Authors: Mark Edmundson
Blake and Frye are avatars of Romantic individualism, and they are, to Butler, an error that must be attacked, both in the
past and present; to her, they make a system out of an aggressive, resentful solipsism. For Butler, Romanticism is a plague,
something that tears society apart, encouraging us to live only for ourselves. It must be shown up for what it is. Greatly
preferring Blake-Frye as I do, full of gratitude to Frye for performing the task Schopenhauer sets out and making Blake's
work unfold as a contemporary answer to the question "What is life?," I find little to agree with in Butler. But in teaching
Austen alongside Blake, as I often do, Butler seems to me key in helping students to see the differences between the two and
to begin to make some choices, choices that will matter not just in class but for future life.
Of course Blake does want us
all
to live in Golgonooza, the city of ongoing creation, but you get there by being an inspired artist, by trusting yourself and
by being yourself with the greatest possible gusto. And this is not something that everyone is prone to do. As Oscar Wilde
put it, "Most people are other people."
What matters about these critics is that they are writing accurately about their authors (at least insofar as I can see) and
doing so with
the conduct of life
as their concern. They are asking what it means to live the authors at hand. They are mining them for vital options, questing
for truth.
Orwell's Dickens
GEORGE ORWELL'S ESSAY on Charles Dickens is not an academic investigation, a fresh interpretation from the standpoint of Marx
or Freud or whomever else you might care to apply for the purposes of translation. Rather, the piece is an internal argument—it's
Orwell contending with himself. He is pitting what I take to be his own early infatuation with Dickens against what he has
learned later in life through his immersion in politics (and war) as well as through his study of Marx and other social thinkers.
Orwell seems to be writing this essay because he needs to. He needs—while describing Dickens with all the accuracy he can
muster—to find out whether he, and by extension his readers, ought to take to heart the truth in Dickens's work.
Dickens, as Orwell has come in time to see, has no social doctrine. Perhaps he is unmatched at dramatizing injustice but,
to Orwell, Dickens has no conception of how various social arrangements conspire to create it. When Dickens wants to indict
evil, or inhumanity, he indicts this or that inhumane person or inhumane act. His scope is entirely limited to what he can
see in front of him. Dickens has no capacity to step back and to envision things in their larger, more general workings. "He
has no constructive suggestions," Orwell says, "not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only
an emotional perception that something is wrong."
A case in point, for Orwell, is Dickens's view of education: "He attacks the current educational system with perfect justice,
and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school
might
have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public
school to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination."
"He lacked that kind of imagination": by which Orwell means that he lacked a political imagination. Theories of education,
as Plato demonstrates in
The Republic,
are always political theories, blueprints for future societies. Dickens had no political theory. He was unable to conceive
of an alternative to the slash-and-burn capitalism that was developing everywhere around him. He could protest against institutions,
but he could not imagine their replacement with better ones. Rather, the man behind the functionary's desk must become a better
man. Orwell, it's soon clear, is arguing with himself, for and against socialism, the doctrine that Dickens could have adopted
and never did, and the doctrine that is tempting Orwell himself. When Orwell chides Dickens, early on in the essay, for not
having a social imagination, what he means is that he has no imagination for socialism.
Orwell's argument with himself, and with his own prior love for Dickens, is so honest, nondogmatic, and uncommitted to preordained
conclusions, that by the close of the essay he has, it seems, discovered something. The process of writing the essay appears
to have remade his mind. Yeats said that when you have an argument with the world, you write an essay. When the argument is
with yourself, it issues in a poem. This is an argument with the self that results in an essay replete with the passion that
comes in the best poems.
Here is Orwell on the limits of the kind of socialist thought that he has been measuring Dickens against. "All [Dickens] can
finally say is 'Behave decently,' which . . . is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential
Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the
shape
of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of
mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that
institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression on the human face.'" In fact, Orwell now sees, Dickens's permanent
radicalism may well be more attractive than the temporary discontent, aimed at the overthrow of an existing system, that so-called
revolutionaries maintain. The revolutionaries want to replace the current system with another that will last for all time—the
dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe—and that will almost inevitably solidify and hem in life.
Orwell in his youth seems to have fallen in love with Dickens. And the first phase in being influenced by a writer—influenced
in the best sense—is precisely such love. But the process must go further than that. To actually adopt a writer's vision,
the reader has to engage in critical examination. The writer needs to answer the hardest questions one can put to him, because,
in effect, these are our questions, our perplexities about how to live and what to do. Just so, when we are on the verge of
marriage, we need to know that love is at the core of it all. But we also need to think hard about our choice. What kind of
mother or father will the person make? Will she bear with me in bad times as well as good, sickness as well as health, poverty
and wealth alike? Posing such questions of an author's vision—can it sustain me in the hard hours as well as the sweet?—is
central to the act of criticism that precedes consequential belief.
Some students will go even further. So far, we have been talking about two sorts of people: those who are reasonably comfortable
with the values they've been socialized to accept, and those who feel an uneasiness with them, however latent. This second
group is ripe for literary study. They need a second chance to come of age. But some of them will not be satisfied with what
they find in books, however much it may draw them. They'll see that Shelley or Austen goes only so far, and they'll feel the
need to complete and correct the writers they love by writing novels and poems and essays of their own. Writers become writers
for many reasons, but one is that the books on the shelf are never quite the right books. They don't render the world in exactly
the way that it is. So there is reason to write more. Walter Benjamin tells the story of a village schoolmaster who was too
poor to buy books; when he saw a title in a catalog that intrigued him, he sat down and composed the volume himself. "Writers,"
Benjamin observes, "are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the
books which they could buy but do not like."
