Why Read? (8 page)

And why should he not be disconsolate? For how can one bear life in its manifold sorrows, with all of its horrible sufferings,
the sufferings of children and the innocent preeminent among them (think of the horrors unfolding in the world as you read
this page, as I write it) and not go mad? Virtually all of us are bound to suffer as well—"pain of heart, distress, and poverty,"
if not of one sort then of another, to use Wordsworth's phrasing from "Resolution and Independence." But what seems to trouble
Wordsworth most is that amidst this commonality of suffering, we still treat one another with rank callousness, with "greetings
where no kindness is," "rash judgments," "sneers." Without the figure of a loving (or at least a just) God presiding over
the world, ready at some point to dispense rewards to the worthy, and punishment or correction to the erring, it is no easy
matter to find a reason not to despair. Where is Wordsworth, who seems devoid of religious faith (pious Coleridge always feared
for Wordsworth's soul) to find any reason to continue on?

Wordsworth's answer is that there is a part of himself that is free from the fallen society in which he's immersed. It is
a part that lives on deep in him, although covered over by custom, convention and fear. And in this region of half-remembered
being he finds hope, or, as he puts it, "life and food / for future years."

He remembers himself as a child free in nature, with a spirit that belongs to nothing but the gorgeous, frightening natural
world and has not been colonized by the city and its dispiriting ways. He thinks of the time "when first / I came among these
hills; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever
nature led." In memories of that free self, Wordsworth finds an authentic pleasure, a vision of life lived without the anxieties
that attend on awareness of death. The child in Wordsworth is free of that mortal fear; he senses that he will return painlessly
to the natural world that brought him forth and gave him his vital, unambiguous force.

There is something in the poet that was there before civilization left its imprint. That something is free and it makes Wordsworth
freer, however temporarily. In the last phase of the poem, he worries, edging again toward gloom, about whether in time the
freedom will be foreclosed. He is becoming aware, in other words, of the merely transitory power that Emerson associated with
even the most impressive human expansions. In time, they can "solidify and hem in the life." Maybe this contact with nature
existing inside of him won't serve Wordsworth as an antidote all his life through.

Some critics like to look at this poem as a major moment in "the Romantic invention of childhood." But that is too ironic
and distancing a notion. For the poem asks us to look into our own childhoods and into the lives of the children around us,
and to see if they might not have something to teach us. May they show us how to live in a less guarded, more joyous and exuberant
way? Could they teach us how, for a while, to stanch our fears of the future, and live in the present moment in nature? ("We
are blessed always if we live in the present," says the American Wordsworthian, Thoreau.)

And what about this nature? The poem asks us to look around at nature as it exists in our moment, and to consider what sort
of restoration is to be found there. It suggests that in nature is the perpetuation of human vitality, that between civilization
and nature there is a dialectic, and that letting one element in the tension grow too mighty, as Wordsworth's eighteenth-century
forebears seem to the poet to have done, can be killing. This poem has legitimate connections to the best current ecology
movements. The work can add to—or create—the conviction that in the love of wilderness and its preservation, there lies hope
for humanity.

In "Tintern Abbey," one also encounters the bracing hypothesis that depression or melancholia or what-have-you is a great
force, to be sure, but that it is a force we may combat through individual resourcefulness and faith. Maybe the answer to
one's despondency does not lie in nature or memory or childhood per se, but Wordsworth's poem enjoins us to feel that it lies
somewhere within our own reach. The site of our sufferings, what J. H. Van den Berg called the overfilled inner self, may
also be the source of our cure. We are creatures who have the capacity to make ourselves sick, collectively and individually,
but we often have the power to heal ourselves as well.

