To a certain kind of mind, few things are quite so pleasurable as literary interpretation. To slip into a literary work as into a pool, to engage in a spirit of collaboration or even co-creation with another mind that struggled to express through this layered, interwoven work of the imagination something we must now struggle to understand; to root around, making connections, grasping implications, reworking and rearranging — this goes with that, that qualifies this — in an effort to make explicit and clear and full what had been implicit, coded, or indirect; to filter the text through your own experience and sensibility; to feel that nobody has ever seen the matter in this way and yet to sense the ghostly but benign presence of other readers who are doing the same thing; to refashion the past and deliver it, clarified and unblocked, to the present — all this is to experience at once a sense of weightlessness, of a liberating distance from oneself and the here and now, and an exhilarating feeling of power.
That feeling led me, at the end of the 1960s, to graduate school, where, I thought, I would become credentialed in this pastime and then employed so I could teach others to experience the same pleasure I did in the presence of great literature. That plan sounded exciting to me, but I would not have argued with anyone who found it an irresponsible way to spend one’s life, unconnected to the deeper issues of human existence, the advancement of knowledge, or the welfare of the nation. If someone had asked me why the study of literature should be considered important or worthy, or had demanded to know what larger purpose it served, I would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. This may have been why none of my teachers or professors at any level ever raised such questions.
And yet a nested series of half-articulated presumptions about American education circulating in the atmosphere provided an implicit rationale: that the best and truest education was a liberal education, that the humanities represented the cultural anchor and moral core of the curriculum, that English was the central discipline of the humanities, and that interpretation was the proper business of literary study. Somehow all this had been settled.
This package of essays from The Chronicle Review considers what’s gone wrong, and what colleges can do to strengthen our democracy.
I never really understood the contribution that literary study was supposed to make. Dominated as it had been for well over a generation by the New Criticism, which explicitly banned any political, social, or moral arguments about literature in favor of a rigorous focus on the text itself, literary study actually seemed to refuse any kind of worldly importance that might be attributed to it, or even to literature. Reading in the New Critical method, one engaged with texts, not with authors or their historical or other contexts. How does a close technical study of the machinery of a poem — and for the New Criticism it was poetry that defined literature — advance any larger project?
It was many years before I discovered that in their less doctrinaire pronouncements, virtually all the leading New Critics acknowledged that their limited approach was preliminary, intended to be gathered in the fullness of time into a more holistic understanding of the work in which the author and the historical and other contexts would be taken into account. Explicating a Wordsworth poem, Cleanth Brooks, for example, begins by describing it as “an independent poetic structure” but concludes his analysis by saying that the “Immortality” ode is best understood “if we see that what Wordsworth wanted to say demanded his use of paradox.”
Such concessions were, however, never stressed and were often only implied. One of the consequences of this textual focus was that when, around 1970, essays by French theorists began to appear with such titles as “What Is an Author?” and “The Death of the Author,” as well as an avalanche of other works in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy proclaiming the “end of Man,” many American literature professors found them empowering and familiar rather than debilitating and hostile, because the New Criticism had already accustomed scholars to think of works without authors. English became the institutional sponsor of Continental theory, the most advanced and influential thinkers in the discipline renouncing any connection between literary study and a larger American system of education.
Over the next 15 years, the theory revolution very largely succeeded in discrediting or at least rendering unfashionable that foundation of literary interpretation, the intending author, who — or rather, which — was described as an ideological phantom, the ghost of an outdated and provincial “humanism” whose dominance in the American academy had left literary study flailing in the backwash of science. Leading figures in the “sciences humaines,” a rough French equivalent of the humanities in America that included anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and psychology, converged on a general critique not only of the author but also of other concepts on which interpretation depended, including the notion that truth is the goal of understanding. By the mid-1980s, the discipline I had entered a decade earlier had been profoundly altered. The nature and role of literary analysis had been transformed from an intellectually modest and culturally conservative activity into an ambitious, cosmopolitan undertaking dominated by a spirit of soi-disant radicalism. English had become a site of sophisticated self-subversion dominated by linguistics, philosophy, and various forms of theory. Interpretation lay in ruins.
De Tocqueville was struck by the fact that in America, ‘everyone is more or less called upon to give an opinion of state affairs.’
