English Lit Is for Losers
You may not admit to the claim in my title. You may even lament the well-chronicled decline of the humanities. But at the very least you've probably thought that an English Literature major needs a backup plan. American students go further. They have pretty much decided that lit and other liberal-arts degrees are for losers: The number of humanities majors between 2012 and 2020 fell by about half in schools as different as Vassar, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Bates, and Arizona State.
Maybe we should just agree with the sentiment. Simply judging from the protagonists of the English literary canon, the claim seems insurmountable. Beowulf is betrayed by his men and killed by a dragon. One mistake follows another before Spenser's Redcrosse Knight finally earns his name, St. George, and is ready to face his dragon. Even the formidable Wyf of Bathe, who begins by celebrating the woman's "sovereignty" over her husband, resorts to a wish-fulfillment tale about an eternally beautiful wife who submits to her man. Before we even get to Shakespeare, our literature is dominated by losers.
And it's not just the characters who fail. Samuel Johnson offered a lament for the whole English language. In the "Preface" to his monumental Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson confessed that he had begun his project in hopes of establishing the proper use of English vocabulary. Likewise, many others had hoped that his work "should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it...." Eight years of effort left him defeated, and the Preface concludes that "neither reason nor experience [could] justify" such hopes. For "sounds are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints; to enchain syllables and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength."
Johnson's Preface thus recorded a losing battle against the corruption of our language. The culprits are everywhere: commerce, scientific jargon, vain authors who flaunt their foreign learning, and sheer ignorance. Johnson ultimately despaired that language could benefit us at all: "combinations of letters [do not] have much influence on human happiness; [for]...words are but the signs of ideas...."
The crowning glory of Johnson's Dictionary is the wealth of literary selections that illustrate precise, rich uses of English words. Those lapidary exemplars attracted later writers — Austen, Coleridge, the Brontës, Dickens, Browning, and Hardy — who pored over his work. Johnson was awarded an honorary degree for his labors, and his increasing fame led to a much-needed pension from the Crown. But Johnson was right about the malleability of words, and by illustrating their meaning by their uses, he became preternaturally aware of their depreciation. The Preface has an elegiac note throughout: "I wish...that the instrument [of language] might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent...." But decay they do, and Johnson resigned himself to the triumph of common speech over the best literary diction: "[T]he pen must at length comply with the tongue....It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure." It's an admission of defeat, but it's beautifully wrought. Perhaps his statement can serve as both consolation and model for our own efforts at precision and grace as we too encounter our limited powers of expression.
COMPROMISE, RIVALRY, AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE
It's not just English Lit majors whom students view as losers, according to the enrollment data. In 2022, the Harvard Crimson reported that only 7.1% of entering Harvard students indicated an intention to major in the arts and humanities.
That was certainly true at the university where I taught. As the 2020 election approached, only two non-majors at my university were interested enough to take the most germane political-science course. Apparently, they thought history and political science were for losers too. And it's probably true that, like literature, those fields treat plenty of losers. But unlike literature, few of their major texts pay significant attention to the defeated.
Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow made this point early in their 2018 book, Legacies of Losing in American Politics. Most historians and political scientists are drawn to transformational presidencies like that of Lyndon Johnson. But Tulis and Mellow argued that the losing side — Barry Goldwater, in that case — often enjoys its own triumph later, as its rhetoric and modes of thought rise from electoral defeat to become mainstream. The paradigmatic losers in this telling come from America's constitutional era, the Anti-Federalists. Though defeated in their efforts to derail ratification of the Constitution, they ultimately succeeded in weakening their opponents' main ideas. Their argument for the Bill of Rights soon became part of the mainstream. Their opposition to a monarchical presidency made a limited executive the standard interpretation of the Constitution. They feared the consequences of an unaccountable administrative state that undermined local rule. I can hear them saying "I told you so" to all of us right about now.
In a different way, Yuval Levin establishes that accepting loss is part of America's constitutional legacy. Recent winners have begun to think that their electoral success, however narrow, gives them a mandate for an avalanche of new policies. But sharp changes of direction after a single election is the ethos of the parliamentary model, he notes in American Covenant, not ours. It's not the typical American mode of policy evolution. Even when a single party controls the presidency and large majorities in Congress, sweeping change is rare. "The American system," he writes, "insists on restraints that slow and structure decision-making and require broad and durable coalitions...." Our constitutional order compels accommodation. It typically embraces change only after both sides accept their failure to achieve their complete program and submit to compromise. In other words, both sides must often fail in some respects so they can act together on what is actually achievable. Unified action is possible only after both sides accept that failure is part of the underlying, dynamic structure of American politics.
