At Large and At Small Page 7
Most later writers, including Plutarch, aligned themselves with Diodorus, perhaps believing (as do I) that a single bed for all comers was better suited to Procrustes’ one-size-fits-all philosophy. I like to think, in fact, that the host was the only man who was exactly the right size for his bed, and that his unorthodox etiquette was a way of enforcing a solipsistic conformity: It fits me; therefore everyone should fit it.
The Procrustean bed, Diodorus model, suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There’s just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.
By the Culture Wars, I mean that peculiar development of the last two decades or so that takes culture—a multidimensional thing if there ever was one—and attempts to compress it to a skinny little line running from left to right. No matter how oddly shaped a book or a play or a poem is—no matter how idiosyncratic, how ambivalent, how anarchic, how complicated, how big, how messy—it’s just got to fit that Procrustean bed. So out comes the handsaw, and whop! With a few quick strokes, it’s cut down to size and, as a kind of casual side effect, murdered.
Both armies in the Culture Wars are eager to recruit new soldiers for this limb-attenuation campaign. Here’s how you enlist. Without giving it much thought, you toe the party line—once. You think you’ve signed your name to a single page, but then you discover that a thousand pages of carbon paper lie underneath, transferring your signature with perfect fidelity to a thousand different documents. With your collusion, cultural politics have become, in the words of the eighteenth-century poet David Mallet, a
Tyrant! more cruel than Procrustes old;
Who, to his iron-bed, by torture fits,
Their nobler part, the souls of suffering wits.
You have lost your right to judge literary works on a case-by-case basis, and those works have lost whatever nuances were lodged in their overhanging periphery.
Reader, cast down your handsaw! You need not become a conscientious objector—there are plenty of ideas worth shedding blood for—but if in every battle you look around and see the same people fighting alongside you, you should ask yourself whether you are demonstrating an admirable constancy or a Procrustean intransigence. I do not suggest that the attractions of a single set of marching orders are easy to resist. It is far more work to start from scratch every time you open a book than to let someone else make up your mind before you read the first word. But if you start hacking the toes off your culture, you will soon look down and find that your own toes—those humble appendages, given to blisters and bunions and ingrown nails, yet so essential to your balance—are unaccountably missing.
There are dozens of questions currently provoking skirmishes in the Culture Wars. I propose to discuss four elementary ones, all concerning the literary canon. I do not expect everyone to agree with me, but I do hope to show that it is possible for a single person to entertain some ostensibly liberal views and some ostensibly conservative views and some utterly ambivalent views, and that such inconsistency can have a wonderfully dulling effect on the blade of Procrustes’ handsaw.
Should we read great books because of their literary value or because they provide moral lessons—that is, because they teach us how to live?
When David Denby returned to Columbia at the age of forty-eight to audit two Western civilization courses he had originally taken three decades earlier, his literature professor told the students on the first day of class, “You’re here for very selfish reasons. You’re here to build a self.” That’s a pretty clear summary of the moral-lesson school.
Here’s Hannah Arendt: “The trouble with the educated philistine was not that he read the classics, but that he did so prompted by the ulterior motive of self-perfection, remaining quite unaware of the fact that Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more important things than how to educate himself.” That’s a pretty clear summary of the literary school.
My view is that being forced to choose between the two is a senseless act of sadomasochism that injures both reader and book. College students—over whose souls most of the goriest battles in the Culture Wars are fought—are, by virtue of their youth, deeply engrossed in character building. Is it wrong to enlist the help of Shakespeare and Plato in this difficult task? But if that’s all that young readers do, then narcissism (Should I emulate Tybalt or Mercutio? If I liberate my soul from dependence on my body, as the Phaedo suggests, can I still have sex with Tiffany?) trumps aesthetics, and great books are reduced, by a process that trims away all the most beautiful parts, to self-help manuals.
These days, it is mostly the people who consider themselves to be on the cultural left who ally themselves with the self-builders, and mostly those on the right who accuse the self-builders of shallow egotism. This just shows how fickle the whole right-to-left spectrum is, for the self-building position used to be considered conservative. It was Matthew Arnold, that well-known revolutionary firebrand, who wrote “that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,—to the question: How to live.” Whatever critical cycle we happen to have been born into, reading with only one motive in mind seems unnecessarily restrictive. However, to those who insist on a single path, I would recommend self-building. They will miss a great deal, but they will miss even more if their reading is a disembodied intellectual experience that has been carefully divorced from their own lives.
