I would never have thought about the secret to literature as well as history and the arts except that recently I finished Mark Edmundson’s fabulous little book, “Why Read,” for at least the third time. The book has been so enlightening for me that this was my third actual copy of the book. I read my first copy, shortly after it came out in 2004, and marked it up, along with about two pages of notes in the front. Then six or seven years ago, I picked up Edmundson’s book on the humanities which included three books, “Why Teach? Why Write? And a second copy for me of “Why Read?” All three copies of “Why Read?” have sets of my notes that are reflective of the different perspectives that were shaping my life during just these last twenty years.
Surprisingly, this third copy has the most notes throughout the book and in the front pages. There are four full pages of notes in that copy and different responses throughout most of the pages. Clearly, this last read surfaced issues out of my past that were not yet clear in the earlier reads. I’ve had a very busy brain for the last twenty years. It’s had no off-switch.
Informative versus illuminating
What Edmundson explains so well is the distinction between writing that merely informs and literature which illuminates. The distinction is important. Writing that is informative focuses on data, facts, statistics, things known that provide the basis for reasoning or calculation. Illumination, in contrast, focuses upon change which can impact the individual, enhancing not merely their understanding, but their life.
So, novels, according to Milan Kundera, the author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” are populated by “experimental selves.” These selves, Edmundson writes, are persons whom we might become, or have characteristics that are appealing to us, offering fascinating and liberating opportunities for one’s personal development. They provide appealing strategies with clearly spelled out implications, processes and feelings. They make it clear that no way of seeing things is final and they often detail the growth and consequences of these insights and behaviors, resolving many of the fearful questions the reader might have about change and growth. The kind of populist, fascist single truth that surfaces in today’s news is very different than that presented in the novel and histories: it makes little place for differences, relativity, doubt and questioning. Novels, histories, philosophies, arts all point to the “great span” of individuals found in the world—the immense proliferation of divergent humans. There are not merely two, three or even five paths to offer to human beings.
What my elementary reading began to assert for me was that I need not be constrained by my dysfunctional family—or even by the fairly sophisticated evangelical congregation that had so much power over my life in my years from grade school and into my graduate seminary education.
The books my coffee klatch reads are nearly always about information. Like the majority of web writing, they typically provide facts, data or historical or sociological information—failing to illuminate. The powerful books I love are illuminating, reflective of Edmundson’s interests in great literature—always, of course, in narrative form.
What was intriguing from my first read was Edmundson’s reminder of the reading that I did throughout my late elementary and mid-school years--and their liberating influence. During that time, I read the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes books, along with Robinson Crusoe which I devoured endlessly, perhaps eight or ten times. In those early school years, I also read Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Calaveras County. All of the books were, well, phenomenal experiences for me, especially Huck Finn, Robinson Crusoe and the Sherlock Holmes books. They were especially poignant because they took me away from my dysfunctional family.
The narratives
As I’ve mentioned in several blogs, I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family with a mother who was not a mother—and mean as hell. All of which ties directly to my earliest reading, books that took me away from my dysfunctional family, offering the potential for a rich and fulfilling life.
Robinson Crusoe, my earliest favorite, tells the story of isolated individualism and the refusal of the individual to give up on life. It fills in the blanks of human creativity and individual isolation. Most of all, it relates the potential processes of human creativity in the context of limited means.
Huck Finn is a “scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism and freedom.” What so caught my attention in the book was Huck’s determination to use all the means available, including compromise, deception and theft to achieve his objectives. I’m certain now that Huck Finn was one of the texts that made possible my revision of naïve religious ethics and behavior that were drummed into my head by both family and church about the right and wrong, good and evil. These early books enabled me to understand that decision making and behavior are choices, practical and moral—not merely givens about which there are no other options.
All the detective stories, the books that first captured my interest in even the fourth grade, were about thinking, questioning, setting up a proposed criminal to gain further information—and finally getting their guy. They reveal the many uses of the mind, sometimes failing, but then reconsidering, thinking and talking subtly and finally decisively achieving their objectives.
Mark Twain’s Huck Finn is one of the glorious literary works that many in the Idiocracy desire to be kept from children and removed from libraries. Huck is the son of an abusive alcoholic who tries to kill him. Intelligent enough to fake his own murder, he escapes to an island where he reunites with a local slave, Jim, who has run away after learning that his owner intends to sell him. The two build a wooden raft, deciding to travel downriver to the free state of Illinois. Though the novel explores themes of race and identity, and the ideas of race and social responsibility and justice, it is very much a “coming of age” story where Huck makes what must be considered crucial moral choices in direct opposition to much that he has been taught. I spent many sleepless nights as an early teen, struggling with the rejection of traditional choices, fearful of making terrible mistakes, but taken by the forms of social justice proposed in Huck and other books.
Rethinking
The written narrative, whether fiction like above--or poetry, differs from the specific experience of a person because it can relate the full implications of a person’s actions, including their meanings, consequences, motives and intentions. More than that, the written narrative can provide a greater degree of truthfulness and significance for our behaviors. One of the most difficult drawbacks to our personal action is that we are often extremely fragile and caught in the fears of taking action, even when there seems no other alternative. If not caught in fear, then certainly limited in the number of options available for a specific context. And failing to recognize consequences, often some of the unintended.
Workings of literature
Although I hold a college minor in literature, Mark Edmundson’s full-blown orientation to great fiction was unique to me. I found my lit teachers quite vague in their discussions of the role of literature, barely mentioning its role in creative thinking and decision making, making much less about the ability to develop sensitivity and appreciation of life in other worlds. And these were faculty from some of our finest universities.
Unconscious impact
Surprisingly, aside from my adolescent understanding of detective approaches to situations and their possibility of approach to my mother which I unconsciously excerpted from the simple narratives, the actual workings of form and content were all largely by osmosis and rather unconscious. That limited consciousness of literature and the humanities were regularly surfaced in comments, analogies and strategies for clients in my fifties and sixties with the response of “where did that come from?” and my typical rejoinder that I was “utterly clueless” about where the ideas came from. Yet clients found my insights extremely valuable and came to depend on me for my ideas and thinking.
In the background chapter for his fine volume, Edmundson comments that poetry and literary work woke him up from a world of “harsh limits into expanded possibility.” I’d add many of the humanities to his list, including music, painting, history, languages, drama, philosophy and religious studies.
As he indicates, a major proportion of faculty hold the canonical works as outmoded and useless, a conclusion both he and I find stupefying. “They find it embarrassing to talk about poetry as something that can redeem a life, or make it worth living.” A majority of educators and clients would be speechless to learn that my executive development program which set me up for a highly lucrative, extremely wealthy life and retirement, grew out of my childish detective stories, unconscious understandings like the Biblical prophecy of Jeremiah and the musical forms I first learned in piano and choral studies as a junior and senior in high school.
What Jeremiah offers, for example, is a world of hope and possibility, found in the freedoms of responsibility and creativity, which lie at the core of the humanities and a liberal arts education. For example, writers like Proust and Emerson point toward questions that matter especially for the young as well as for all of us: Who am I? What might I become? What is this (messy) world in which I find myself? How might it be changed for the better? And what roles can I take on to take part in these changes?
What I saw in people as a young church minister were far too many who hug the status quo, who are fearful of surprise, and who believe in God as a sort of insurance policy (cover your bets). Having lost all interest in ideals, they could never learn to strive to become more than they are, living with the satisfactions of cool. They do not understand that faith is a learned behavior and that hope is a moral responsibility. In contrast, at the end of every book great readers apply the book's perspective on life to their own, and then come to terms on how that changes their own perspective.