Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Coerced Confessions
by Bruce Robbins | ns 71-72
I begin with two anecdotes. I would like to think that the genre of the anecdote offers at least a thin layer of protection against the threats of self-importance and self-righteousness. Self-importance and self-righteousness become significant hazards from the moment you even think about answering an invitation to produce a credo. Don't be afraid, go ahead, tell us: how seriously do you take yourself?
First anecdote. About ten years ago I was asked by a well-respected publishing company to consider working on a writing textbook in collaboration with an even better-respected authority in the composition field. The idea was to combine the teaching of writing, which she does, with the teaching of literature, which I do. As I was an admirer of hers and not averse to contemplating the small fortune that might come my way, it was hinted, should the book "take off," I said a tentative yes. At the first meeting, however, I discovered the plan the editors had put together for the textbook. I already knew that our theme was to be "community," and this seemed initially plausible to me as a way of emphasizing the social nature of writing and inducing students to think of writing as learning to enter into a conversation. What I didn't know until I arrived, or perhaps resisted knowing, was that this would entail organizing the readings around the communities that our students were assumed to belong to: the family, the school, the church, and so on, presumably up through the nation. In other words, the literary works that were my responsibility were to be classified according to the presumed primacy for each of a community pertinent to today's students. So King Lear would illustrate membership in a family—or was it a state? Othello would illustrate belonging to a race—or was it a state again? Or a family? It suddenly struck me—a bit late in the game, given the investments in time and airfare that had gone into this meeting—that this was not only different from any way of looking at literary texts I was used to, but was at odds with basic beliefs that until that moment I had not been aware I held. By way of explaining that I really couldn't go forward with this project, I found myself saying, in a hesitant but emotionally-charged way, that when I tried to think of literature and community together, I thought of my daughter's experience of watching the first film version of Frankenstein at about six or seven years old. She knew that the monster was the bad guy, but when the crowd of outraged villagers arrived with their torches to put an end to him, she burst into tears and cried inconsolably right through the ending. Pretty much the same thing had happened when she saw King Kong. In both cases, you might say, community is defined by the expulsion and destruction of a kind of monster. What seemed "literary" about these narratives (though of course they're films) was the impossibility of not identifying with the monster, the impossibility of feeling good about belonging to the community that expelled the monster, the sort of dividedness in her identifications and loyalties that would properly leave even a six- or seven-year-old sobbing in front of the TV.
A second anecdote. I gave my first lecture at Columbia on the twelfth of September, 2001. The events of the previous day were very much on everyone's mind. I asked the class whether they wanted to talk about the attack on the World Trade Center or to try for business as usual. By a very large majority they opted for business as usual. But consulting my own feelings, I found I could not avoid some sort of segue. The text on our syllabus was Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North. Season of Migration to the North reverses Conrad's Heart of Darkness: a dark-skinned Arabic-speaking African travels up the Thames to London, and in that northern heart of darkness he commits several unspeakably violent acts against white women; women who end up dead. This came too close to the horror of September 11 to pass unremarked. So I invited the students to imagine a secretary in the firm of Cantor Fitzgerald who was at her desk in the World Trade Center bright and early the day before and who therefore lost her life in a way that we would be tempted to describe as utterly meaningless. By "meaningless" I meant, I said, that the attack that ended her life seemed to have nothing to do with her life—nothing to do with who she was, her history, her personal relationships, her character, with her life in the sense that life is what novels are made of. And then I told the students that one reason for paying attention to the novels we were going to be reading was that this is the challenge they set themselves: to produce something like meaning out of historical materials that, like the planes that attacked the World Trade Center, seem to come from nowhere and thus seem to defy the whole project of novel writing.
This was an unrehearsed and somewhat desperate gambit. The fact that it's what I said on that day doesn't make it true. The fact that it comes close to what I had said five years earlier at the composition textbook meeting doesn't mean that I necessarily believe either one. I offer both statements as potential answers to the question of why I do what I do in part because I didn't really have time to think about them seriously—because they were forced out of me, as a stressed disciplinary subject, by acute pressure from external events and thus might be seen as expressions of a sort of disciplinary unconscious.
On the evidence of these two moments, I (and perhaps "we") would seem to believe that literature is worth teaching because it offers a distinctive experience of living with ethical and emotional contradiction. (For the 9/11 story, I ask you to imagine for yourselves how even that act of monstrousness could and should elicit some degree of dividedness.) One obvious thing to say about this living-with-contradiction idea is that it's not new. On the contrary, it's a recognizable version of the "romantic imagination," seen as an ability to hold opposing views in focus simultaneously, to resist resolution, to live in uncertainty. For me personally, this credo seems entirely plausible, if not very flattering. It would reveal me as falling back, in a moment of high anxiety, on what I learned in college from the New Critics. But Romanticism works a little better for the Frankenstein-and-my-daughter anecdote than for the September 12 anecdote. In what I said to my students on September 12, the problem would be the hinted promise of "meaning." If "meaning" suggests that the novels are going to say something commensurate with what the loss of a single life means to the one who loses it or to their loved ones, then it's clearly setting the bar too high. But there's also the old business about poems being rather than meaning. Haven't we learned to say that what's distinctive about literature is resistance to anything so crude as meaning? Perhaps it would have been better if I had said the following: Thinking about the secretary at Cantor Fitzgerald, you may well feel that life is meaningless. The novels you are about to read will be more honest with you than the government or the newspapers or the churches. They will show you that you're right. Instead, I seem to have been channeling Matthew Arnold, another figure from my earliest training, who famously saw literature as doing much the same redemptive, meaning-affirming work as religion.