Tragically, politics and history also offer the most destructive alternative to accepting loss and moving on. It's not surrender, and it's not compromise. It is rivalry. Instead of accepting failure, compromising, and acting together, rivalry wallows in defeat. Rivals revisit their defeat and plan their next attack. Rivals don't even put their highest priority on victory. For them, winning isn't everything or even "the only thing." Suffering a crushing loss actually validates their truth and the rival's falsehood, while compromise does not. Defeat confirms the rival's identity. Success is sweet, but crushing the enemy is sweeter. The rival's highest priority is to see the opponent wounded, suffering, and incapacitated.
The great teacher on rivalry is René Girard, whose scholarship embraced literature, anthropology, and theology. Girard helped organize the famous 1966 Johns Hopkins Conference that launched the post-modern theories of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others. Today, their theories may be more famous than Girard's, but his insights about the origins of culture and violence are more profound.
Girard's theory of rivalry begins with its positive role: We create the elements of culture primarily out of our desire to imitate. When we see someone using a stone as a hammer, we create one for ourselves. Soon we want to make a better one. The imitation, even when leavened with some competition, isn't necessarily bad. Here's a personal example: When I heard that a nearby elite college had hosted a "Jane Austen Dance," I organized one for our "great books" program. If they could do it, we could too. But then we added a Swing Dance for the 20th-century part of our course. If they could do it, we could do it better. It's a silly example, but the students got memorable experiences of Regency and Jazz Age culture out of it — and they knew nothing of my ridiculous rivalry.
Siblings may provide the most familiar example of both the creativity and rivalry that Girard described. Younger brothers and sisters don't need to be taught to imitate their older siblings' achievements — and to fight with them for the most trivial reasons. If the process never teaches them how to lose, the consequences can be tragic. The same is true for our friendships, business relationships, and social connections. Rivalry can take over and entirely displace any creative element at all. At that point, the adversaries "forget the object of their quarrel," Girard wrote. "[T]hey turn against each other with rage in their heart....The more the antagonists desire to become different from each other, the more they become identical. Identity is realized in the hatred of the identical."
This is not just the horseshoe theory that political extremes meet. It's Girard's effort to explain the origins of social violence in the development of culture, both within a people and across national bounds. As rivalry increases, the two sides progressively unite in a poisonous, hateful fascination with each other. They troll one another. Now, their competition may still produce some advances in the arts, sciences, and economy. But a tipping point comes when the two sides start to define themselves by their mutual opposition. And if no religious, legal, or moral force persuades the rivals to accept their losses and failures, violence builds up. Vengeance takes over.
Each side comes to need an outrage perpetrated by the other to maintain its identity. They feed on indignities. Their hostility escalates until a scapegoat, an innocent victim, is sacrificed in an explosion of violence. As a resident of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, I witnessed this in 2020, when the hostilities engendered by a congeries of forces — police brutality, Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, and similar pressures — burst with the murder of George Floyd. The subsequent riots across the country killed or injured many and resulted in widespread property destruction, totaling more than $1 billion in insured losses alone. By continually referring to the unwarrantable death of an innocent man, the rioters and sympathetic media made Floyd's death a sacrificial one. He became the scapegoat. The crowds who engage in this cycle, Girard wrote, must remain unconscious of the scapegoat mechanism for it to work, which is one reason why the cycle continues to repeat itself. Despite the outward peace in Minneapolis today, the current contestation over how to memorialize the site of Floyd's murder resembles a dispute about holy ground. Resolving such issues will not bring lasting peace if Girard is correct. Sacrifice alone never can.
This past September, the same dynamic was at play for many on the other side in the memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. "The day that Charlie died the angels wept," proclaimed White House staffer Stephen Miller. "But those tears have been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend....You have no idea the dragon you have awakened," he warned.
So, what's the alternative to this violent cycle?
