Next up on the essays shelf:
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
While Fadiman does not go after the “culture wars” with the same scorched-earth policy that Camille Paglia did (and still does), her aim is the same. There are those who want to control what we read, and also want to control how we interpret what we read. In a culture that de-values art, anyway, Literature is seen as an unnecessary luxury, or a dangerous provocation. People argue about the silliest things. So-and-so was a drunkard, a criminal, a fascist: yet he wrote this great book. How should we feel about this?? Oh, I don’t know. Read the fucking book and make up your own mind. Separate the artist from the art, if you are able to do that. If you are unable to do that, I feel sorry for you. No really. I do. Because you miss out on so much. The arguments are all here in Fadiman’s essay: Huck Finn should not be read because of its use of the word “nigger”. Never mind the context, and never mind the larger story of what that book is saying. The WORD is now “out” with our enlightened culture (and rightly so, it shouldn’t need to be said), and so we must now read second-rate more “correct” books which will not sully our precious consciences. Obviously it’s clear how I feel about the culture warriors. As long as they don’t get in my damn way, I have no feeling for them but contempt and pity. I find their arguments to be stupid and uninteresting. A waste of time. To quote William Blake, “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.” The culture warriors come from the left and the right. In many strange cases, left-wing feminists become aligned with right-wing religious bossypants: Both want to control/sanitize/restrict the intake of the gullible public with works that they personally find problematic.
Fadiman breaks down four of the major issues in the culture wars around literature, and discusses them. She uses as her motif the story from Greek mythology of the serial killer Procustes who would abduct travelers along the road, tie them to a bed, and then chop off whatever didn’t fit in the bed. Legs too long? Chop them off. Arms too long? Chop them off. Fadiman, in her typically insightful way, sees a correlation with the culture warriors, who are just so NERVOUS about how people might react to literature (“what if they don’t interpret it the right way? What if they think it’s okay to say the word ‘nigger’ because it shows up in Mark Twain’s book? We need to DO something about this.” You know: Thought Police people.) – that they try to lop off whatever doesn’t fit into our modern-day sensibility. It is a one-size-fits-all mentality that is fascist in nature. Atomize literature, break it down, lop off that which doesn’t fit. 19th century classic which unfortunately shows sexist attitudes? Well, this will not do. People need to be reminded that these attitudes are BAD, otherwise … good Lord, they may think their own thoughts about it, and we can’t let THAT happen.
One of the arguments of culture warriors that Fadiman finds interesting is the belief that literature should be “self-building”. That all literature is meant to make us grow, change, learn. That is the only reason to read books, that is the only reason to keep literature around. It should be uplifting, in other words. It should have the Oprah message woven into it. Fadiman, in her essay, says that this is the LEAST problematic of the arguments because “self-building” is often a byproduct of great literature anyway. And if people get major life lessons out of Brothers Karamazov, lessons they find therapeutic, helpful, then what’s the harm? It’s certainly not the POINT of literature, nor SHOULD it be. (It’s just another way to be like Procrustes: demanding that books fit the bed we want it to fit: if it doesn’t assist us in “self-building” then the book must be bad, dangerous, etc.)
Fadiman, in this section, discusses an example of using literature as “self-building”. It speaks for itself. It’s gorgeous. I find reading it to be “self-building” in and of itself!
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
These days, it is mostly the people who consider themselves to be on the cultural left who ally themselves with the self-builders, and mostly those on the right who accuse the self-builders of shallow egotism. This just shows how fickle the whole right-to-left spectrum is, for the self-building position used to be considered conservative. It was Matthew Arnold, that well-known revolutionary firebrand, who wrote “that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, — to the question: How to live.” Whatever critical cycle we happen to have been born into, reading with only one motive in mind seems unnecessarily restrictive. However, to those who insist on a single path, I would recommend self-building. They will miss a great deal, but they will miss even more if their reading is a disembodied intellectual expereince that has been carefully divorced from their own lives.
People who have concentrated on self-building haven’t turned out so badly. Consider the example of Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s running mate, whose favorite book was the Enchiridion of Epictetus. Judging from Stockdale’s incoherence in the 1992 presidential debate, I think it’s fair to say that he didn’t learn much about literary style from Epictetus. However, he did learn something about Arnold’s “powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.”
Stockdale first read the Enchiridion at the age of thirty-eight, when the navy sent him to Stanford to study international relations, and Philip Rhinelander, the dean of humanities and sciences, invited him to take his philosophy course. Stockdale did so, received supplementary tutoring from Rhindelander, and found himself drawn to the Stoics. Rhinelander mentioned that Frederick the Great had always brought a copy of the Enchiridion on his military campaigns, so when Stockdale was sent to Vietnam, he took along the copy his professor had given him during their last meeting. In September of 1966, Stockdale’s plane was hit by antiaircraft fire over North Vietnam, and as he was descending by parachute, knowing he was about to become a prisoner of war, he said to himself, “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the word of Epictetus.” I would venture a guess that this is the first time a parachutist has thought about first-century Stoic philosophy on the way down. Stockdale didn’t have his copy of the Enchiridion with him, but he hardly needed to, since by that time he had the book virtually memorized.
Epictetus, born as a slave in Phrygia and sold to Nero’s secretary, is said to have once murmured quietly to his master, who was twisting his leg, “You will break it.” When the leg broke, he said with a smile, “Did I not tell you that you would do so?” Stockdale contemplated this incident during seven years as a prisoner of war, four of which were spent in solitary confinement and two in leg irons. He also pondered the following passages, among others:
Work, therefore, to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not, and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to your ability to choose, unless that is your choice. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose.
Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Upon all occasions we ought to have these [words of Socrates] ready at hand: … “O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be. Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed, but hurt me they cannot.”
It was in this way that, through more than fifteen episodes of torture, Stockdale was able to preserve the self that Epictetus had helped him build. When he was released by Hanoi in 1973, he was lame, just as Epictetus was when he was released from slavery in Rome, but, like his exemplar, he believed that his external suffering had failed to destroy his internal sense of freedom. I can think of worse ways to use literature.
