A manifesto
Literary studies is in the doldrums. Wave after wave of revisionism has washed over literature departments in the last few decades, bringing a mind-spinning miscellany of new methods and critical tools, from cultural materialism to critical race theory, deconstruction to disability studies, the new historicism to the new formalism. And yet, even as our ways of reading have become more searching and sophisticated, the stories we tell ourselves and others about what we do and why we do it have grown hesitant and faint-hearted.
We are now in the throes of what German philosophers like to call a “legitimation cri-
sis,” struggling to explain to ourselves and to the public at large why literary works are worth reading at all. Old-school beliefs that exposure to literature is a guaranteed path to moral improvement and cultural refinement have fallen by the wayside. In a cultural climate increasingly fixated on vocational training, economic efficiency, and the importance of the bottom line, scholars of literature are wondering how to make a case for the value of what we do. How do we come up with rationales for reading and talking about books without lapsing back into the canon worship of the past?
A puzzling paralysis over justification grips the discipline. That paralysis is often blamed on the current vogue for a style of reading known as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Taking its cue from Freud’s skepticism about his patients’ motives and his refusal to take their words at face value, this style of interpretation has gained significant traction since the 1970s. Drawing its energies from the political commitments of professors and students, it seeks to read against the grain and between the lines, to subject seemingly self-evident truths to merciless questioning and vigorous critique. Its strategy is one of relentless deciphering, of pressing below surface distractions to lay bare hidden meanings. A spirit of disenchantment hovers over the practice of suspicious reading, a desire to slay false gods by exposing art’s complicity with oppressive social arrangements.
This sensibility has inspired trenchant and often astute analyses of the political dimensions of art: clarifying, for example, how silent assumptions about gender shape the architecture of 19th-century novels or how modernism often imagines the non-Western world as thrillingly primitive and primeval, as the essence of the exotic and the erotic. But its ultimate effect, if left unchecked, is to render the work of art secondary or supernumerary, bereft of insights into the reality of social relations that must be supplied by the critic. The literary text is demoted to an object of knowledge rather than a source of knowledge, condemned to echo and to reaffirm conclusions that have already been thrashed out elsewhere. The critic draws her inspiration from Foucault or feminist theory and then reads texts to discover once again what she already knows.
To be sure, there is no shortage of theorists eager to save literature from such a fate by emphasizing its difference from the world and our other ways of understanding the world, and seizing on that difference as the measure of its value. To read literature in this way is to approach a text not as already known but as fundamentally unknowable. The critic does not mine Baudelaire’s poems for attitudes toward gender or signs of the author’s misogyny, but rather insists that the value of the poems lies in their refusal to be reduced to a content and in their power to elude or unsettle our conceptual frameworks. In this line of thought, what defines the literary work is its singularity, its otherness, its radical untranslatability — its resistance, in other words, to all plodding calculations of purpose and function.
Such arguments are frequently wheeled in to drum up renewed respect for Shakespeare or Gertrude Stein, but at what cost? Separating literature from everything around it, critics are unable to explain how it moves in and through the world. Highlighting literature’s uniqueness, they overlook its equally salient qualities of commonality and connectedness. Applauding the enigmatic qualities of works of art, they fail to do justice to how such works influence and inform our lives. Here, too, the critic serves as the final arbiter of textual meaning, lamenting the naïveté of those who look to books for knowledge or entertainment instead of reading literature “as literature.” Confined in an imaginary museum and protected from the grubby handprints and smears of everyday life, literature can only retain its significance, it seems, by declaring its impotence.
Let me offer a third vantage point, beyond ideological readings that reduce literature to its political functions and theological readings that prize literature only for its otherworldly and ineffable qualities. Such a perspective locates the value of literature (and by extension, of other art forms like film) in its everyday uses and intimate entanglement with our lives. To think clearly about this question demands that we reassess our ways of talking about “use.” Clearly, literature is not useful in the same way as a toolbox or a train schedule. Indeed, the word “useful” radiates a host of unhappy undertones, conjuring up images of drab practicality, of shapeless overalls and sensible shoes. We tend to equate the useful with what is practical, rational, and charmless, opposing utility to the lure of pleasure or surprise.
Instead of calling literature useful, let us call it “usable” — a word that better captures its chameleonlike ability to speak to diverse interests and desires, to morph into different roles and functions. Use is not always strategic or calculating, manipulative or grasping; it does not have to underwrite instrumental thinking or imply indifference to beauty or complex form. Reading a novel is not just a means of fulfilling certain needs but can open your eyes to needs you never knew you had. The pragmatic, in that sense, neither destroys nor excludes the poetic. To explore the uses of literature is to open up for investigation a vast terrain of expectations, emotions, beliefs, dreams, and interpretations. Many of us, for example, have had the experience of being utterly entranced by a novel, so completely engrossed in what we are reading that nothing else seems to matter. The meaning and value of this quasi-magical state of possession is poorly understood through our standard rationalist assumptions. What literary studies sorely needs, in other words, is a nonutilitarian understanding of use.