In his book The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton makes a distinction between two senses of the word "meaningless": 1) that the world is full of "meanings in plenty, but they are specious"; and 2) that life is "unintelligible" (70-71). He is ready to grant the first, but not the second. This seems right to me, and worth insisting on. What I don't want to say, in other words, is that for the world to be in a state of contradiction is for the world to be unintelligible. Or that the world's resistance to intelligibility can be happily embraced or surrendered to—that we can repose happily in the presence of the ineffable and even feel we've done our duty by showing once and for all that things are ineffable. I would like to think that the question "Why teach literature?" can be answered without in the process making a case for religion, or for what is now being called the post-secular condition. This is not obvious. To cultivate paradox, learning to hold two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at the same time, opens a royal road to religion, for (like Cleanth Brooks talking about the paradox of the Incarnation in Donne) it insists on fundamental and irreducible mystery. In this sense, my anecdotal credos can look as if they are saving the literary only by turning it into a life-preserver for religious thought. This is something about which I do not feel comfortable. We're in a moment when the old "everything is" formulas—everything is language, or discourse, or narrative, or rhetoric—are in danger of being supplanted by an equation that they will arguably have done much to facilitate: everything is belief, or (worse) everything is faith. This equation too is a way of living with emotional and ethical contradiction—living with them so as to enjoy the insuperability of the contradictions. Which leaves me to reflect that when I chose "meaning" over "meaninglessness" on September 12, 2001, one thing I hope I was trying to choose was a more secular attitude to contradiction.
What would that be? Among other things, one that could be aligned with Edward Said's notion of "secular criticism." And one that had more room for information. What I was trying to tell the students on September 12 was that providing information was indeed part of what these novels were doing. This information might seem extraneous, but it was information about how we are connected, and it was information that ought to change how they felt that connection. If feeling in a state of contradiction is a traditional answer to the question of literature's value, what may be slightly less traditional here is feeling in a state of contradiction that is created by and dependent on seemingly extra or extraneous information, that is informed in part by looking away from what is in front of it. I have written elsewhere about novelistic representations of atrocity which enrich the reader's emotional response precisely by looking away from the atrocity. In a formal embodiment of contradiction, I suggest, the looking away both spares the feelings and at the same time augments them by adding information that doesn't seem to fit.
Information is also a way of reframing one of the most widespread and maybe indispensable answers we have to the "why teach literature" question. According to the National Council of Teachers of English, "Literary response and expression are aesthetic acts involving complex interactions of emotion and intellect. The acts of responding to, interpreting, and creating literary texts enable us to participate in other lives and worlds beyond our own and to reflect on who we are." This may sound a trifle embarrassing—in fact it gets worse—but putting "intellect" there next to "emotion" is a plus, as is "worlds beyond our own." When the NCTE statement goes on to affirm that literature enables students "to discover how literature can capture the richness and complexity of human life," I can't say this statement is incredibly informative. But the point that literature is informative needs to be made. I think we find it embarrassing even when it is better made—for example: literature as a vehicle for the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of the experience of people distant from us in space or time. (And of course for the self-reflection that contact with such experience encourages.) This position is embarrassing, in part because it seems to suggest that literature is simply instrumental, merely a vehicle; in part because it seems to suggest that the experience of others is open to more or less reliable interpretation; in part no doubt for other reasons. But for an answer to the question "Why teach literature?" to avoid becoming a backhanded case for religion, I think some version of this dry, rational position needs to be articulated. Yes, oh dear yes: literature... represents.
At more or less the same time that I was having my misadventure with the textbook publisher, the National Council of Teachers of English was trying to come up with national "standards" for the teaching of English in secondary school. The draft that was initially circulated made no provision at all for teaching literature. It was all critical thinking, ability to understand and use language effectively, and so on. There was an outcry, much of it from people like us, and literature got put back in—literature understood as enabling us "to participate in other lives and worlds beyond our own and to reflect on who we are." The fact that literature only made it in by the skin of its teeth suggests that this case is far from well established in the minds of ordinary practitioners. I'd like to see it better established, in spite of its multiple embarrassments. It would have been good, in September 2001, if more people had been able to remain in a state of emotional irresolution, mourning the dead innocents and at the same time holding the country itself far from blameless, and therefore hesitating to seize what the government offered as resolution. Making the acquaintance of the subjectivity of others is good for you, even (or especially) the subjectivity of monsters. Being forced to realize that the monster is like you in some way, is connected to you in other ways, is a useful thing. These are banalities we can't afford to be afraid of. And in the future, a future that is sure to have increasingly sharp confrontations over immigration, that is sure to see anti-Chinese racism recurring on a larger scale as the US faces the unaccustomed experience of losing out, economically, to a rising competitor, it will be good if people are able to think about "aliens" with some of the emotional intelligence that my daughter brought to the film version of Frankenstein. It will be a step toward a world that will have fewer monsters.
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