Bookplanet: why literature matters

What happened to literature?
For me, literature matters because I have had my own inexplicable personal experiences with a particular passage, never-dying intimacy with some line or fallen in love with a particular character who will outlive me, and who is seemingly beyond even authorial control
By Mehreen Zahra-Malik/Pakistan’s Daily Times

“There is nothing I can teach you that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky can’t themselves,” was how one of my English professors opened the first session of a class on Russian fiction. He went on to say that there could be no instructor for a literature class other than the authors that were being studied. The reward would come not from any class discussions or lectures but from the students’ own engagement with the works.

I felt vindicated. He had confirmed a thought that had vexed me for some time. Despite my love of literature, literature classes, except on the rare occasion, have increasingly begun to make me wary of the subject rather than draw me into it. Theory seems to have smothered the spirit of the original works.

Edward Said, once president of the Modern Languages Association, lamented the “disappearance of literature itself from the...curriculum” and its replacement with “fragmented, jargonised subjects”. Today, theoretical innovation is what drives on the English Department — in how many ways can one pin down a text (not a ‘book’, mind you) or how many perspectives can be said to inform it: Christian, Foucauldian, Marxist, Lesbian-Feminist, post-structuralist or post-anything?

Such is the theorise-or-perish desperation that one can find in the same Department a seminar on Milton as well as one on “The Invaginated Eyeball: Living the Romantic Dream through Batgirl”. One critic wasn’t off the mark when he wrote that “if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department...Lately it has become impossible to say with confidence whether such topics as ‘Eat Me; Captain Cook and the Ingestion of the Other’ or ‘The Semiotics of Sinatra’ are parodies of what goes on there or serious presentations by credentialed scholars”.

With an ever-shrinking constituency and resources, the English Department perhaps feels the need to compete with other more ‘utilitarian’ and ‘scientific’ disciplines and have its own specialised, though quite nauseating vocabulary.

We have post-colonialist literature where the protagonist is always this or that ‘Other’ (for the most part the internal harmony or intrinsic merit of the ‘text’ seems to matter much less than the fact that it can be evaluated in relation to some sort of identity to the exclusion, of course, of all others); deconstruction reminds us that all truth, analysis, meaning and conclusions are influenced by the “subject-position” of the reader; Marxist criticism reveals the great Project-Create-False-Consciousness which disallows us to examine the institutions that suppress our consciousness; structuralism turns literature into a branch of anthropology — until literature completely loses the faculty of “transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge” and even the residual aspiration to have “any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind”.

A field that was previously allowed to be self-referential and was about boundless imagination is now spilling over with dogma and dogmatists. Frank Lentricchia was bang on target when he said: “Tell me your theory and I’ll tell you in advance what you’ll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven’t read.”

When my professor talked of the redundancy of having an instructor for a class when there was Tolstoy himself, I assume he wasn’t foretelling or even announcing the death of the English Department; he was simply making a general comment on the need to read — not just Tolstoy, but Tolstoy in conjunction with everything else one had read so far or would read in the future. Connections are important, whether through feelings or as a cerebral exercise. In How Should One Read a Book? Virginia Woolf put it aptly: “The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another”.

That is the only way to become one’s own authoritative critic of the books one reads: to read enough and with adequate understanding to make comparisons come alive, to reach that point where an intimate, personal bond with one’s poets and novelists is possible without the need for mediators. Instead of rejecting or embracing opinions from outside, one has to grow as a reader, not just in classrooms but silently, solemnly, waiting for one’s own impressions to shape up and articulate themselves.

For me, the appeal of Literature has never had much to do with the scholarly imperative. Of course, its pure luck when a student who loves literature can also be blessed with a teacher in the religious sense of the word — devoted, even extremist, but always able to “get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep”. Such professors always add to what one can derive from a piece of art. But for me, literature matters most because I have had my own inexplicable personal experiences with a particular passage, developed a never-dying intimacy with some line or fallen in love with a particular character who will outlive me, and who is seemingly beyond even authorial control (Hamlet, they say, is greater than Shakespeare himself).

I turn to literature because it offers a world of ideas that are always in tension, always provisional and forever unwilling to surrender to any overarching theoretical or ideological framework.

This is why a great work of literature is always philosophical — it provides no final answers. And not only that, because, while life anaesthetises us, literature de-familiarises us, makes us conscious of the ‘great’ ordinary moments, the paradoxes.

This is how Wallace Stevens put it in Anecdote of a Jar:

“I placed a jar in Tennessee,/And round it was, upon a hill.../The wilderness rose up to it, /And sprawled around, no longer wild./ It [the jar] took dominion everywhere./ The jar was gray and bare./ It did not give of bird or bush,/ Like nothing else in Tennessee.”

(The writer is Assistant News Editor of The Friday Times)