People who have concentrated on self-building haven’t turned out so badly. Consider the example of Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s running mate, whose favorite book was the Enchiridion of Epictetus. Judging from Stockdale’s incoherence in the 1992 vice-presidential debate, I think it’s fair to say that he didn’t learn much about literary style from Epictetus. However, he did learn something about Arnold’s “powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.”
Stockdale first read the Enchiridion at the age of thirty-eight, when the navy sent him to Stanford to study international relations, and Philip Rhinelander, the dean of humanities and sciences, invited him to take his philosophy course. Stockdale did so, received supplementary tutoring from Rhinelander, and found himself drawn to the Stoics. Rhinelander mentioned that Frederick the Great had always brought a copy of the Enchiridion on his military campaigns, so when Stockdale was sent to Vietnam, he took along the copy his professor had given him during their last meeting. In September of 1966, Stockdale’s plane was hit by antiaircraft fire over North Vietnam, and as he was descending by parachute, knowing he was about to become a prisoner of war, he said to himself, “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.” I would venture a guess that this is the first time a parachutist has thought about first-century Stoic philosophy on the way down. Stockdale didn’t have his copy of the Enchiridion with him, but he hardly needed to, since by that time he had the book virtually memorized.
Epictetus, born as a slave in Phrygia and sold to Nero’s secretary, is said to have once murmured quietly to his master, who was twisting his leg, “You will break it.” When the leg broke, he said with a smile, “Did I not tell you that you would do so?” Stockdale contemplated this incident during seven years as a prisoner of war, four of which were spent in solitary confinement and two in leg irons. He also pondered the following passages, among others:
Work, therefore, to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which
are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to your ability to choose, unless that is your choice. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose.
Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Upon all occasions we ought to have these [words of Socrates] ready at hand:… “O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be. Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed, but hurt me they cannot.”
It was in this way that, through more than fifteen episodes of torture, Stockdale was able to preserve the self that Epictetus had helped him build. When he was released by Hanoi in 1973, he was lame, just as Epictetus was when he was released from slavery in Rome, but, like his exemplar, he believed that his external suffering had failed to destroy his internal sense of freedom. I can think of worse ways to use literature.
Should the life of the writer affect our valuation of the work? In other words, if the writer was a stinker, do we boot the book out of the canon? Or, as The New York Times Magazine put it in an article about Herman Melville, “Forget the whale. The big question is: Did he beat his wife?”
No one will ever be certain, but according to family rumors, long suppressed by scholars who wished to protect his reputation, Melville chased his wife, Elizabeth, around the table with a carving knife and once, when drunk, pushed her down the back stairs. At the very least, he made her so miserable that, in 1867, her family made abortive plans to help her escape her marriage via a feigned kidnapping. Even Hershel Parker, Melville’s most devoted biographer, admitted to Philip Weiss, the author of the Times article, “One of the great-grandchildren told me a story that Melville came home once with a bag of oranges and ate them by himself in front of his daughter.” That’s not the sort of crime that lands a man in jail, but Melville’s daughter was hungry, and after you hear a few stories like that, it is no longer possible to think of Melville as someone you’d like to invite to supper.
But should we forget the whale? That is, if Melville did push Lizzie down the stairs, should the stock of Moby-Dick experience a parallel plummet? In similar fashion, we now know that Byron committed incest and pedophilia, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were anti-Semites, and Philip Larkin was a more democratic sort of bigot (he hated almost everybody). Should their poetry be permanently tainted by their character deficiencies?
These questions seem to me to be intertwined with the question of whether we should read great books for their literary merit or for the purpose of self-building, and to provide a compelling argument for doing both. Those who believe that the purpose of literature is primarily moral are going to run into trouble if the book they’ve been using as a guide to living turns out to have been written by someone who beat his wife. I’m sure it mattered to James Stockdale that Epictetus was an exemplary man—that he is said to have lived by choice in a small hut furnished with only a pallet and a lamp, that he adopted a child who would otherwise have been left to die. It would have been acutely disturbing to find out, for example, that Epictetus had abused that child.
