The Use of Literature

Recently I bumped into an old friend, a colleague from the college English department in which I taught for many years. She had news. The department, it seems, has just finished revising its two-semester freshman sequence, a pair of courses that has always been the department’s bread and butter, as it is required of all students. The thrust of the new revision was to remove all the literature from the second semester, so that students and teachers could concentrate on just writing.

So I’m like, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. In my own day, that sequence was revised every few years, I seem to remember; and the aim of the revisions was always to establish English 1002 as more clearly and unquestionably a course about teaching students to write — not about literary appreciation, which fell under increasing suspicion of being a mere frill. The course went from Introduction to Literature at one point, to a brief stint as (ugh!) Writing About Literature, to Literature and Composition. This latest redaction renders it as “ENG 1002: Composition II: Argument & Critical Inquiry,” combining a muscular emphasis on debate and polemic with an odd ambition to bring back the ampersand. Here, as in my day, the feeling seems to be that literature — now not so much as mentioned —  is more a hobby of the professor’s than anything that really benefits the student. It needs to be fended off, so that students can get what they really need from their balky teachers, solid writing instruction, not some elitist mumbo-jumbo about iambic pentameter or Virginia Woolf or whatever. When the hungry sheep look up, they must be fed.

 

But why has the exorcism had to be performed so often? It seems that Literature keeps creeping back in, like kudzu.

Historians of the discipline, like Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, tell us that the dichotomy of reading versus writing, literature versus composition, appreciation versus literacy, has always been there. English teachers — and before them Classicists, and before even them priests and monks and ministers — have always liked best to think of themselves as expert guides to a body of more or less sacred writings: adepts and exegetes, keepers of the flame; priests, really, but too timid or shrewd to say so. We have always been happy to let our courses be workshops on needed skills, but also wanted them to be quests for wisdom, hot in pursuit of that mysterious truth that lives (we feel sure) in the great texts.

The fallback position, though, has always been writing rather than reading, Rhetoric rather than Literature. When the dean or the parish or the parents demanded to know where the money was going , the teacher could always justify his modest salary by stressing his role as a writing instructor. People in authority, it seems, have always been eager to have teachers take on the scut-work of grading student papers, asking rather few questions about what the process really entails. Partly due to such inattention, teachers have won permission to bring some literature into the course or minor or major, eagerly explaining that it will make the students, not just better writers, but better people, partaking as it does of that mysterious higher wisdom the teacher has glimpsed here and there in her own reading. By that point in the conversation, though, the dean has already quit listening, turning to one side and muttering,  “Yes. Well. Just make sure they can write a decent theme. With punctuation, please.”

In the old days it was much easier to make the higher-wisdom argument for literature. Authorities from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson adhered to much the same formula, according to which literature, dulce et utile, delivered nuggets of moral instruction nicely sugar-coated with “pleasure.”  No mystery about what the higher wisdom was: just standard everyday Virtue, tarted up a bit by the sales department. There will always be plenty of people who believe exactly this, and their ranks will always include most college deans and high school principals. But for the last two centuries or so, teachers have known better;  they have understood the grave deficiency of didactic moralism — message-hunting — as an approach to literature or any art. You don’t need Hamlet, after all, to teach you that procrastination is bad; you don’t need Lear to teach you to file a will before you get dotty. To Kill a Mockingbird may teach you not to be a racist, but the better bet, if you already are a racist, is that it will only teach you to hide the fact. From about the Romantic era on, it has been precisely the tendency of art to defy “bourgeois morality” and herd thinking that fans and critics have most celebrated. The job of the poem is to transcend and confound ordinary understanding, not to teach trite Sunday school lessons.  

But all this leaves would-be Lit teachers in an untenable position. We have to go on insisting that the higher wisdom is there, by cracky, but that it is ineffable and mysterious, that it decisively resists paraphrase into anything obviously true or useful. This argument goes over badly at PTA meetings.

