Why is literature
central to the humanities? And why is it so difficult to study it?
The answers are
related. The first thing to note is that among the humanities,
literature is the odd man out because it is an art. Students and
scholars of literature do not use specific, more-or-less scientific
methods to study a specific component of human life; they study an
art that takes human beings as its subject. Literature is the only
art that inevitably takes human beings as its subject, which is one
reason, presumably, that's it's grouped with the humanities rather
than the fine arts. The other reason is that literature does not,
like music, involve learning a new language, or, like music and the
visual arts, isolatable and teachable techniques (the exception is
poetry, which traditionally was grouped with the fine arts).
Literature was
originally included in a liberal arts education, alongside the human
sciences, because it was considered that a familiarity with the
classics of literature was a necessary part of being a cultivated
person. In order to become familiar with the classics of literature,
however, all one has to do is read them. It has never been clear how
one teaches these texts. After all, you don't “teach literature”
the way you teach music, or teach painting, or teach dance. Art is
represented in the humanities as Art History, but as such, like
Religious Studies, it's taught as a special branch of history,
looking at a cultural phenomenon on which great importance has
traditionally been placed. Literature, on the other hand, is supposed
to stand alongside History, as its own liberal art and area of the
humanities.
The reason that
literature, as an academic subject, has lagged behind the other
humanities in becoming a type of (soft) science, is not that English
students are especially backward or fuzzy-headed, but that at bottom,
students and professors know that what they are there to do is read
books. Literature students are not engaged in a practice, as
historians are when they study history or philosophers when they
practice philosophy. (Philosophy, the other non-scientific humanities
field, asks many of the same broad questions about human beings and
human life as science, but uses abstract reason rather than empirical
analysis and testing to develop answers.) Literature students are
reading books. Moreover, because of the status that canonical
literature acquires, the humanists within Humanities departments
often want to interfere as little as possible in the student's
experience of the books, from which students are supposed to get
everything they need.
Naturally this has led
to a lot of confusion about what English, as an academic subject, is,
and what its students and scholars are or should be doing. The
confusion that what students are doing is studying literature as a
cultural product leads to Cultural Studies and to attracting students
to English with courses about popular new books (which can of course
be made interesting through postmodern theory: everything can). We
have already seen that students cannot be engaged in the study of
literary history if English is, as it is taken to be, its own
subject; although there is a large component of literary history to
what English students do.
Another way in which
English students become confused about their subject is that a large
component of any university subject is reading books. In other
subjects, however, the books present information or arguments about
the subject (say, American history, or epistemology, or biology). In
English, the books are the subject. Confusion about this
difference leads to the idea that what one is studying is the
author's ideas, making English into a less rigorous form of
philosophy.
There are a couple of
reasons why so much radical theory found a home in English
departments, from Freud and Marx to feminism, queer theory, and
postcolonialism. First, the literary canon has the peculiar feature
of coming to stand for cultural authority, quite regardless of
whatever ideas the authors represented in it may have had. We often
view this as an ex post facto sacralization of literature, but
although the phenomenon is most familiar from sacred texts (e.g. The
Bible, The Koran), it occurs just as often with secular texts (The
Confucian Four Books and Five Classics, The Iliad,
Shakespeare). Although any art will acquire a canon, none of the
others have anything like the cultural authority of the literary
canon: no matter how visual the culture becomes, writing continues to
bear authority. At the same time, humanists, understanding that
literature is central to the humanities, mistakenly took this to mean
that the literary canon exemplifies humanist values. Accordingly,
those who are critical of or disappointed in humanism found a logical
target in the literary canon, which is also a useful target because
of its embodiment of authority.
As Frye recounts in the
“Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy: since neither
English students nor English professors are exactly sure what they're
supposed to be doing, professors have had to look outside of the
subject area for ideas that are teachable, and have found no shortage
of them. Since the nature of textual interpretation is such that you
can make almost any text into an allegory for almost anything,
literature turns out to be a fantastic way of teaching the ideas of
the professor's favourite thinker; and as a bonus, you can also
symbolically attack authority.
This is how English has
gone, or always already went, from being about gaining familiarity
with canonical literature as part of becoming a cultivated
individual, to being about attacking canonical literature in order to
prove you're duly sceptical of bourgeois Western values.