Wrenched from the sheltering arms of humanism, the humanities and English in particular were now exposed to another onslaught, this time on the domestic front. In the “culture wars” of the 1990s, English was accused of giving sanctuary to foreign adversaries, betraying the nation, and cultivating a sneering condescension to the idea of American exceptionalism. Conservative pundits found the postmodernist position on the uncontrollable proliferation of meaning immensely irritating and perverse, and the new interest in other cultures and countries anti-patriotic, and they said so at length. Funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities was cut drastically, and the phrase “political correctness” entered the popular lexicon of derision.
So within two decades after I left graduate school, the discipline I had embraced out of a simple desire for perpetual pleasure had been essentially laid waste twice, by different armies. But in the fog of war, something had become quite clear: Strong ligatures bound the discipline of English to the idea of America. What happened in English did not stay in English but ramified. Despite violent disagreement about how the connection between the discipline and the nation might be realized, everyone seemed to agree that what English teachers did, and especially what they thought about interpretation, had political and cultural implications.
Today those debates have an almost touchingly miniature quality, for the controversies swirling around education, and higher education in particular, now concern fundamental social issues: the accelerating cost of education, the relation of education to future employment, the notion that education serves a public interest and should be publicly supported, and the premise that the goal of education is to ensure equal opportunity. But historically the connection between interpretation and the idea of America is quite direct.
The first English arrivals in the New World were considered dangerous heretics, having been thrown out of England because of their anti-ecclesiastical belief that each person should read and interpret the Bible for him- or herself. That conviction survived the eclipse of Puritanism and informed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, texts whose iconic status in the new nation recalled that of the Bible in the religious settlements of the 17th century. The new nation could claim to be, in John Adams’s words, “a government of laws and not of men” because of the extraordinary authority granted to these fixed and virtually sacrosanct texts.
The Constitution was deliberately written in simple language so that every citizen could understand it without special knowledge or training. In countries not bound by a constitution, judges could refer to precedent and general principles, but in the United States, judges, especially those who sat on the Supreme Court, had to decide cases based on interpretations of the possible meaning of texts in contexts far removed from the original. Indeed, in principle everyone had to be a competent speculative interpreter of the constitutional text just in order to understand the law of the land. Interpretive method had political implications.
From the very beginning, the “conservative” position focused on the words of the text and regarded any merely personal construction of the meaning of those words as a dubious invention. The late Justice Antonin Scalia often referred to the “original public meaning” of the constitutional text; more restrictive “originalist” approaches hold that the Constitution’s meaning was fixed by the original understanding of the framers’ document itself, or, most radically, that the text itself is the only legitimate evidence for determining its meaning.
None of those attempts to determine objective guardrails has, however, been universally persuasive, with the result that the supposedly bright line between the “conservative” position and the more liberal or progressive insistence on seeing the Constitution as a “living document,” available for reinterpretation in light of present circumstances, fades on examination. The simple phrases of the Constitution have continued to provoke disagreement and contention, licensing what some call an “agonistic” politics in which interpretive opinions and the forces they reflect clash endlessly, with no possibility of final resolution. The fixed text of the founding documents creates a mirage, suggesting that disputes can be resolved beyond cavil if we just read the simple words; but the facts that the text must be interpreted, that interpretation must identify the animating intention, and that intention can never be finally determined have the effect of ensuring that the oasis of certainty — like the Declaration’s “happiness” and the Constitution’s “perfect union” — will be pursued but never reached.
If people did not learn the ‘rules of interpretation,’ opinion would degenerate into a plague of fake news.
One school of contemporary thought argues, in fact, that the Constitution should be seen as a “tragic” document that binds us to the dead past, locking in the privileges of the already privileged and condemning us to endless disagreement. But the historical record tells a more complicated and less tragic story. Consider in this context the example of Frederick Douglass. When he began his career as a public speaker, most abolitionists took the position that the Constitution was a slave document written by slaveowners and could not command the allegiance of principled people. Douglass, a former slave, at first agreed with his friends and allies. But he quickly realized that this position put abolitionists on the wrong side of the law, powerless to appeal to the legal system for support. And so, in a startling break, he began to argue the opposite case: that the Constitution was, as he put it, a “glorious liberty document,” whose abolitionist intentions could be inferred not only from the general character of the American polity that had been built on its basis, but also from the negative fact that the words “slave,” “slavery,” and “slaveholding” were nowhere mentioned in it.
