attempt to make the murder of Desdemona a sacrifice."69 Images of b.e.s.t.i.a.l transformation abound, and the beast is Oth.e.l.lo.70 It is unclear whether Shakespeare intended the audience to consider interracial marriage unnatural. Some of the characters in the play do; others don"t. Yet it is common for a Shakespearean tragedy to begin with an unnatural act that is a clue to the impending disaster, whether it is Caw 66. Bloom, note 65 above, at 4.
67.On Elizabethan hostility to blacks,see Karen Newman,""And Wash the Ethiop White": Femininity and the Monstrous in Oth.e.l.lo," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology 143, 148149, 153 (Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O"Connor eds. 1987). On racism in Oth.e.l.lo, see John Salway, "Veritable Negroes and Circ.u.mcised Dogs: Racial Disturbances in Shakespeare," in Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum 108112, 115122 (Lesley Aers and Nigel Wheale eds. 1991).
David Bevington, "Oth.e.l.lo, the Moor of Venice," in The Complete Works of Shakespeare 1151 (David Bevington ed., 6th ed. 2009). Barbara Everett, in her book Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare"s Tragedies, ch. 9 (1989), argues that the play presents Oth.e.l.lo as a distinctively Spanish Moor.
Edward Berry, "Oth.e.l.lo"s Alienation," 30 Studies in English Literature 15001900 315, 317318 (1990).
Jonathan Bate, "Ovid and the Mature Tragedies: Metamorphosis in Oth.e.l.lo and King Lear," 41 Shakespeare Survey 133, 136137 (1989).
*dor"s treachery, Gertrude"s marriage to her brother-in-law (though it occurs immediately before the opening of the play rather than in the play itself), or Lear"s dividing his kingdom. What is certain is that Oth.e.l.lo is grossly deceived, forms ugly ideas about women, and commits a hideous crime that he can expiate only by his own suicide.
Oth.e.l.lo could be read as a tragedy about reciprocal misunderstanding between the s.e.xes rather than about anything to do with race. Oth.e.l.lo"s isolation from polite Venetian society by his military career and his foreignness prevents him from forming a true picture of a Venetian woman"s character, while Desdemona, because of the cloistered upbringing of women of her social cla.s.s, knows nothing about men.71 Alternatively, Oth.e.l.lo is a "tragedy of perceptions," like Faulkner"s novel Light in August. Because the other characters in the play cannot accept Oth.e.l.lo as "equally human but culturally different," he (like Joe Christmas in Light in August, a black who pa.s.ses for white) comes eventually to believe that his only choice is between a.s.similation and barbarism, and he oscillates between those poles.72 Oth.e.l.lo can be read most simply as a play about how the insecurity that a man feels who is married to a much younger woman makes him p.r.o.ne to jealousy, and how difficult jealousy is to allay when once it is aroused.
So there are "safe" readings of Oth.e.l.lo, as of Faulkner and Twain, who dealt with race sympathetically but to modern ears insensitively.73 Yet one is never completely safe with a great writer, especially Shakespeare, whose greatness, it bears repeating, "lies in the fact that, whatever univocal insights or affirmations may be expressed within any work, they are thoroughly dramatised-that is, set within a complex interlocutory process such that they are never the "final vocabulary" of individual works."74 Another feature of Nussbaum"s choice of works to discuss is related to Gayle Greene, ""This That You Call Love": s.e.xual and Social Tragedy in Oth.e.l.lo," in Shakespeare and Gender: A History 47 (Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps eds. 1995).
72. Berry, note 69 above, at 318.
On Mark Twain, see Booth, note 11 above, at 477. Booth believes that Faulkner"s works are "to some degree marred by s.e.xism." Id. at 405. Surprisingly, he does not mention racism.
David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel 60 (1994). Even d.i.c.kens is not safe: Hard Times expresses a fierce antipathy to labor unions, Oliver Twist antisemitism, and most of his novels are s.e.xist.
my earlier point that the literary canon must be drastically shrunk if it is to edify: they are preselected.75 Their take on social issues corresponds to her own (though she is distressed by d.i.c.kens"s hostility to labor unions); they were chosen to ill.u.s.trate rather than to shape her moral stance. If literature were really believed to be a source of ethical insight, the critic would examine works of literature that reflected different ethical stances. Hard Times would be matched with Nostromo or William Dean Howell"s The Rise of Silas Lapham,76 Maurice with "Death in Venice" or Sartre"s "The Childhood of a Leader,"77 Native Son with Prester John. Or the focus would be on works that seem to wobble around the moral center, as it now seems to us, such as Oth.e.l.lo, or Pudd"nhead Wilson, or Light in August. Instead the ethical position is in place before the examination begins, and furnishes the criteria of choice and shapes interpretation.