All these things, and many more besides, readers may draw from "Tintern Abbey." They may say, "Yes, of course, I've always
thought so, but never quite had the words to say as much." Or "All right, I'll try Wordsworth's cure, or something like it.
It could very well work." Others will be put off by this particular vision. Perhaps they'll find it too self-absorbed. Where
are the others? What is Wordsworth to give to the poor? What is Wordsworth's role in the larger human hope for liberation
or freedom from want? These are valuable questions. And if the answers—and there are answers—do not satisfy the individual
reader, then he will legitimately look for another place to put his allegiances, another circle to expand into. Or perhaps
he will stay with some enhanced confidence in his own.

But asking critical questions should not devolve into a mere parlor game. That is, we should not teach our students that the
aim of every reading is to bring up the questions that might debunk the wisdom at hand, then leave it at that. We must ask
the question of belief. Is this poem true? Can
you
use this poem? Or are you living in a way that's better than the poem suggests you might live? To these queries, we should
expect only heartfelt answers.

By refusing to ask such questions once we have coaxed the work's vision forward, we are leaving our students where we found
them. And if we leave them in the grasp of current social dogma, we are probably leaving them in the world of the normal nihilist;
we are leaving them to the ideology of the consumer university, center of training and entertaining, in its worst manifestations.
We may turn "Tintern Abbey" into a species of diversion, or we may turn it into an occasion for acquiring analytical techniques,
but in doing so we are mistaken. For there is a deep force in the poem that we can put to saving uses in the present.

We ask often what we think of great works. What, we might also ask, would the creators of those works think of us? What would
the Wordsworth of "Tintern Abbey," replete with drawbacks though that poem may seem to some, think of our posturing analytics?

But, one might say, all I have produced here is a reading, itself a translation of Wordsworth, no different from the application
of, say, Foucault's terms to Wordsworth's poem. Isn't that right?

I don't think so.

Granted, my account of Wordsworth would not match the poet's own, word for word. Granted, there are points at which, brought
to life to listen, the poet might part company with the description at hand (or with the more expansive account of the work
that I would offer in a classroom). But I have tried to be true to the poem. I have attempted, acting something like its advocate
before the court of readers' opinion, to make the best possible case for its application to life. And as a teacher I have
done so, in fact I must do so, as though I believed in the poet's every word.

The fact is that I do not. I may want, in time, to register my quarrels with this vision of experience, and I may want to
offer the criticisms of others. But before those criticisms arrive, the poem needs to have its moment of maximum advocacy;
it requires, and by its power it has earned, a display of full faith. And the testament to that faith takes place in a language
integrally related to the language of Wordsworth. The teacher speaks of nature and childhood and memory. And that is a much
different thing from speaking of discipline and norms and discourses, as Foucault might do in the face of this work. There
is a difference between evocative description and what Eagleton and Macherey call rewriting. Both reimagine the work. Both
bring the past into the present. But the difference in approach is so great as to constitute not a difference in degree, but
a difference in kind. One is re-presentation, one translation.

The activity I have in mind is in some regards anticipated by Nietzsche's precursor in philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. "What
is life?" That, to Schopenhauer, is the question at the core of all consequential art works. Schopenhauer believes that "every
genuine and successful work of art answers this question in its own way with perfect correctness." The reader's task is to
bring the works' wisdom to the fore: "The works of the poets, sculptors, and representative artists in general contain an
unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom. . . . Everyone who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute
out of his own means to bring that wisdom to light; accordingly he comprehends only so much of it as his capacity and culture
admit of; as in the deep sea each sailor only lets down the lead as far as the length of the line will allow." For Schopenhauer,
however, the artists reveal one major truth and one only, that of the Life Will in its sublime potency. To us now, literature,
and the arts in general, reveal truths that are multiple. Every artist that matters gives us a world of words that we may
translate into a world of acts. Poets, to modify Shelley a little, are the too often unacknowledged legislators of the word.