We think of Douglass today as a man of immense conviction and moral stature who fearlessly spoke truth to power. That is certainly the case, but the lever of Douglass’s arguments was not rage against injustice but what he described in one of the quieter passages in his famous 1852 diatribe “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” as:
certain rules of interpretation for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I and all of us can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. … I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the Constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one.
The moral case was built on a hermeneutic case: Before people could accept his interpretation, he had to persuade them that any citizen, even a former slave, was entitled to have an interpretation. By 1860, Douglass was hardening his position to the point where he was claiming that his view was not an interpretation at all, but a simple reading of “a written instrument full and complete in itself.” “I am,” he declared, “for strict construction.”
It is difficult to overstate the audacity and ingenuity of Douglass’s embrace of this phrase, which was then as now the slogan of reaction. Seizing on the Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal — which most people took to be a mere piece of rhetoric not to be taken literally — Douglass heartily congratulates the framers on their enlightened views and steps forward to claim his share.
Douglass’s argument about the validity of the citizen’s interpretation, or “opinion,” of the Constitution brings into sudden prominence the reference in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence to the desire of the colonists to declare their intentions to the world out of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” That phrase, which seems an inconsequential element in that crucial sentence, actually contains an assertion that would prove to be central to the Revolution: that freedom was marked by the right to one’s own opinion. The Declaration submits its case to the judgment of free people whose uncoerced opinion it solicits, with the implication that opinion was the sign and testament of freedom itself.
The importance of opinion in our Constitutional democracy has only become clearer with the passage of time. De Tocqueville was struck by the fact that in America, “everyone is more or less called upon to give an opinion of state affairs.” Social conflict often takes the form of differences of interpretative opinion, sometimes with tragic dimensions: Lincoln described the Civil War, for example, as an interpretive conflict over the meaning of the words “all men are created equal.” In a nation of laws, differences of opinion are more often adjudicated in courts, but even there, opinion rules. While judges often insist that they are, as Chief Justice John Roberts said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate, merely calling “balls and strikes,” the fact that the decisions of the court are called opinions indicates that the element of interpretive judgment, which must appeal to some kind of intentionality governing the text, can never be eliminated. The debatability of opinions marks a deeper freedom of thought that is central to democracy. Indeed, one of the most committed advocates of the American Revolution, Hannah Arendt, argued that the “right to opinion” was the very foundation of the “right to have rights.”
From the beginning of the nation, various groups have sought redress of grievances, equal protection, or basic rights by appealing to some previously unstressed, unacknowledged, or implicit meaning of the Constitutional text that, they claim, was present all along but unrecognized, like shapes in clouds or figures in blotches on the wall. Not only slaves but also women, workers, gun-rights advocates, political interest groups, religious groups, abortion opponents, and other aggrieved parties have come before the courts to try to persuade judges to see what they see. Their occasional success proves that the Constitution is as flexible as it is unchanging, and that the necessity of interpretation ensures its adaptability to the needs of the moment.
As our history has demonstrated, a nation governed by opinion runs certain risks. De Tocqueville saw in the immense political and social force of opinion (which he called “the mistress of the world”) in the new nation the source both of a “courtier spirit” of conformism and of a tropism toward tyranny and demagogy. If opinion could not transcend itself through discipline and good faith, if people did not learn what Douglass called the “rules of interpretation,” opinion would degenerate into an unsorted mass of groundless assertions, speculations, rumors — a plague of fake news. If the country was to realize its promise, opinion had to be disciplined.
The American educational system is in large measure a response to this imperative to protect society from wild gusts of irresponsible opinion. The need to educate not just the small number of people who would become professionals but the entire citizenry, and to educate them precisely in citizenship, fell to the schools. The end of World War II provided a moment of consensus, when both private and public entities committed not just to vague goals but to a system of education that would announce to a world devastated by war how a free and prosperous society educated its people. The system was to be universal (educating everyone, with universal access to higher education for those who wished it), general (educating not for a skill or a profession but for life), and liberal (exposing students to a range of disciplines, each studied, as the phrase went, “for its own sake”). The concept of a liberal education meant that the disciplines had to be organized in a way that would clarify their differences. Hence the now-familiar categories: the natural sciences and mathematics specialized in nonhuman reality, the social sciences in how people behaved, and the relatively new category of the humanities in cultural knowledge (vitally important in a nation of immigrants) and in the meaning and value of things.