Unlike mythical violence, Girard pointed out, the Bible never divinizes the economy of vengeance. "The Roman myth tells us Romulus was right to kill Remus," he wrote, but "[t]he Bible says Cain was wrong." The Bible announces the innocence of victims and decries their violent ends, from Abel to Zechariah, he continued. The Bible also diverts from myth by progressively revealing the whole dynamic of vengeance. Ultimately Christ's self-conscious sacrifice makes sacred violence obsolete by identifying all of us as part of the crowd and the Son of God as our willing — and, crucially, divine — scapegoat. He forgives those who killed him. He offers forgiveness for our trespasses and commands us to do likewise. As the Yale psychiatrist James Kimmel has recently written, forgiveness is the "wonder drug" that eliminates our craving for revenge. This too was on display at the Kirk memorial, when Erika Kirk invoked Christ's example to forgive her husband's killer, as her husband would have. Never one to be outdone, President Trump drew the crowd back into hatred and rivalry: "That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them."
Not all loss, whether in literature or life, requires forgiveness. But forgiveness and other modes of accepting loss are surely among the qualities that our greatest texts seek to illustrate. No work of English literature depicts these issues more powerfully than Paradise Lost.
PUTTING THE GREATEST OF FAILURES TO REST
If the first, great English dictionary recounts instability and loss within our language, our greatest poem, Paradise Lost, recounts the failure of the entire human race. No one worked harder than John Milton to bring about the political changes he believed would create a just English polity. He triumphed when Oliver Cromwell triumphed, and he continued to serve "the Good Old Cause" after Cromwell's death in 1658. Two years later, he was frantically writing tracts on how to establish an English republic just a few months before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. After great success, Milton found himself a political failure. Arrested for his role in the execution of King Charles I, he was in great danger of capital punishment. Were it not for the intervention of his friends, he could have been hanged, drawn, and quartered like other regicides. But freed from that fate and liberated from political exigencies, Milton was also free to release his literary genius in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
Paradise Lost is a 12-book poem about one event: the failure of Adam and Eve to keep a single rule. Like all epics, however, it is also a poem about everything — including rivalry. Never did anyone depict the corrosive effects of rivalry better than Milton in his portrait of Satan. Deprived of his pride of place when the Father announced the begetting of the Son and his headship over the angels, Satan "[d]rew after him the third part of heaven's host" in rebellion against God.
Satan knows that the purposes of the Almighty are unquestionably good, but still he questions them. He bullies his fellow angels lest they acknowledge the Son's superiority:
Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend
The supple knee? Ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right....
And then, after leading his legions into hopeless battle and hurtling downward to Hell, he summons them to use that abyss as their base for another attack:
Farewell happy fields
Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Ever since William Blake conjectured that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it," critics have weighed in on where the poet's sympathies lay — with God or with the rebel. But surely Milton's sympathies are ultimately with Adam and Eve — that is to say, with humans like us. Our failures may seem trivial, like their single fault, not titanic like our archangelic deceiver. Still, our failures often hold sparks that can be fanned into a devilish conflagration of malice.
Eve's fall is depicted in gloriously tragic verse, while Adam's is more briefly told. But once they have both sinned, their inability to deal with failure threatens the very existence of our race. And isn't that our greatest challenge? We know we'll fail. We don't know how we'll respond.
In the longest, most confused speech of the poem, Adam considers suicide, but he fears that God will torment him beyond death. When Eve tries to speak "[s]oft words to his fierce passion," he responds with hatred: "Out of my sight, thou serpent." Samuel Johnson's words about one of his own contemporaries apply well to Adam — and, incidentally to Milton himself: "he was a very good hater!" But from a cycle of hatred no resolution can come.
Although I won't speculate on Milton's psychological profile, I think it's clear that he knew what hatred can do: Those who will not learn from failure may come to cherish it, to recall it with a perverse love, and to turn it into a motive for revenge. Adam's lament hardly merits the name. Like his language, Adam is disgusting.
It is Eve who makes the first and best gestures toward reconciliation, as Diane McColley and Barbara Lewalski have written. Drawing on the genre of lament from the Psalms, Eve expresses the misery of sin but then reaches out in sympathy and love to beckon Adam to a new life:
Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness heaven
What love sincere, and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily deceived; thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not....
A colleague once remarked to me that it's only after Adam and Eve become subject to death in Paradise Lost that they become truly human. I'm not sure I believe that. During their innocence they fully relish their work, rest, conversation, and intimacy. Before the Fall, they learn quite a bit and even have a few healthy arguments. But they have never experienced failure. They have certainly never experienced a cancerous disappointment in themselves and their most cherished companion. The despair and division that follows upon failure is unknown to them until the Fall.
