Literary Study and the Social Order.

• Author: Tanner, Stephen L.

Determining how literary study relates to the social order has occupied the best minds at least since Plato excluded poets from his ideal republic. The subject has been so thoroughly aired that it seems difficult, in Samuel Johnson's phrase, to say anything new about it that is true, or true about it that is new. Plausible arguments contend that the study of literature is a civilizing influence that nurtures good citizenship by providing instruction and models in compassion, justice, and the moral law. But forceful arguments also contend that engagement with literature is primarily an aesthetic experience having no direct practical consequences for civil affairs. After centuries of consideration, the matter still defies resolution. But because it is perennially relevant, each age grapples with it in the context of its own views regarding the nature of literature and the ideals of society. My purpose in what follows is to survey some significant recent contributions to this endless debate over what literary st udy can or should do to promote the civic good and offer some observations concerning the debate and the direction it should take in the future.

The question of the moral and social effects of literary study is so knotty that even people who have made a career of teaching literature sometimes reverse their beliefs concerning the effects of the study of literature upon human conduct. For example, Peter Thorpe explains in Why Literature Is Bad for You why he, as a professor of literature, became disillusioned with his former belief in the edifying consequences of literary study. "For years," he says, "I believed that if a person lived with great books he would be a better specimen of humanity--more mature, aware, happy, tolerant, kind, and honest. But I'm not a believer anymore" (vii). His approach is to examine the behavior of people who devote large portions of their life to literary study--writers, students, critics, and particularly professors. His conclusions are these: "That literary art, instead of making us more mature, has a subtle way of guiding us into a new immaturity. That the great books, instead of endowing us with more awareness of the cosmos and the human condition, put the blinders on. That instead of showing us the way to happiness, literature moves us toward gloom. That it fogs our minds, instead of enabling us to think more clearly. And finally, that instead of improving our ability to communicate, it keeps us from getting through to each other" (xii). These are controversial assertions, of course, and his evidence, although extensive, is unlikely to be widely persuasive. But I must admit that having associated closely with literature professors for thirty years, I find that much of Thorpe's characterization of them rings painfully true. Obviously, studying the best literature does not, in itself, produce the best people.

A more significant example is the case of Lionel Trilling, one of the most distinguished literary intellectuals of his age. He began his career with a published doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold in 1939, a book that has never been out of print. Arnold is a giant figure among those convinced of the edifying effects of literary study, and Trilling was strongly influenced by Arnold, who said, "It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: 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" (478). This notion of literature as a criticism of life is apparent in the preface to Trilling's famous collection of essays The Liberal Imagination (1950), in which he suggests that in the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, "literature has unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature i s the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty." Yet, in teaching a renowned course in modern literature for many years at Columbia University, Trilling gradually became disturbed that modern literature provides so few examples of literature promoting moral good. With its emphasis on the self in an adversary relationship to society, modern literature seems to question civilization itself. This alarmed Trilling because, from his secular perspective, the social relationship is the only source of obligation and authority. Increasingly his Arnoldian faith in literature as a social stabilizer was subject to some very hard tests, and his work during the fifteen years preceding his death in 1975 can be read as a transcript of discomforts occasioned by an actively radical literature in a mind for which the idea of society was of ultimate concern. He faced the dilemma of reconciling two divergent convictions. First, that great literature ben efits man individually and socially by stimulating and extending his moral imagination and enlarging his awareness of his necessary connection with his fellows. Second, that modern literature, though possessing genius, has divorced morality from imagination and denied the validity of the social connection, and consequently may be harmful.

"Antihygienic effect of bad serious art."

As early as the 1950s, he had remarked in an aside that "No one has yet paid attention to the anti-catharsis, the generally antihygienic effect of bad serious art, the stimulation it gives to all one's neurotic tendencies, the literal, physically-felt depression it induces" (Gathering 99). His doubts about the edifying effects of art grew during his final years, and he found himself asking "whether that wonderful Victorian confidence in the educative, moralizing power of art has been justified or if it can be accepted simply and without qualification" ("Sincerity and Authenticity"105). "What is the basis of our society's belief that art is so important?" he asked. "What do we expect of it? Only good, it seems. I am quite open to the idea that art can produce bad effects as well as good ones, even that what might be called good art can produce bad effects. ... I would like to hear why, apart from its usefulness as entertainment, art should be supported" (Qtd. in Chace 52-53).

Much literary criticism "no longer literary."

Frank Lentricchia provides a different kind of example. After earning a reputation as an historian and polemicist of literary theory who spoke passionately about literature as a political instrument, Lentricchia wrote "Last Will and Testament of an ExLiterary Critic" for Lingua Franca (1996), in which he explains that when his book Criticism and Social Change appeared in 1983, he was convinced that "a literary critic, as a literary critic, could be an agent for social transformation" (60). He confesses that he has now mostly given up reading literary criticism because much of it is no longer literary, and he has reverted to the pleasures of reading that brought him to literary study in the first place, heeding "the repressed but unshakable conviction that the study of literature serves no socially valued purpose" (65). This was a startling turnabout for the man once labeled "the Dirty Harry of literary theory."

Stanley Fish is another scholar-critic who, if not reversing himself in the same way as the three men just mentioned, has certainly modulated his opinions in striking ways. In fact, he has made a career of going against the grain of accepted literary opinion, adroitly dancing along the line between brilliance and self-serving notoriety--between being provocative and being dismissed. Occasional missteps--like claiming that his criticism need not be true, only interesting--have toppled him into heated controversy. In Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995) his targets are social constructionism, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, new historicism--in short, literary studies intended to produce social-political change. His thesis in a nutshell is that academic work is one thing and political work quite another. He acknowledges that in centuries past literature contributed "to civic...