And is it an accident that Maurice was written by a h.o.m.os.e.xual and Native Son by a black? Or was Nussbaum"s choice of these novels a bow to ident.i.ty politics-an acknowledgment of the "right" of members of marginalized groups to be represented in the literary canon so that they will feel proud?
Then Why Read Literature?
If we do not read literature in order to form better or truer opinions on matters of religion or politics, economics or morality, then why do we read it at all? I shall suggest several answers: acquiring surrogate experience; obtaining templates for interpreting one"s actual experiences (but not practical lessons for living); sharpening one"s writing and reading skills; expanding one"s emotional horizons; obtaining self-knowledge; 75. Cf. Nussbaum, note 10 above, at 10.
In which the Gradgrind-Bentham figure, the Reverend Sewell, is treated a good deal more sympathetically than his d.i.c.kensian counterpart. See Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy, ch. 4 (1996).
In Sartre, The Wall and Other Stories 157 (1948). The seducer in Sartre"s story is a surrealist whose objets d"art include a lifelike sculpture of a t.u.r.d. The young man whom he seduces is shown embarra.s.sedly urinating in the washbasin of their hotel room while getting ready for s.e.x. By the piling on of such details Sartre a.s.sociates h.o.m.os.e.xuality with disorder, the unnatural, the shameful, and the unclean.
*gaining pleasure; experiencing an echo-chamber effect; undergoing therapy; and enjoying art for art"s sake. None of these benefits is likely to improve the reader"s morals.
"Stories provide low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience. They satisfy a need to experiment with answers to "what if ?" questions . . . Fictions are preparations for life and its surprises . . . Stories [also] encourage us to explore the points-of-view, beliefs, motivations, and values of other human minds . . . They extend mind-reading capabilities that begin in infancy and come into full flower in adult sociality."78 Fiction, like other counterfactual imaginative thinking, enables us to decouple thought from action (we don"t rush out of the theater when we see a lion on the movie screen) and even helps us to tune our brains.79 It thus enables us "to generate predictions or generalizations about matters of fact which are not otherwise in practice available."80 A related answer has been given by the philosopher Hilary Putnam, commenting on Bentham"s statement that there is no difference in value between poetry and the child"s game of pushpin: We find it virtually impossible to imagine that someone who really appreciates poetry, someone who is capable of distinguishing real poetry from mere verse, capable of responding to great poetry, should prefer a childish game to arts which enrich our lives as poetry and music do. We have a reason for preferring poetry to pushpin, and that reason lies in the felt experience of great poetry, and of the after effects of great poetry-. . . the enlargement of our repertoire of images and metaphors, and the integration of poetic images and metaphors with mundane perceptions and att.i.tudes that takes place when a poem has Dutton, note 4 above, at 110. See also see Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts 273 (1990). "This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be outcast from one"s family, like an insect (Kafka [in "The Metamorphosis"])." James Wood, How Fiction Works 238 (2008).
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts," 30 SubStance, issue 9495, 2001, p. 6.
80. Daniel Nolan, "Fictionalist Att.i.tudes about Fictional Matters," in Fictionalism in Metaphysics 204, 209 (Mark Eli Kalderon ed. 2005).
lived in us for a number of years. These experiences too are prima facie good-and not just good, but en.o.bling [sic], to use an old fashioned word.81 People steeped in literature (Putnam"s "we"-a shrinking sliver of the U.S. population) tend to compare their experiences to the literary counterparts of those experiences and to derive some of their expectations concerning other people"s behavior from the behavior of characters in literature. In other words, they use literature as a template for life. (One might even, building on Aristotle"s distinction between literature and history, compare a work of literature to a scientific model-the one a model of man, the other a model of nature.) A lawyer might sum up a career spent working for a legal-aid or public defender"s office in these lines from Yeats"s poem "Easter 1916" that I quoted in chapter 8: "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart." A lawyer slaving away as an a.s.sociate at a large law firm might be reminded of Bartleby, or moved to ponder Yeats"s claim in "The Choice" that "The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,/And if it choose the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark." You might worry about committing Lear"s mistake of trying to separate power from perquisites or about insisting on always being candid, like Cordelia, or you might be made sensitive to the kind of no-win situations that Agamemnon stumbled into and that occur in milder form throughout one"s life. In a book of social theory, Ulysses and the Sirens, Jon Elster finds in the story of Ulysses" instructing his crew to tie him to the mast when he came within earshot of the Sirens the prototypical case of self-commitment. And sometimes when my judicial colleagues and I become restive as a long-winded lawyer talks into the lunch hour, I think of these lines from The Rape of the Lock (III.1922): Meanwhile declining from the noon of day, The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
81. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History 155 (1981).