Unsurprisingly, it is the self-builders who tend to place a great deal of emphasis on biography and who vote to expel someone from the canon if he or she turns out to have been an unsavory character. But if you believe, as I do, that great literature can be written by bad people, then your library can remain intact, no matter how much respect you lose for the authors as individuals.
Some readers feel that the life is irrelevant and only the work counts. A friend schooled in the New Criticism recently wrote me: “As a critic I was trained to ignore the biography of the author. We figured he knew what he was doing; it was our job to figure it out. To slide into biographical details was to admit a lack of critical perception. Let the work stand for the man.” I disagree. For instance, if you know that Melville was a terrible husband, you may be able to make more sense of the sealed-off, seabound world of Moby-Dick, where everybody was male, even the whale. And even if there are no themes in the work that resonate with the life, great writers are not machines that produce, out of nothingness, a series of words that happen to be more perfect than other people’s words; they are flawed mortals, often imprudent and uncivil, who are so large (that’s what greatness is: size) that every part of them deserves to be understood.
Should a book be demoted if its plot fails to meet standards of behavior that have changed since it was written?
I once read a letter to The New York Times Book Review in which Sharon Uemura Ronholt of Stockton, California, berated Richard Jenkyns for his review of Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey. She wrote, “Nowhere in his review does Mr. Jenkyns draw critical attention to the fact that Homer’s world is that of a quintessential male fantasy and may not meet with universal approbation: Homer’s hero commits adultery with various gorgeous, high-class women, and the construction of the plot (his desire to depart for ‘home’) legitimizes his callous abandonment of his ever-changing women lovers.” Ms. Ronholt therefore concluded that it was naïve and, as she termed it, “pretheoretical” to accept the Odyssey as “a ‘timeless’ Great Book.”
Sharon Uemura Ronholt put her finger on the paradox that women, or indeed anyone who is currently better off than he or she would have been in another century or another place, will always feel when reading works from other times or cultures. But she didn’t see it as a paradox, a word that suggests ambivalence. She saw it as an unambiguous black mark against the Odyssey.
Whenever I read Homer, I see ample evidence that women were treated abominably in ancient Greece, and I am very thankful that I live now and not then. In fact, I would rather pay a visit to Procrustes than marry any of Homer’s heroes. Fortunately, none of them is asking me. The invitation Homer offers me is a far broader one: to enter a world that was very different from ours, but that in its own “pre theoretical” way possessed nobility and beauty. If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer’s sexual politics, I’d pull the no lever strenuously. I am therefore very glad that the Odyssey is a poem, not a referendum.
I would guess that Ms. Ronholt doesn’t much like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, either. If you’re on the cultural right these days, you’re supposed to think it’s a masterpiece—the book from which, as Ernest Hemingway said, all modern American literature has come. (Of course, if you were on the cultural right a century ago, you would probably have disliked the book and considered its author—a muckraker who had uncovered political corruption in San Francisco and would later denounce King Leopold’s regime in the Congo—an untrustworthy radical. A month after publication, Huckleberry Finn was banished from the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, on the ground that it was “trash and suitable only for the slums.”)
If you’re on the cultural left today, you’re supposed to think that Huckleberry Finn should be expunged from the reading lists of America’s high schools, partly because it contains the word nigger and partly because nineteenth-century progressives don’t sound like late-twentieth-century progressives. In a controversial 1996 article in Harper’s called “Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.” According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.
“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)
And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few mutterings from her
Huck about how many slaveholders’ houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she could keep writing (and Huck could keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.
I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)
What should you do when a work’s language excludes you? If the very words leave you on the sidelines—because, for instance, they are addressed to men and you are a woman—should you stick out your tongue and say, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I reject you, too”?
Consider, for example, “The American Scholar,” the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa oration that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered on August 31, 1837, in the Brattle Street Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He spoke for an hour and a quarter on the necessity of emancipating America’s intellectual tradition from “the sere remains of foreign harvests.” The audience included Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Edward Everett Hale, and plenty of famous people who had only two names. Not everyone was impressed. Hale wrote in his diary that Emerson was “half-crazy” and that his speech was “not very good and very transcendental.” But Lowell called the event “a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration,” and Holmes later referred to the oration as “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” When Thomas Carlyle was sent a copy, he wrote to Emerson, “I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling thro’ my heart; I said to my wife ‘There, woman!’ She read; and returned and charges me to return for answer, ‘that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent.’ My brave Emerson!”