After the Fall, God sends his Son to confront Adam and Eve with words that are honest and severe, but ultimately compassionate. He pities them and clothes them, taking the "form of [a] servant," which Jesus will later assume on Earth. Still later, God dispatches the archangel Michael to unveil to the pair his "covenant in the woman's seed renewed" through Noah, Abraham, and the Christ. This news is so welcome that Adam breaks into a version of the "fortunate fall" explanation for evil: Maybe our failure was a good thing in light of the good to come. But Milton will have none of it: "Happier had it sufficed him to have known/Good by itself, and evil not at all."
Ultimately, then, Paradise Lost does not celebrate failure. It does not excuse it, make light of it, or minimize it. But what is its last word? How are Adam and Eve supposed to deal with failure "east of Eden"? And how are we supposed to deal with it? After they are expelled from the Garden the poem ends with some curious words:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Yes, the world is all before us, and a beautiful world it is. Despite the horror of evil, despite our jockeying for position, and despite the toil set before us, who can deny its beauty? But looking for "rest"? Their task is to "choose/Their place of rest"? How can choosing rest be the final word that this almost-Puritan poet leaves with us?
"Rest" is a crucial concept in Paradise Lost, along with the thinking behind "choose." When done rightly, our choices are the product of reason. When done erroneously, our choices destroy our peace and rest. Throughout the poem, Milton associated "rest" with a fulfilled life. The labors of Adam and Eve in the Garden are vigorous but not exhausting. Their conversation is leisured, and even when they differ, they don't snap at each other. Their sexual intimacy is fulfilling, not a mere release, and it is deeply intertwined with their growing love, their hope for children, and their rest in God's care. In contrast, Milton was at pains to illustrate the restlessness of Satan and all he touches. Hell is filled with "[r]egions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell."
Paradise Lost portrays all of this in lengthy detail. But Milton's positive conclusion is expressed quite simply in those final words. The world is all before them. Every day, the offspring of Adam and Eve can deal with their failures by choosing their place of rest or not.
However simple the words, though, discerning their daily implications is mysterious. We may spend a lifetime trying to understand the consequences of our choices, to say nothing of finding peace despite their effects. From our limited earthly perspective, moreover, the effects of our failures — and our ways of dealing with them — may as well be eternal: Their consequences ripple outward through friends and family and downward to children's children. But Milton won't let us evade the choice with such casuistry: Will we choose the path of rest or rivalry?
COMING TOGETHER IN COMMON DEFEAT
John Milton may be our best guide to Eden and its safest exit ramp. But for a modern literary companion in discerning the later signposts on our "solitary way," I'll go with Flannery O'Connor. In her fiction, the characters learn almost nothing until the consequences hit them where it hurts — sometimes fatally.
O'Connor wrote to a friend that "The Artificial Nigger" was her "favorite and probably the best thing I'll ever write." It is a story about the failure to see — first the inability of the white characters to see the black Americans that make up half of their neighbors in O'Connor's Georgia, and then their limited capacity for understanding their own actions.
The title refers to a plaster figurine of a black man displayed "on a low yellow brick fence that curved around a wide lawn" in a white neighborhood of Atlanta. It "was pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon." O'Connor is at pains to describe the statue as similar in size to one of the main characters, a boy named Nelson, whose grandfather has taken him from their rural Georgia home to see the big city. She wrote to another friend that "there is nothing that screams out the tragedy of the South like what my uncle calls 'nigger statuary.' And then there is Peter's denial" — which becomes the key plot point in the story.
The grandfather, Mr. Head, thinks of himself as a "suitable guide for the young," and he is eager to demonstrate his moral and intellectual superiority — his headship — to the boy. Questioned about the trip by Nelson, he retorts, "Have you ever seen me lost?" No, he admits, and Mr. Head prophesies that Nelson will soon "find you ain't as smart as you think you are." These characters are poor and white and from the backwoods. Their room has a slop jar, and Nelson's shoes hurt because he "was unaccustomed to them." Nevertheless, Mr. Head is confident of his fine character traits, including his racial superiority. He knows that their journey is about to bring them face-to-face with black Americans, and that Nelson has never seen one. Mr. Head doubts the boy will even recognize blacks when he encounters them in Atlanta, the city of Nelson's birth, for "we run [the last] one out [of our county] twelve years ago...." The story is unusual for O'Connor in that it lacks physical violence, but we feel the injuries of racism, self-righteousness, and callousness on every page.