To talk about the uses of literature is to insist that those uses are plural and diverse. We need to surrender, once and for all, the quixotic pursuit of a single concept that can explain why literature matters. Libraries are bursting with books declaring that the role of literature really is to inspire aesthetic delight, or to encourage moral reflection, or to estrange us from the norms of Western culture, yet any half-alert reader can easily refute such claims by showing how they conflict with and contradict one another and by coming up with a myriad of counterexamples. Moreover, literary theorists are often reluctant to factor everyday uses of literature into their reflections, to take seriously such motives as the desire for knowledge, or pleasure, or escape. There is a long history of academic attachment toward an ideal of detachment, a belief that any of those everyday desires on the part of readers can only be debased or deluded. For the New Critics of the mid-20th century, for example, the only question worth asking of a poem was, “How does it work?” That question is an excellent one, to be sure, but it is hard to see why it should rule out all conversation about the cognitive or affective aspects of art. And the subsequent political turn in literary studies often intensified such impatience with everyday reading practices, which now stood for the power of invisible yet inescapable ideologies that only intellectuals could fully discern.
It is time for literary theorists to abandon such a vanguardist sensibility and the conviction that high theory can somehow redeem us from ordinariness and error. There is no reason why theory must be cast in the register of permanent suspicion, why rigorous thought requires us to go beyond the backs of ordinary readers in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or delinquent. In drawing a hard-and-fast line between academic reading and ordinary reading, moreover, we overlook a host of commonalities and affinities. Literary scholars are less theoretically correct than they imagine themselves to be; poses of skepticism and detachment intermingle with more mundane yet also more varied responses. Everyday motives for reading retain a shadowy presence among the footnotes and fortifications of academic prose, and scholarly arguments often continue to depend on assumptions they claim to refute.
Take, for example, the idea of recognition: the widespread belief that we see ourselves, and discover something about ourselves, in the act of reading a novel or watching a film. Literary theorists routinely pour scorn on that belief, insisting that any such gain in self-knowledge is illusory and that what looks like recognition is really another instance of misrecognition. Yet in their efforts to discredit everyday thinking, critics frequently underestimate the extent of their own entanglement in such thinking. It is a common experience for readers to be struck by the parallels between themselves and a fictional character, to see aspects of themselves in Jane Eyre or Stephen Dedalus. For professional critics, such acts of recognition reveal an unseemly confusion of literature and life, yet those same critics are attracted to literary qualities of ambiguity, alienation, and anomie that resonate with and reconfirm their ingrained mind-set of skepticism and disenchantment. Lay reading and academic reading differ, to be sure, in their vocabularies and procedures, but both hinge on processes of interpretation that connect the unfamiliar to the already known.
If recognition is one recurring element of reader response, there are many others: the sense of being utterly absorbed by a work of fiction; the use of literature as an orientation device to help make sense of the social world; the uncanny, unnerving, pleasure-pain of aesthetic shock. We have barely begun to understand the modes of engagement that bind us to the texts we read and that can inspire fanlike fervor, as well as more sober and reflective forms of appreciation.
Here, to my surprise, I have found inspiration in phenomenology, a way of philosophizing about the nature of first-person experience that is often dismissed as retrograde or old hat by contemporary theorists. My interest is less in the specific arguments of early-20th-century philosophers like Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty than in the style of thought their work makes possible. What draws me to phenomenology is its intense curiosity about structures of thought, perception, and emotion that are often so close to us as to be invisible. Its aim is to describe rather than prescribe, to be patient rather than impatient, to look rather than overlook, allowing us to see for the first time what we thought we already knew. The point is not to celebrate the self or to hail it as a source of truth or authenticity — phenomenology is not narcissism or therapy, nor a warrant for smug self-absorption — but to investigate the many-sided structures of ordinary experience in all their baffling complexity. Such an approach invites us to explore the relations between form and feeling and to delve into the mysteries of our many-sided attachments to texts.
We need to be careful, of course, not to reinstate the myth of a common reader who turns out to be the spitting image of a Yale critic. Aesthetic experience is shaped by salient and often sobering differences of education, class, and culture. People who read books do not read the same books and do not read them the same way. To build better bridges between literary theory and common sense is not to deny the differences between them, nor is it to minimize the genuine merits of the eccentric, the esoteric, or the obscure. It is to propose that our efforts to explain why novels or poems or films matter cannot afford to discard the passions and prejudices, the infatuations and attachments, that pervade both scholarly and popular reading. To craft more searching and more sympathetic accounts of such attachments is not to relinquish theory, but to give it a much needed shot in the arm.
Rita Felski is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her book Uses of Literature was published by Blackwell earlier this year.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 17, Page B7