Authors: Mark Edmundson
But multiculturalism, well understood, remains one of the joys of current humanistic study. The scholarly work of bringing
together East and West, for instance, is of the greatest consequence. The religious thought and the medical knowledge of the
East have a great deal to teach us in our present state. Never have we had a chance to learn so much from the study of others,
including a humane, but not a blindly comprehensive, tolerance. And some texts that initially seem embodiments of pure difference
will turn out to be exactly the ones that future students respond to with a shock of recognition. The young upper-middle-class
woman from Ohio may turn away from Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse,
a book she's supposed to adore, and find that Chinua Achebe sees the world almost precisely as it is. Once we've opened up
the possibility of direct literary connection—connection with great authors in the search for truth—all sorts of marvelous
and unexpected meetings of mind become possible.
Pop
THE SPIRIT OF education I affirm is well expressed by Harold Bloom: "We all of us go home each evening, and at some moment
in time, with whatever degree of overt consciousness, we go back over all the signs that the day presented to us. In those
signs, we seek only what can aid the continuity of our own discourse, the survival of those ongoing qualities that will give
what is vital in us even more life. This seeking is the Vichian and Emersonian making of signification into meaning, by the
single test of aiding our survival." This is what we do, or ought to do, with books—turn their signification into meaning,
and so into possibility, in the hopes that so doing will better our lot.
The test of a book lies in its power to map or transform a life. The question we would ultimately ask of any work of art is
this: Can you live it? If you cannot, it may still command considerable interest. The work may charm, it may divert. It may
teach us something about the larger world; it may refine a point. But if it cannot help some of us to imagine a life, or unfold
one already latent within, then it is not major work, and probably not worth the time of students who, at this period in their
lives, are looking to respond to consequential and very pressing questions. They are on the verge of choosing careers, of
marrying, of entering the public world. They are in dire need of maps, or of challenges to their existing cartography. Perhaps
most of all, they seek ways to unfold their promise, to achieve the highest form of being they can. Works of art matter to
the degree that they can help people do this. Books should be called major and become canonical when over time they provide
existing individuals with live options that will help them change for the better. A democratic humanism can have no other
standard for greatness.
The most beautiful statement of this ideal of literary education that I know of is Oscar Wilde's and comes from "The Soul
of Man Under Socialism": "So he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be
a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker
of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws
his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him.
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and
carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like
when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realized fully what was best in him. But he was not more
Christ-like than Wagner, when he realized his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realized his soul in song. There is
no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men." Such perfections are the aim of literary education,
and if perfection is rarely the actual result, the process is no less noble for that.
Popular culture, which is more and more taught at universities, usually cannot offer such prospects. The objective of a good
deal of rock music and film is to convey the pleasing illusion that people can live in the way that the singers and the actors
do when they're on. Occasionally, I suppose, a performer comes through. Keith Richards seems to be, in life, the Keith he
evokes when he's onstage. Most people probably don't have the guts or the constitution. When Terry Southern came to interview
Richards, he laid three Quaaludes on him as a gift. Keith swallowed them all, took a slug of bourbon, and woke up two days
later. No interview for Terry. But I'm not sure that this moment, taken as representative, can point to a plausible life for
much of anyone except Richards himself.
Yet what David Denby says about movie love—and by extension the love of popular culture overall—still strikes me as true:
"Movie love puts people in touch with their own instincts and pleasures. Movies can lead to self-reconciliation, and that
is one reason they have inspired an almost unlimited affection." Putting people in touch with their in stincts and pleasures:
movies and many other popular forms tap into the fantasy life, and insofar as desire is being drowned by the gray waves of
the reality principle, we need it to be restored. (Not to be able to fantasize at all is probably even less healthy than fantasizing
all the time.) A little bit of tolerant thinking about the sorts of erotic and adventurous fantasies that we're drawn to can
tell us a good deal about what's not present in our own lives. The message may be hyperbolical; fantasy is an exaggerated
genre. But perhaps we need such exaggeration to be awakened from the spell of the day-to-day. Fantasy can inspire us to search
for ways to satisfy hungers we didn't know we had.
By far the best inquiry into pop culture I know of along these lines is Simon Frith's essay on the Stones'
Beggar's
Banquet.
"I've always lived a decent, sober, careful life," says Frith, disarmingly enough, and then he goes on to describe what it
means to him to be drawn to the woozy, reckless life the Stones purvey. By the end of the piece, Frith can say that
"Beggar's Banquet,
so intense in its pursuit of pleasure, lays bare the weight borne by our notions of love and sex, the secret melancholy of
life in the consumer collective. These are as much effects of current capitalism as dole queues and boring jobs and material
squalor[,] and the Stones' pleasure perspective gives us a new sense of them . . . In other words, the function of the Stones'
rock and roll dedication . . . is not self-indulgence or escape but defiance.
Beggar's Banquet
celebrates the reality of capitalist pleasure and denies its illusions. No expectations, a lot of laughs—the Stones' strength
derives from their prodigality, from their denial of consequence." That said, the "decent, sober, careful" author has probably
got to think about some riskier, more pleasure-prone ways to live.
Once we have made contact with fantasy, we need a new, larger self-synthesis that pays heed to refractory desires. Self-knowledge
means knowing what we want, even if those wants are embarrassingly grandiose, or socially despised. But fantasies cannot generally
be a direct blueprint for life, the way that the work of Henry James, say, can conceivably be.