*Harvard law professor Paul Freund once remarked that "the telling allusion may provide a genuine flash of insight, and the temptation to use it [in a legal brief, for example] may be irresistible." He gave the example of "drawing on Wordsworth when voices are raised saying that G.o.d has been driven out of the public schoolrooms along with ritual prayer,"82 and he quoted some lines from Wordsworth"s sonnet "Evening on Calais Beach." His discussion is cryptic, and to explain it I need to quote the entire sonnet (which I am happy to have an excuse to do, since it is very beautiful): It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o"er the sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder-everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouch"d by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham"s bosom all the year; And worshipp"st at the Temple"s inner shrine, G.o.d being with thee when we know it not.
The last five lines (beginning "If thou appear untouch"d . . .") are the ones Freund quoted. Their significance lies in the contrast with the first eight lines (the ninth line is transitional), which evoke prayer and explicitly acknowledge a deity ("the mighty Being"). The child does not pray, or think about holiness or heaven or G.o.d, yet she is as close to G.o.d as the pious adult narrator-maybe closer. We can think of her as a child in a school in which there is no prayer, and thus realize that to ban prayer from the public schools is not necessarily to banish G.o.d from them.
But it would be a mistake to think that because some people use litera 82. Paul A. Freund, "The Humanities and the Const.i.tution," Humanities, Aug. 1982, p. 3.
ture as a source of insight into human nature and social interactions, it provides a straighter path to knowledge about man and society than writings in other fields, such as history and science, and interactions with real people as distinct from fictional characters. I did not argue in Part I that works of imaginative literature are the only suitable texts for studying revenge, jurisprudence, or the romantic temperament or in chapter 10 that the study of literature is the only way to learn about refugee issues, totalitarianism, or the impact of technological advances; and I reject the implications of James Boyd White"s claim that "information [conveyed by findings in the natural or social sciences] may shift my sense of the sufficiency of the information I already have, but I do not expect it to change me."83 More people have been changed by natural science (think of Darwin"s impact on social thought) and by social science-a body of research and writing that includes the works of Adam Smith, Marx, Freud, Keynes, Kinsey, and Hayek, among many others-than by imaginative literature, though White may have inoculated himself against this body of writings.
Nor can readers expect to extract from literature many practical lessons for living. Do you think that King Lear teaches you not to put yourself in your children"s power? Think again. People who try to retain personal control of their property in their dotage are the natural prey of con men, of dishonest personal attendants and financial advisers, of grasping physicians, and of gigolos and gold diggers. Better to be dependent on your family and hope that it doesn"t harbor a Regan or a Goneril; just don"t think you"ll be able to impose your hundred knights on your daughters and sons-in-law. Writers of imaginative literature rarely are practical people with sound practical guidance to impart.
3. We might read literature just to improve our writing skills. The most distinguished legal writers, such as Holmes, Cardozo, and Hand, were steeped in literature, reflecting the character of elite education when they were growing up. We might read literature in order to improve our reading rather than our writing skills-another skill important for lawyers to have-by studying texts made difficult by cultural distance or the density or complexity of the writing. To read the literary cla.s.sics with understanding requires deploying "a good many of our most complicated 83. White, note 40 above, at 56.
*faculties of perception-our nuanced knowledge of language, people, social inst.i.tutions, politics, history, morality; our ability to grasp a.n.a.logies, parallelisms, ant.i.theses, significant repet.i.tions, ellipses, ironies, double meanings, even cryptograms."84 The test of time can help us see why this should be so. The writings that pa.s.s the test tend to be open-ended-that is what makes them adaptable to a changing social environment-and "the open-endedness of the text plays a key role in [the pleasure of reading literature] because the reader is the recipient of a kind of communication that, unlike graffiti or b.u.mper stickers or telegrams, offers a rich multiplicity of messages in which the mind may delight."85 An enduring value of the New Criticism is the encouragement it gave to close reading of the densest literary texts-compared to which most statutes and judicial opinions are child"s play.