Influence
WHEN SOME TEACHERS think about this approach to education, they find the issue of influence particularly troubling. They are
concerned that they might become propagandists, rather than what they hope to be, critical thinkers who enjoin critical thought.
They don't want to implant ways of seeing things in their students, using their authority and the powers of their grades.
Rather, they want to echo the advice that Johnson gave Boswell, turn to their students and demand that they rid their minds
of cant. What is to be put in the place of this cant—or doxa, or ideology, or, if you like, bullshit—the critical thinkers
rarely say.
To me, there are few pleasures greater than being influenced: learning something I need to know from another. Longinus describes
this feeling of connection with a great author in a splendid sentence when he says that when we encounter sublime wisdom,
we feel that we have created what in fact we've only heard. The utterance so much echoes our latent wisdom that we take the
author's words as our own. Emerson, greatly fearing influence, especially early in his career, speaks of the indignity of
being "forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." But Emerson addresses us here as an aspiring original. To
the true reader, every form of usable truth is welcome many times over. Later in life, Emerson is more circumspect: "Shall
I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
him."
Many of our students have grown up being suffused with TV, movies, video games. Is what is to be found in Blake and Dickens
so much worse than what Paramount and Disney have to deliver? Should we suffer endless qualms lest the world according to
Spielberg be displaced by the world according to Wallace Stevens? Yet there is something real about these concerns; teaching
in the way that I describe does have its dangers.
To me, part of the risk of true teaching lies in the willingness to see students make choices, sometimes bad choices. We must
not be afraid of submitting our students to influence. We face people who are on the verge of major decisions. Should I marry?
Should I have children? Should I go into law? Should I stay in my parents' church? Such questions matter to young people,
and they matter now. If thinking about these questions in a classroom can be dangerous, it can be much more dangerous not
to think about them. The result of never brooding over major issues is likely to be that one follows the crowd. One takes
common convention as a guide. Rich in use as convention can be, for some it is stifling, begetting lives of quiet desperation.
We spend our days pursuing ends that outrage our natures, making ourselves sick, as Thoreau said, so that we can lay something
up against our coming illness. A fundamental qualification for teaching literature should be the view that great books are
worth studying, and because of the salutary effects that they can have on life. Why would a student wish to study with anyone
who didn't think as much? Doing so would be like hiring a lawyer who had lost all of his faith in the law and didn't want
to sully himself through contact with the corrupt legal system.
The professors who become most uneasy about asking their students real questions are often those with the most doubts about
the capacities of everyday people to make their own decisions and to direct their own lives. These professors, whatever they
may say, are fundamentally afraid of living in a democracy, where people think for themselves, rather than letting experts
do their thinking for them. This fear is a scandal at the center of the current day academy. Though many professors claim
to be on the left, the fact is that they do not trust, or sometimes even much like, everyday, relatively unschooled people.
In fact, they tend to despise the people in whose behalf they claim to be working.
As disconcerting to me as the fears of those who think that students will be too easily swayed are the doubts of those who
feel that human beings can be changed little, if at all, for the better. Eminent among these is Sigmund Freud. What Freud
calls the transference is purportedly an inescapable part of life, perhaps even an element of every significant encounter.
The theory of the transference suggests that we live eternally in the past, never in the present and future. To Freud, we
perpetually approach figures of authority and figures of erotic interest not as the people they are in themselves, but rather
as though they were figures from our past. The boss's injunctions are inflected with the mother's commands. The lover's carpings
are the father's as well. We are lost in a world where, as J. H. van den Berg puts it, "everything is past and there is nothing
new." We find ourselves amidst facsimiles of replicas of reproductions.
One of the reasons that Freud hated America as much as he did is that the nation seemed organized on the premise that the
present could have a liberated relation to the past. We believed that it was possible to draw on the past, not be swallowed
by it against our wills. Democracy, which depends on the enfranchisement of greater and greater numbers of people, on the
widening of their possibilities, is inseparable from faith in the present and future.
To have gone into teaching is to have placed one's wager on the hopeful side of the question. By choosing to teach, we have
declared a hope that the powers of nurture may be a little stronger than nature's. We've affirmed the hope that the present
can be more alive than the constricting past. What is our proof beyond that hope? Do we have any evidence, besides our temperamental
wish to think well of the world? I think so. As teachers we see proof all the time. We see proof, first of all, in the nearly
miraculous works that we often teach. If a human being can write as Shakespeare or Blake did, coming from humble beginnings,
with no advantages other than those they created themselves, then what is not to be hoped for from an individual man or woman?
"A human being did that!" one says, reading their work. "And what might I, too, no less human, be able to achieve?"
Freud and all the other purveyors of the Gothic imagination may be right. It's possible that the present is bound so tightly
to the past that it rarely breaks free. Edgar Allan Poe, the ultimate Gothic writer, delighted in depicting people who are
fated from the start to be devoured by past sins, whether they committed them or not. Is there any doubt, once you see the
enormous crack running through the House of Usher, what will happen to it and its residents by the tale's end? Poe, who sought
his own doom ruthlessly enough, seemed to believe that all of us would eventually be sacrificed on the altar of long-ago transgressions.