Denby's article on film is related to Freud's radically undervalued essay "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." Here Freud,
always competing with literature, wants to associate it with the id, giving psychoanalysis pride of place as the best way
to develop the sane ego. Freud says that creative writing is simply a form of wish-fulfillment. In fiction and poetry of every
sort, we find pleasurable fantasies to enjoy. What keeps us from seeing literary texts—not some, but all—as the fantasies
that they are is form. Form, to Freud, is a distancing device. It offers the ego something to occupy itself, a kind of fore-pleasure,
preliminary to the id's immersing itself in wish-fulfillment. In other words, form plays the role for literature, and presumably
the other arts, that the dream work—the mechanisms by which the desire at the center of the dream undergoes distortion—plays
in dreams.
Surely, though, it's not only form that makes John Milton definingly different from the latest pop best-seller. One can still
live out of Milton's
Paradise Lost,
a poem that has a word, however harsh, to say about virtually every subject that matters. What ought to make a work survive
is that it can be lived, can function, as Milton very much wished his poem to do, as a Bible of sorts.
Paradise Lost
was Freud's favorite poem, and, like all of the major works Freud pondered, from
Oedipus Rex
to
Lear,
it is a basis for psychoanalysis. Those works are far too tough-minded to be written off as wish-fulfillments, just as psychoanalysis
is far too sophisticated, at its best, to boil down to the worship of one more spectral figure of authority, Sigmund Freud.
Pop culture is by and large where wishes thrive, and knowing as much reveals pop culture's great value, as well as its limits.
Of course pop culture can be an area for productive disagreement. Given the work at hand, different people will respond differently
to the question of whether you can live it out. Some will say yes to Bob Dylan (as I would, with reservations), yes to Muddy
Waters and the blues tradition he works in, yes to Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick. But you'll find far fewer people, I think,
who'll be able to say an unequivocal yes to the Rolling Stones or to Britney Spears. That doesn't mean that the Rolling Stones
and, who knows, maybe even Britney, are without their value (fantasy matters). But teaching such work to people who're looking
for answers to primary questions may not be the best way to use their time.
Not long ago, I met a student who told me an illuminating story. The student, now in college, had a high school English teacher
whom he'd greatly admired, and that teacher admired Faulkner above all writers. For his part, the student admired Stephen
King. He read everything King wrote; he loved his work. The teacher detested King. Why? Because, the teacher said, unlike
Faulkner, King did not write "works of universal human significance."
The student walked away angry and unsatisfied, and I don't blame him. How does this teacher know what is "universal" and what
is not? How does he know what something called the "human" might be? Only God—if he exists—knows what "universal human significance"
is.
What the teacher might have said is something like this: "King is an entertainment. King is a diversion. But when you try
to take him as a guide to life, he won't work. The circles he draws on the deep are weak and irresolute. And this is so in
part because King, for all his supposedly shocking scare tactics, is a sentimental writer. In his universe, the children (or
at least the pack of nice kids, the ones the bullies prey on) are good, right, just, and true. (In Wordsworth, the child is
a much more complex being, appealing but not without his dangerous limits.) When King's kids see It—whether It is a spaceship,
a slasher-clown from the deep past, or a ravenous vampire—It is truly there. Just about all adults who are not in some manner
childlike are corrupt, depraved, lying, and self-seeking. This can be a pleasant fantasy for young people and childish adults.
Facile Rousseauianism has its temporary pleasures. But bring this way of seeing the world out into experience and you'll pretty
quickly pay for it. Your relation to large quadrants of experience, in particular those where you have to encounter adult
authority, will likely be paranoid and fated to fail. On the other hand, Faulkner's tragic humanism is tough; it could stand
the test of time. There's a lot to be learned from Dilsey, the black woman in
The Sound and the Fury,
who above all things endures. But that's not because she illuminates some 'universal human significance,' but because she
does her work and lives righteously in the world."
When we teachers stop giving self-inflating answers to our students, and become clearly articulate about what the humanities
can and can't offer—they may help you live better; they won't help you be a god—we'll be on our way to justifying our work
to the public and attracting the students who most need us. Students now live in a bubbling chaos of popular culture. They
need a way to navigate it. They need to know what's worth taking seriously, and what's a noisy diversion. We in the humanities
can help them make this distinction. The mark of an educated person should be the ability to see the differences between entertainment
and more nurturing, vital stuff. We need to help the public see how to make use of what great books offer. When people can
do as much, they'll be able to take plenty of harmless pleasure in pop.
Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media
will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet, and feel
that what they have to offer—words, mere words—must look shabby by comparison.
Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium
is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who and what we are. Then we can step
back and gain distance on what we've said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives
in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day's end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then
they can brood on what they've said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the chance for new beginnings. In
this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don't permit.
Our culture changes at an astounding velocity, so we must change or pay a price for remaining the same. Accordingly, the powers
of self-rendering and self-revision are centrally important. These processes occur best in language. Surely there is something
to be learned from the analysis of popular culture. But we as teachers can do better. We can strike to the central issues
that confront students and the public at large, rather than relegating ourselves to the edges. People who have taught themselves
how to live—what to be, what to do—from reading great works will not be overly susceptible to the culture indus try's latest
wares. They'll be able to sample them, or turn completely away—they'll have better things on their minds.