The Pleasure Principle

This is a response to a conversation about the profession, about why we teach literature.

The standard liberal humanist point about empathy—that art has the power to transform us into better people—is unsatisfying, not least because it doesn’t hold up: many of those who have read plenty of literature remain unable to “consider life and its dilemmas from perspectives other than one's own.” More importantly, art very often reinforces rather than undermines the set of political and social relations that lead to prejudice, extremism, and blind individualism. Does Book V of The Faerie Queene, for example, teach religious tolerance?

Something similar could be said about preserving culture and history: how much should we really want to preserve, if our own culture and history includes so much ignorance and inequality, so much oppression of other peoples, so much mistreatment of nonhuman species? What "preservation of culture and history" suggests is a continuation of patriarchal, capitalist ideology. Is that what we should be teaching?

Critical thinking has always been our fallback, but what does this mean? Do we need literature as an object in order to exercise such critical thought?

What we really do is teach students to talk and write in a certain language. I'll just go ahead and quote Terry Eagleton, whose ideas I have been paraphrasing anyway: "Literary theorists, critics and teachers are not so much purveyors of doctrine as custodians of discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse, extend and elaborate it as necessary, defend it from other forms of discourse, initiate newcomers into it and determine whether or not they have successfully mastered it. The discourse itself has no definite signified, which is not to say that it embodies no assumptions: it is rather a network of signifiers able to envelop a whole field of meanings, objects and practices." The "embarrassment" of literary criticism, he continues, is that "it defines for itself a special object, literature, while existing as a set of discursive techniques which have no reason to stop short of that object at all" (Introduction to Literary Theory 177ff).

What we really do, then, is teach something like "discourse analysis," and if we're good at it we might be able to demonstrate the ways that discourse is both a component and a product of power. Andy's suggestion about teaching writing is the flip side of rhetoric: if we can teach our students to recognize discursive techniques, we may also be able to teach them to apply these techniques for themselves.

None of this really explains why we still think Shakespeare is valuable, or why we ask students to memorize the plot and principal characters of Frankenstein. The latter is probably because we feel like we need to test them on something; the former is probably because we like Shakespeare. (There's more to it than that: we are told that we should like Shakespeare, because those who have come before us have decided that Shakespeare is somehow valuable. Still, if we were to trace that determination back far enough, I imagine it would have much more to do with pleasure than most of us are willing to admit.)