This story was published in 1955, which places it in the context of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955), when many white Americans literally had to see black people in public places for the first time. The story asks whether we recognize what we see. Do we discern its meaning? In Keys, the Interstate Commerce Commission integrated interstate travel, but that doesn't affect the Georgia train that takes Nelson and his grandfather to Atlanta. Sure enough, when "a huge coffee colored man" passes through their segregated car, Nelson doesn't know that he is black. When challenged, he describes him as fat and old, and Mr. Head delights in Nelson's ignorance.
Once in town, Mr. Head takes note of the dome of the terminal and resolves to keep it always in sight as they amble through Atlanta. Still, he quickly loses his way. They wander into the black neighborhoods and quarrel about whether to ask for directions from the residents. Nelson does so, and when a large black woman gives them information, he "suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her...." Disgusted, Mr. Head ignores the woman's advice. Eventually they arrive in a white neighborhood. Exhausted, Nelson falls asleep on the pavement, which inspires his grandfather to teach him who's in charge. He wakens Nelson by kicking a garbage can, and the frightened boy shoots off at a wild run, crashes into an elderly woman, and knocks her to the ground. A crowd gathers and the injured woman threatens Mr. Head with the law. To the assembled onlookers Mr. Head responds: "'This is not my boy,' he said. 'I never seen him before.'"
Readers are usually horrified by this Petrine betrayal. They sympathize with the indignant Nelson, who keeps his distance from his grandfather as they proceed through the white neighborhood. Soon they come upon the bizarre plaster figure that gives the story its title. They are dumbstruck:
They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy....Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one."
Mr. Head's pronouncement is as racist as the statue itself. He certainly does not see in it "the tragedy of the South," as O'Connor does. But by coming into their common vision at just this moment, the strange statue has a strange effect: It reconciles the man and his grandson.
Of the story's concluding paragraphs, O'Connor wrote: "I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise." The expulsion from Eden is the low point for human failings, and O'Connor has amply illustrated one permutation of the disasters that Paradise Lost foreshadowed. But now, in the concluding sentences, Mr. Head
stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it....He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
Mr. Head may have felt God's forgiveness, but I doubt many readers can forgive him. If he should ever work at changing his character, he will face a monumental task. True, he may be kinder to Nelson. And yes, he will no doubt experience the consequences of Brown v. Board and Keys. But will he ever see his black neighbors? Still, the text offers this vision as a beginning. "What I had in mind to suggest with the [statue]," O'Connor wrote, "was the redemptive quality of the negro's suffering for us all." That's bold. But none other than Howard Thurman, perhaps the greatest theological influence on Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that "the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst."
Surely our engagement with this story's fictional characters must make us think about our own betrayal of friends and family. It must elicit our own response to historical tragedy, whether of the South or elsewhere. We may question Mr. Head's ability to see himself with the "thoroughness of God," but how much more insightful are we about our own shortcomings?
Many readers attest to something like revelation from the pages of O'Connor, Milton, and Johnson, just to mention the three I've highlighted. But why is that experience so fleeting? If the discipline of literature offers such great teaching, how could Flannery O'Connor's literary friend, Allen Tate, share so many racist predispositions, as Algis Valiunas has shown in these pages?
IS EDUCATION A FAILURE TOO?
In an influential essay 30 years ago, the psychiatrist Robert Coles wrote of the rude (and worse) behavior of Harvard students toward a female undergraduate who cleaned their rooms. When a bright pre-med classmate approached this young woman with a veiled proposition, she came to the breaking point. She told Coles, who had been her professor in a seminar on American loneliness, that she had quit her job and was considering quitting Harvard. Her studies in literature and philosophy had acquainted her with the compromises of Ezra Pound, Martin Heidegger, and others with fascism and the Nazis. She had taken two courses on moral reasoning with the same young man who had propositioned her, and she gathered from his boasting that he had received A's in both. She deflected Coles's attempts to defend the good of a Harvard education — even its benefit for her, personally. When Coles offered that parents, not universities, bear the responsibility for moral education, "she responded with an unspoken but barely concealed anger." One question of hers struck Coles in particular: "[W]e talk about what's true, what's important, what's good....What's the point of knowing good, if you don't keep trying to become a good person?"
I've been defending the view that a literary education should help us discern both our failures and our opportunities to grow thereby. I've implied that certain texts can shape our character for the better and give us greater empathy for others. Those are some of the grounds on which a former head of Columbia's storied curriculum has defended its humanities-rich requirements. In his 2021 memoir, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, Roosevelt Montás passionately recounted his own reading in the sizeable, mandatory Columbia curriculum. Its books enabled him to face the challenges of immigration, poverty, divorce, loss of faith, and more. Above all, Montás credited his Columbia experience with shaping his character in positive ways, "turning [my] eyes inward, into an exploration of [my] own humanity."