Literature can expand our emotional horizons. An idea can usually be encoded straightforwardly enough and transferred more or less intact to another person. It is different with emotions. You can describe a pain, its origins, its consequences, in as much detail as you like and I still will not experience them. And so with describing one"s feelings about growing old, falling in love, losing a friend, failing in business, succeeding in politics. Imaginative literature can engender in its readers emotional responses to experiences they have not had. We read King Lear and feel how-or some approximation to how-the failing king feels, the wicked b.a.s.t.a.r.d, the evil daughters, the good daughter, the blinded earl, the faithful retainer, the corrupt retainer, the fool. We experience simulacra of the agony of madness and the pang of early death in Hamlet, the depths of reciprocal misunderstanding in The Secret Agent, the loneliness of command in Billy Budd, the triumph of the will in Yeats"s late poetry.86 This is empathy. But to return to the theme of the first part of this chapter, empathy is amoral. The mind that you work your way into, learning to see the world from its perspective, may be the mind of a Meursault, an Edmund, a Lafcadio, a Macbeth, a Coriola.n.u.s, a Tamburlaine, a torturer, Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age 228 (1996).
Id.
Flint Schier, "Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment," in Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics 73, 85 (Peter Lamarque ed. 1983).
a s.a.d.i.s.t, even a Hitler (Richard Hughes"s The Fox in the Attic), who with his unparalleled insight into the hopes and fears of tens of millions of Europeans must have had one of the most highly developed empathetic capacities in history. Antony"s funeral oration, though reactionary in tendency-it is a paean to Caesarism-is a masterpiece of empathetic understanding; he knows what moves people.
5. So much literature is about screw-ups that it might be thought a repository of lessons on how to keep out of trouble and be happy, even if it is not rich in practical advice. On this view, as on the moralistic, literature can change us, though in the sense of helping us to be more successful at the game of life rather than morally better. If ethics is defined broadly enough, to encompa.s.s all possible answers to the question "How should I live?" including answers grounded in egoism,87 amoral literature may be ethical. But I resist the idea that literature can tell us how to live, as distinct from telling us how the characters in a literary work live. Literature is not in the advice business. The characters and situations in literature that most interest us are ones that capture aspects of ourselves and our situation.88 If you don"t already believe that love is the most important thing in the world, you"re unlikely to be persuaded that it is by reading Donne, Stendhal, or Galsworthy. But reading them may make you realize that this is what you think, and so may serve to clarify yourself to yourself. Literature helps us to become what we are.
The "real you" that you discover by reading literature may not be a tame modern liberal. Yeats and Hemingway, Haggard and Buchan, Gide and Camus, Waugh and Pound, Mailer and Larkin, Rabelais and de Sade may express your innermost self more faithfully than Austen, Joyce, and Forster do. You may prefer the macho Conrad of Nostromo and Lord Jim to the feminist Conrad (as it seems to me) of The Secret Agent and Victory. Since "war is more beautiful than peace,"89 you may revel in Yeats"s poem "Under Ben Bulben," written a year before the outbreak of World War II, See Bernard Williams, "The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics," in Williams, Making Sense of Humanity, and Other Philosophical Papers 19821993 153, 156 (1995).
"The knowledge that literature gives us is specifically a knowledge of ourselves." Cleanth Brooks, A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer"s Craft 10 (1971).
89. Todorov, note 24 above, at 71.
*where we read: "You that Mitchel"s prayer have heard,/"Send war in our time,O Lord!"/Know that when all words are said/And a man is fighting mad,/Something drops from eyes long blind,/He completes his partial mind,/For an instant stands at ease,/Laughs aloud, his heart at ease." Malcolm X "read "Paradise Lost" in prison and identified with Satan."90 The possession of knowledge does not dictate its use for moral ends. Not only may we identify as readers with the egomaniacs, scamps, seducers, conquerors, psychopaths, tricksters, and immoralists who people fiction; we may improve our skills in manipulating people to selfish ends by acquiring a better understanding of the naive and vulnerable, the good, the generous human types we encounter in works of fiction. "To be able to see the world from another"s point of view may be the greatest weapon one can wield in war against that other."91 I have no quarrel with the a.n.a.logy that Booth and Nussbaum draw between reading and friendship. Bookish people do make friends with characters in books, just as children befriend imaginary beings or anthropomorphize animals. But does friendship make for goodness? Are bad people characteristically friendless? Are friends always good people? Are not some or even many of them the proverbial "bad companions"? To prefer Charlotte Stant to Maggie Verver, or Kate Croy to Millie Theale, is to risk being led astray, is it not? It"s not a big risk. But neither are we likely to become better people by imaginatively befriending the "good" characters.