It was in this context that English was advanced as the core discipline of the entire system, and especially of higher education, the one in which the development of interpretive skills was at the center of the discipline. The New Criticism was not developed as part of a national agenda for mass education, but it was well suited to the task. The New Critical emphasis on poems not authors echoed Adams’s “laws not men” dictum, and the insistence on a quasi-technical analysis before any more holistic account could be ventured mirrored the longstanding American judicial reluctance to add to or alter the text through interpretive guesswork. Equally important, however, were the New Critical concessions to the author, which registered an “American” understanding that words are not simply formal units of meaning and must be understood as human expressions, with intention — however that ambiguous term is construed — providing the key to understanding.
All academic disciplines evolve, and in the past 50 years English has undergone more upheaval than most. Grounded in the study of literature, English is a discipline always in search of itself, as open to external influences as literature is to the world at large. For that reason, English has a special relationship to the idea of America, which might be described as a “universal” country always in search of itself. At a time when English could use some friends, this relationship, long dormant, might be reactivated today by a creative reimagining of the discipline.
At the graduate level, where research is conducted and new knowledge produced, English may and should pursue whatever projects seem most productive, interesting, or new. Darwinian literary studies, neuroaesthetics, theory-of-mind approaches, technology-assisted data mining, various integrations of literature with other materials and literary scholarship with other disciplines — all these and more are properly available to the imaginative and curious scholar, along with the historical and formal approaches that have long been the discipline’s bread and butter. But there has always been a greater division between the research and the pedagogical dimensions of literary study than in most other disciplines, and that distinction should be recognized and exploited.
At the undergraduate level, many students are encountering literature for perhaps the first and perhaps the last time in their lives. The best thing they could gain from this encounter is a sense of the deep, rich, empowering pleasure of the literary experience, a sense that might keep them returning to the well for the rest of their lives.
The sources of this pleasure are often considered by research-oriented professors to be theoretically naïve or unsophisticated. The tendency of the untrained reader to lose him- or herself in an imagined world, to identify with characters, to pay meandering or intermittent attention, to fantasize, to judge, to take an unembarrassed and personal delight in the surprising or the felicitous — all those are integral to the literary experience but inconsistent with the advanced discourse of the discipline.
Interpretation has been thrown into this basket of the professionally deplorable. As a source of sometimes naïve pleasure, interpretation has something in common with the others, but it has, in addition, a more serious social value. Interpretation — by which I mean the effort to divine the author’s meaning through a close study of the text and disciplined and informed speculation about context — represents the highest calling and most refined form of the everyday citizen’s activity of opinion formation. A simple and even inevitable activity in itself, interpretation can raise extraordinarily complex questions. Determining an author’s probable or possible intentions, considering conscious or unconscious motives, and assessing how an author’s private intentions were or were not realized in the public language of the text — these are among the most difficult and productive questions that literary analysis can explore. They are also highly developed forms of everyday activities of deciphering, decoding, and evaluating. An undergraduate literary pedagogy that takes as its central mission the development of the student’s ability to respond to literature, and in particular to interpret an author’s meaning, is not only maximizing student pleasure but also performing a very real service to the nation, a service performed by no other discipline.
In What It Means to Be an American, Michael Walzer describes American society as “unfinished” and “incoherent,” two terms he intends in the best sense. “Indeed,” he says, “American politics, itself plural in character, needs a certain sort of incoherence.” As a friendly amendment, I would suggest that America actually needs a dynamic, unsettled combination of coherence and incoherence, a common investment in a shared vision, and a multiplicity of views on how to achieve that vision. The humanities, and English in particular, have a positive contribution to make to that project, for it is in those disciplines that the qualities of incompletion and incoherence — that is, openness and pluralism — are not obstacles to be overcome but constitutive features of the inquiry, with their own kind of value, their own truth. The text itself provides a still point, a locus, a common ground, almost a promise, while an interpretive project that goes in search of the precious, dispositive, but elusive element of intention ensures that, our best efforts notwithstanding, the goal is always yet to be achieved.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is a senior fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. His most recent book, What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez: The American Revolution in Education (University of Chicago Press) came out in August.