It's very inspiring, but would Montás have anything to say to Coles's student? Or to broaden the issue and bring it up to date, why did some of the most hateful, unrestrained anti-Semitic protests of the last several years erupt at Columbia? When I asked this of a friend of mine, a Columbia graduate, he was surprised at the question. He had never even considered it. Columbia has been the "mother ship" of student protest since the 1960s, he reminded me, and the Core Curriculum is no ticket to reasonableness. His observation is buttressed by quantitative research published in 2024. It found that more education is actually associated with greater anti-Semitism in countries that have failed to punish Holocaust denial, or that voted against a 2015 United Nations statement expressing alarm about rising anti-Semitism.
And if this is true of certain countries led by insensitive elites, why not also in certain elite academic cultures? Doesn't it stand to reason, in a campus bubble where the atmosphere is tainted with an anti-Israel odor, that students would breathe in the prejudice, whatever critical faculties the curriculum aspires to instill? I find it shocking that large percentages of faculty at many colleges (like my undergraduate school) pressured corporations to divest from Israel without calling for pressure on Hamas to surrender. But then, I too have blind spots. I was born on virtually the same day that Emmett Till was lynched and never even considered his story until I was 50 years old. Still, I hope that my reading has been making me aware of such issues and ashamed of my insouciance — and willing, as the character of Kent urges King Lear, to "see better."
In The Company We Keep, published almost 40 years ago, Wayne Booth made a significant case for reviving ethical criticism during a time when literary interpretations were mostly guided by ideologies or by theories that distanced the text from one's personal life. Ideological approaches typically reduce literature to predictable interpretations based on race, class, and gender, and the detached theories remove literary meaning from matters of character altogether. But if literature is reducible to predictable ideologies, or if it is irrelevant to character formation (as Coles's student charged), why major in it? Why even read it? Only a loser would do so. And while there are many causes for the decline of the English major, surely this self-inflicted wound by professors of English is among them.
Booth wanted to revive the notion that readers can build "a richer character out of adopted roles...from those stories our society offers us...." He pointed out that
we all are equipped, by a nature (a "second nature") that has created us out of story, with a rich experience in choosing which life stories, fictional or "real," we will embrace wholeheartedly. Who we are, who we will be tomorrow depends thus on some act of criticism, whether by ourselves or by those who determine what stories will come our way — criticism wise or foolish....
Excellent though it is, I believe that Booth's formulation overemphasizes choosing and underemphasizes desiring. Beyond choosing a book, the reader must also want to give himself — to open up to its way of seeing, feeling, and knowing — for it to have any effect.
The desire precedes the embrace. Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," rather like Booth's book, endorsed the "shaping spirit of Imagination." But for Coleridge this "shaping" can only be activated by an act of generosity. Addressing Sara Hutchinson, he wrote: "O Lady! We receive but what we give,/And in our life alone does nature live...." I feel sure that Coles's student gave herself to the books she read, and her tormentors did not. Her critical spirit was activated as well, as her skepticism of Pound and Heidegger attests, but the desire to receive from books came first. I'll wager that she is still an excellent reader — curious, critical, and willing to allow a book to shape her character.
When I have sought to persuade students that literature's value lies partly in its portrayal of loss, I've sometimes used an analogy from sports. At the end of the season, there's only one champion. All the rest are losers. Of course, everyone wants to win, but if winning is everything, the sport itself is nothing. Athletes who love the game must want to play whether they win or lose. Love for the game must come first. And most of what it teaches will come from the athletes' mistakes and limitations — in a word, from losses. Those experiences can go on to shape their character for good, but only if the desire is truly for the game.
For those who read books, whether at Columbia or in their favorite chair, the situation is similar. One of our great civilizational challenges is coming to terms with loss without self-righteous denial; without despair, rivalry, or the host of other soul-destroying alternatives. For if loss is not the most persistent human experience, it is certainly the final one. Milton rejected the "fortunate fall" explanation for dealing with failure, and promised an even greater consolation. The angel Michael comforts Adam with the benefits of gaining wisdom, of relying upon faith, and above all of practicing charity, which he calls "the soul/Of all the rest...."
[T]hen thou wilt not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
Wisdom, faith, charity — they're all interlocked for Milton, as they are in any truly educated person. When such a person experiences loss, he will ultimately be the gainer. And the prize for this loss is the paradise within.