Professional literary critics shy away from the process I have been describing, in part because they fear they can never get
the poem exactly right, never render it into the present in a way that would satisfy some abstract standard of perfection.
But perfection is not at issue here. What we really need to do is to use Wordsworth as the basis for constructing and conveying
a Final Narrative, a way of seeing and saying things, which is potentially better than what our students or readers possess.
Your visions being true to every moment in the poem is less important than that you offer live options to those around you.
The chances are that as a teacher, you will need a Wordsworth to offer such vital options—you will need a visionary's help.
You and I will not be able to do so on our own. And so the vision will be much more Wordsworth's than ours. But the key is
to offer our students something potentially better than what they have, and to see if it resonates with their own best aspirations.

Identification

THE QUESTIONS I pose about "Tintern Abbey" and about virtually every other work of art are inseparable from the matter of
identification. That is, I ask students to perform a thought experiment. I ask them to use their powers of empathy and imagination
to unite with another being. In the case of "Tintern Abbey," the being is the poet, but I have no qualms about asking readers
to identify themselves with characters in novels, with Pip in
Great Expectations,
with Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady,
with Rastignac in
Old Goriot,
with Emma in Jane Austen's novel. I often ask them to find themselves, or to discover what is unknown in themselves, among
the great characters in literature as well as within the imaginations that bring those characters to life.

Discussing James's
Portrait of a Lady,
I begin with a simple question. Does James love Isabel Archer?

Almost all of my students do. They find her vital, benevolent, charming, a full embodiment of what is best about America.
They're drawn to her verve and her courage, particularly at the start of the book when she is young and on her own and, with
an American insouciance, refusing offers of marriage from one Old World potentate after the next. They love Isabel, often,
because in her they see their own best selves. They identify with all that is freshest and most promising in her.

Almost as a reflex my students tend to take the next step: James must love his heroine, too. They all love Isabel, after all,
and in loving Isabel love some part of themselves. Surely James concurs.

But then we begin to read the novel—that is, to interpret it—and some surprising things happen. James's disdain for his heroine,
which is not unalloyed with considerable affection, is there on the page nearly from the start. In lengthy, authoritative,
and summary accounts he attacks her with the greatest force. It's clear that he detests what he takes to be her shallowness,
her glib self-confidence, her habit of thinking far too highly of herself. James writes that Isabel "had no talent for expression
and too little of the consciousness of genius; she only had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as
if she were rather superior." And later in the same passage: "Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines . . . In matters
of opinion she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. At moments she discovered she was
grotesquely wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than
ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself." James can admire Isabel, too;
he is far too fine a novelist to give us a simple portrait. But his dislike for her American egotism at many points reaches
contempt.

In a sense, Isabel's horrid fate, marriage to the disgusting, fortune-seeking Gilbert Osmond, is James's punishment for her.
In terms of novelistic probability, the marriage seems rather forced. What we see of the courtship falls far short of persuading
us that Isabel would actually give in and marry Osmond. But a purgative marriage—a punishment—is what Isabel needs, so the
master of realistic fiction bends plausibility and brings it to pass. Isabel's small-time hubris, the vanity of provincial
America, summons Gilbert Osmond and the almost equally appalling Madame Merle to deliver to Isabel the chastening that, as
I believe James sees it, she so deserves. Brash Isabel early in the book announces that she might rather go without clothes
than be defined by them. By the end, James has her dressed in so many layers of drapery that the four-piece suit Woolf said
T. S. Eliot favored looks liberating by contrast. And then James is content, for Isabel has been chastened. She has learned
to submit. She has learned to surrender her American wildness in the interest of something else, something more European and
refined and more modestly fitted to an awareness of human limits. Then James does admire her—her submission to fate is rather
awful and rather touching. One recalls the sufferings that the Marquis de Sade visits on the unworldly, Rousseauian Justine,
whose naive sense of human nature the Divine Marquis despises. It may not be going too far to say that in
Portrait
James is our Marquis, and Isabel is the one whose virtue finds its reward. What James detests in this novel and chastens with
purgatorial zeal is the American wildness to be found in Emerson, in Whitman (whom James notoriously poked fun at), and in
Emily Dickinson. That the spark should be alive in a woman is probably all the more frightening to James.