For Frye, rectifying
this situation begins with understanding that what the literature
student or scholar is doing (as the philosopher does philosophy or
the physicist does physics) is not “literature”; literature is
what writers do. What literature students and scholars are doing is
criticism. It would therefore go a long way toward clarifying things
to rename English, English Criticism.
This both is and is not
a solution. Students who are avid readers will show up to gain a
familiarity with literature; students who are pissed off (with good
reason) about Western values or who just like symbolically attacking
authority will show up for the other stuff. But I'm not sure who
would show up to study English Criticism. We certainly believe that
literature is as important as philosophy or history; but do we
believe that criticism is?
And yet is makes sense.
The philosophy student or professor who reads the work of a canonical
or contemporary philosopher, as they will do in their studies, is
reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they
are. When an English student or professor reads the work that they
are supposed to be studying, they are obviously not reading the work
of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. Yet the
literary works, and not criticism, are made central to the study of
literature (which is exactly why humanists are always shrieking that
they're losing centrality); and, moreover, justify it as a
field of study.
For Frye, the real
reason that literature is central to the humanities and the liberal
arts is that it bridges history and philosophy, with the specificity,
the ties to reality and necessity, of the former and the power of
generalization and speculation of the latter. In doing so, it creates
a hypothetical construct that liberates the reader by freeing her
from having to recognize the mere contingency of the natural world
(let alone the social world) as necessity. The impulse of imaginative
literature is to always propose an alternative; and literature is
most important to us of all when that alternative can't be realized,
but can only be imagined. Behind these descriptions is
presumably some kind of Kantian notion of art as the mental faculties
of human beings in free play, liberated from instrumentalism and
delighting in themselves.
Frye is all thunder and
brimstone in his “Polemical Introduction”; curiously, in his
“Tentative Conclusion,” as the title suggests, he has lost his
fire, and states more than once that he's not suggesting that
literary critics should change what they're doing. Supposing,
however, that the study of literature were to become Frye's
criticism, and were accordingly to become more scientific. This would
doubtless be useful, since if nothing else, the magisterial, densely
argued, wildly erudite, elegantly written, and occasionally
mad-as-a-hatter Anatomy succeeds in showing what fascinating
things can result if we stop reading literature as humanists, for the
characters, author, and meaning (or their replacement, the oppressed
and the means of oppression), and start studying it methodically and
analytically.
This would be a great
discipline that would definitely advance human knowledge more than
the way we currently study literature does; but would studying
literature in this way still do the humanist job that produces some
of Frye's greatest flights of rhetoric in the Anatomy? For a
man who wants literary criticism to be a science, he sure gets
excited about the benefits of the liberal arts.
As an illustration (and
only a minor one) of what Frye's kind of criticism can do, the
portion of the Anatomy with most relevance to subjects I've
written about on this blog is where he distinguishes between the
different types of prose fiction (in the Fourth Essay): the novel (by
which he means the social novel), the romance, the confession, and
Menippean satire or anatomy. In other words, while public criticism
currently consists of babbling about whether or not Sheila Heti or
Karl Ove Knausgaard is really making art, Frye just throws
confession (i.e., literary autobiography) in with “prose fiction,”
which makes sense considering that particularly since Modernism,
novelists have been blurring the line between fiction and
autobiography, and, as Frye points out, the novel and the confession
develop together and mutually influence each other. And yet we still
can't get over this blurring, because in speaking of book-length
prose fiction we have no vocabulary other than “novel” (by which
we mean the European social novel) and “experimental novel,”
which is every extended work of prose fiction that is not like “the
novel,” although it may in fact be trying to be something else, and
therefore be neither a novel nor experimental (even though the author
himself or herself may make this same mistake).
We pay a huge price for
reading literature the humanist way: not only a deeply confused
academic discipline, but also an impoverished, ahistorical public
criticism. No one took heed of Frye in 1957 and no one is going to do
so now, but reading the Anatomy helps to clarify why English
is the strange, fraught subject it is, as well as being
extraordinarily, if fitfully, illuminating on the subject of
literature. Frye manages the seemingly impossible feat of producing a
methodical and theoretical work of literary criticism that is
nevertheless consistently personal in tone, full of aperาซus
and insights; which makes it, after all, the rarest and most valuable
form of criticism, not scientific but humanist, a work of literature
in itself, though not a work of (in the familiar meaning of the word)
fiction – in a word, an anatomy.