So what about the more purely practical argument, that literature makes students better writers on the basic, nuts-and-bolts level? Isn’t the point of Hamlet, finally, that it enhances students’ grasp of English and their ultimate fluency? Gets into their bloodstream and nourishes their own rhetorical and linguistic powers? There is some truth here. But Composition specialists — those annoying puritans, the dean’s and parents’ fifth column inside the discipline itself — have done studies and proved, what seems pretty obvious anyway, that a person can become an excellent writer without ever reading Homer or Shakespeare.  If Just Writing is the criterion, the kids don’t really need all that transcribed ululation from the Globe. What they do need is immersion in prose, on almost any topic under the sun, more like that which you are actually asking them to produce.

So do we relinquish Literature, at least at the freshman level? Do we evacuate in haste from unproved and poorly founded (or outright paradoxical) claims to moral authority? I confess to being an unreconstructed, unrepentant advocate of literature — of something called literature — at the freshman level and everywhere else. Now, as during my own decades as a mostly underperforming college teacher, I subscribe to a churlish doctrine that might be dubbed Insane Holism. No paraphrase can do justice to IH, but its main tenets are more or less as follows:

·         Literature, in some loose expanded sense, is really part of the language, so that in studying the one, you naturally and inescapably end up studying the other, and might as well not fight it. “Teaching English” is really all one thing: the grammar, the punctuation, the lexicon, the three-part essays, the Great Works and the less-great, the popular culture, the brainstorming, the creative writing workshops, the mythological references, the confusion over the apostrophe, the linguistics course with its graphs and data. Affirm all of it together. You will never cover it all, but that itself is the beauty part.

·         There are many clever tricks, well known to composition teachers, that can unlock the students’ latent writing potential, bringing about impressive short-term improvements in the essays. Sooner or later, though, you confront the need to increase the potential itself. You are never going to get smart essays out of stupid students. So at some point you have to sit back patiently and await the outcome of long-term intellectual developments in key areas: general knowledge, judgment, vocabulary, critical thinking.

·         Speaking of general knowledge, studying literature can be an excellent way to get it. One benefit of reading and arguing about Hamlet is the way you pick up tangential lore about all sorts of things: Elizabethan sanitary practices, the code duello, the Viking invasions, psychoanalysis, theories of monarchy, and on and on. Dilettantism has its dangers, of course. But a good Lit teacher is really, like Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus, a professor of Things-In-General.

·         All writing is creative writing. Accept this fact and honor it. Even that inventory report for your boss does not get done until the inner voices speak.

·         A big part of what makes literature literature, and important, is its cultural currency. It is important to know because so many other people know it, even if its claim is finally, like the claim of a native language, quite arbitrary. It provides a frame of reference and a shared fund of vicarious experience that grounds, sharpens, energizes, and stabilizes communication. (Linguists have theorized that Shakespeare, all by himself, substantially slowed the pace of language change in English after 1600.) The King James Bible, classical mythology, and Shakespeare remain the best examples of writings that have virtually fused with the language, and are still the best bets for the future. Beyond that, what will retain cultural currency past 2025 or 2035, say, in the world for which we are preparing our students, is anyone’s guess and a thing that needs to be argued about. Lord knows that English departments everywhere have revised and expanded the canon of what counts as literature, again and again during recent decades. Eventually a purge of membership rolls may be in order (drop Poe!), but for now, canon wars are a healthy thing. What matters is not the answers arrived at but the debate itself.

·         On the same head: what finally matters most is not that the student know Hamlet specifically, but that she have an intense, critical, well-mediated encounter, helped by a prof who is passionate and learned and a little crazy, with some great art. Readily generalized, such experiences really do trickle down into the rest of one’s intellectual life, in all sorts of ways.

Well, you get my drift: I am all-in for a content-rich, somewhat reading-centered, chaotic, intuitive, adventurous, scattershot, and pretty old-fashioned approach to English Composition and every other English class. Do not expect the teachers to be technicians, busily installing essay-production software into freshman brains, getting it done on a schedule that pleases the higher-ups. Let them go on being interesting, creative, cranky people, with lots of strange incidental knowledge, lots of idiosyncratic enthusiasms that they love to share. Recognize that the goal of freshman comp is finally the same as the goal of education in its entirety: the building of a smarter, more knowledgeable, fuller, wiser, stranger student. It is not something that can be hurried, and you will never get there at all if you keep on narrowing and dumbing down your courses in fits of well-meaning but misguided practicality. Nor if you keep on letting financial and vocational anxiety leach out the very elements that students and teachers love most.