6. To emphasize the role of literature in imparting self-knowledge is more defensible than a.s.signing it the role of making the reader a more moral individual. But it still gives literature too solemn and even too puritanical an air. It leaves out pleasure, though pleasure that can be contemplative and fused with knowledge rather than ecstatic; Brian Vickers observes that "we understand works of literature far better than we un Jonathan Rosen, "Return to Paradise: The Enduring Relevance of John Milton," The New Yorker, June 2, 2008, p. 72. See also Reginald A. Wilburn, "Malcolm X and African-American Literary Interpretations of Paradise Lost," in Milton in Popular Culture 199 (Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colon s.e.m.e.nza (2006). Rosen"s article, incidentally, is an exemplary example of fast-vanishing literary journalism.
Alexander Nehamas, "What Should We Expect from Reading? (There Are Only Aesthetic Values)," Salmagundi, Summer 1996, pp. 27, 50.
derstand our own lives, and they form satisfying wholes, aesthetic and ethical and intellectual unities, in a way that life seldom does."92 Philosophers since Aristotle have puzzled over the paradox that the depiction of disaster and undeserved suffering in tragic dramas yields pleasure to the audience.93 Maybe we enjoy these works despite their grimness94 and would like them even more with happy endings, however contrived, like the ending of Job, or Lear as played in the eighteenth century. Maybe there"s something to Aristotle"s idea of catharsis-tragedy is our game of death and we are happy to see fictional characters die in our place.95 7. Literature yields a special kind of pleasure by imparting an echo-chamber effect to everyday life. The life depicted in works of literature is recognizably human and therefore like our own, but it is more intense, more charged with significance. When we are reading literature, whether it is a brilliant light work like Forster"s A Room with a View or a brilliant depressive work like Crime and Punishment, whether it celebrates romantic values or sees through them, we live, for the moment anyway, more intensely. We have a vision of a life more "real"-vivid, meaningful, coherent-than our everyday existence, a sense of immense human possibility, of exaltation (a common response of art lovers to a first-rate art museum). We feel bigger; we are transported. Being rich in transgressive fantasies, literature enables the timid bourgeois to revel in the amoral freedom of a Meursault or a Lafcadio, a Medea or a Cleopatra or a Kate Croy.
The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty . . . which seeks the greatest quant.i.ty of present excitement by inequality and disproportion . . . The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes . . . Poetry is right royal. It puts the individual for 92. Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels 143 (1993).
93. See Budd, note 1 above, at 110123; Schier, note 85 above; A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996).
Nuttall, note 93 above, at 104.
Id. at 7679.
*the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right. A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild a.s.ses, is a more poetical object than they.96 This is not a simple hedonism. But it is something that Nietzsche understood better than the most sensitive moralist can, for it has to do with a sense of power and selfhood rather than with the moral sense.
8. Literature can function as therapy97 and more commonly as consolation. This value is connected with its focus on disruption and crisis. The atheist may find a subst.i.tute for religion in the Stoic values exalted in some of Shakespeare"s plays98 or Yeats"s poetry, or simply in the sense that literature inhabits a timeless realm, thus defying death. Taking to heart Edgar"s admonition to his father (King Lear V.2.810), What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all, may make us stronger, or prouder (or even humbler), though it is unlikely to make us better. Stoic values, as in this pa.s.sage, are conspicuous in many of Shakespeare"s plays (though this has been denied).99 Consider Hamlet"s remark to Horatio shortly before the fatal duel with Laertes that "since no man of aught he leaves knows,/what is"t to leave betimes?" (Hamlet V.2.220222). That is, since one doesn"t know what the future holds-it could be bad rather than good-a premature death need not reduce one"s total lifetime sum of happiness. This is an example of the cheering-up function of Stoicism that T. S. Eliot remarked in his essay on William Hazlitt, "Coriola.n.u.s," in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 8, pp. 347348 (A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover eds. 1903). The point is similar to Todorov"s. See text at note 24 above.
Morris Robert Morrison, "A Defense of Poetry Therapy," in Poetry as Healer: Mending the Troubled Mind 28 (Jack J. Leedy ed. 1985).
Maynard Mack, for example, remarks "Shakespeare"s more tragic vision [in King Lear] of the creature [us] whose fate it is to learn to love only to lose (soon or late) the loved one, and to reach a ripeness through suffering and struggle, only to die." Mack, King Lear in Our Time 79 (1965).
See, for example, Giles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature 135147 (1984).
Oth.e.l.lo (see chapter 1). Another example is Hamlet"s remark that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (II.2.249250). And think of Kent"s comment on the dying Lear, sounding the Stoic theme of death as release: "Vex not his ghost. Oh, let him pa.s.s! He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer" (King Lear V.3.319321).
But Shakespeare did not argue for stoic values; and recall the negative twist that he gives Stoicism in the person of Brutus in Julius Caesar. (Notice too the tension in Hamlet between the cheering-up pa.s.sages quoted above and the dread of death that causes Hamlet in his most famous soliloquy to choose "to be" rather than "not to be.") Having read Shakespeare you might decide that you were, or should strive to become, a Stoic. But it would be another example of how literature can help the reader become what he or she really is (that is, wants to be)-which need not be a moral improvement over the reader"s present, less authentic self.
9. Particularly remote from morality is the disinterested "art for art"s sake" pleasure that much literature affords. This is closest to the pleasure we get from the visual arts, especially abstract art, and from instrumental music. It is the pleasure that comes from being in the presence of beauty. Consider the middle stanza of Keats"s "Ode to Melancholy": But when the melancholy fit shall fal*Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
Or this stanza from Part V of "The Waste Land": A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light *Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wal*And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
These two stanzas are candidates to be touchstones of literary greatness (another is Shakespeare"s description of Cleopatra on her barge, which I quote in chapter 14). Yet they have no moral or informational content. (The stanza from Keats"s ode will not help anyone suffering from depression, and it is patronizing toward women.) They have only beauty. It is true that although musicality is an important part of their appeal it cannot be divorced from the sense of the words, as is often possible with songs. Even nonsense verse depends for its effect on our being able to understand the words and sentences.100 Still, it is impossible to extract a moral from the stanzas that I have quoted, or anything that could be described as information; even the echo-chamber effect that I described is muted.
It is not only from poetry that we derive an enjoyment comparable to that provided by instrumental music; much of the appeal of prose works as different from each other (and from s.n.a.t.c.hes of poetry) as The Stranger, "The Dead," The House of Mirth, The Sound and the Fury, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Golden Bowl, and Moby-d.i.c.k resides in their formal properties-changes of pace, shifts of voice and point of view, the echoing and doubling of themes, the arousing of expectations and the deferral of their satisfaction, the creation and release of tensions, and the harmonizing of disparate elements.101 The more attuned we are to these properties, the less concerned we"ll be with the moral beliefs of the implied or the actual author. The formal properties do not exhaust the worth and appeal of literature, but the moral properties are almost sheer distraction.
"Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking-Gla.s.s is the limiting case. But the poem"s drift is intelligible, even though a number of the made-up words are purely evocative. (Likewise Finnegans Wake.) And right after the recitation of the poem Alice (and so the reader) is told the meaning of the made-up words.
On the properties of "abstract" (nonvoice, nonprogrammatic) music, see Budd, note 1 above, at 164169.
In short, "The humanities do not humanize."102 As summarized by John Fischer, The primary argument in defense of Great Books as the basis for literary jurisprudence has been that it is important to teach them because such works contain radical critiques of Western culture . . . This extraordinary claim a.s.sumes that "traditional" readings are uniform and in some way repress the critical and disruptive forces Great Books contain. But clearly such an Apollonian vision of literary studies is inaccurate, as can be seen by taking even the briefest survey of standard works on a major author such as Herman Melville . . . This Babel of discourses could be reproduced for almost any major author. To claim that the readings such approaches generate restrict a critique of Western society is to misunderstand profoundly the degree to which the study of literature, rightly or wrongly, has challenged traditional understandings of culture. Indeed, the very point of those critics who oppose the increasing diversity of English departments is that traditional approaches have been replaced by questions of politics, gender, and race.103 102. George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life 131 (1999).
103. Fischer, Note, "Reading Literature/Reading Law: Is There a Literary Jurisprudence?" 72 Texas Law Review 135, 153154 (1993) (footnotes omitted).
part iv
The Regulation of Literature by Law
chapter 13.
Protecting Nonwriters
p.o.r.nographic Fiction