![]()
PART 1
Why Should We Read Literature?
![]()
Chapter 1
UNDERSTANDING OUR EXPERIENCE
A Christian understanding of literature is grounded in beliefs derived from the Scriptures and developed through the course of Christian history. These beliefs provide the foundation for our attempts to explain the nature of literature and what it is that we do when we read it. For centuries in the Western world, Christian reflection upon interpretation—especially the “reading” of the Scriptures and of nature—deeply informed the practice and theory of interpretation for all written works. With the dramatic growth of secular thinking in the past several centuries, the influence of Christian thought upon literary study has become less explicit, even though the careful observer may still discover beneath the surface of contemporary thinking deep Christian roots.
Nevertheless, whether contemporary beliefs about literature show the historic influence of Christianity or its present insignificance, the task for the Christian student of literature remains that of grounding his or her thinking in the history of Christian thought. And one place for the Christian to begin thinking about literature is with the conviction, held by Christians through the ages, that in a universe created and ruled by a sovereign God all things are meaningful. The Scriptures proclaim that, in creating the world, God gave order and purpose to it, that in the Incarnation he sent his Son to redeem our fallen state, and that at the end of the age he will judge the nations and disclose the meaning of history in its fullness.
The loss of faith in a God who creates, reveals, and redeems is no doubt a major source of the sense of meaninglessness one finds in much modern literature. It is this loss of meaning, for example, that the American novelist Herman Melville contemplates in a passage from Moby-Dick. In the novel, Captain Ahab is driven by a passionate desire to discover the truth about life by slaying a whale called Moby Dick. As an incentive to his crew, Ahab nails a gold coin to one of his ship’s posts. This reward will go to the first person to spot Moby Dick. Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, reports that one day Ahab pauses as he passes the coin:
… he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way. (358)
In a Christian doctrine of Creation, the earth is much more than a cartload of dirt filling a hole in a corner of the Milky Way. In its abundance and complexity—as the Psalmist, the Apostle Paul, and many through the ages have proclaimed—the world gives evidence of having been the creation of God. God “has been pleased,” wrote John Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, “to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe …. On each of his works his glory is engraven in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse” (1: 51).
The doctrine of the Incarnation also testifies to the significance of earthly life. Though we have all sinned, God has neither destroyed nor abandoned humanity. We are not alone in our sins, the Gospel assures us, and the events of our lives are not the products of a cruel fate or random process. “So the Word was made flesh, in order that sin, destroyed by means of that same flesh through which it had gained the mastery and taken hold and lorded it, should no longer be in us,” explains the second-century theologian Irenaus, “and therefore our Lord took up the same first formation for an incarnation, that so he might join battle on behalf of his forefathers, and overcome through Adam what had stricken us through Adam” (Pelikan, 1: 144–145).
Thus, the doctrines of Creation and Incarnation affirm that human life is inherently meaningful. God has placed us in a world filled with order and hints of wonder, and through his acts of revelation and redemption he has entered into our history. As a result, although some things are obviously of greater importance than others, everything in our experience has significance, and our attempt to discern that significance—as well as we can—is part of our calling as God’s servants.
If we are convinced that our world has meaning, then we may see that interpretation is not isolated from the rest of life but is at the very heart of our life. The English teacher who scours a poem for symbols is not an odd person obsessed with meaning, for every one of us is always “reading experience.” The anxious student wants to know what her teacher means when he clasps his hands behind his head and stares off in the distance before answering her question; the job seeker tries to interpret the signals she receives from a potential employer during an interview; and the son tries to read between the lines of his parents’ latest letter to him at college.
Symbols and Meaning
Many modern works of literature focus upon questions of meaning and understanding, as do a number of classics from the past. For example, though Shakespeare’s King Lear was written almost four hundred years ago, it seems contemporary in its concern with interpretation and matters of meaning. The central character of the play, Lear, is an aging king who wants to finish his life in peace. To that end, he decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. In doing so, he hopes to avoid any conflict among his heirs after his death. Though he will relinquish authority, he plans to keep a group of knights as a symbol of his former power and to travel with this entourage from daughter to daughter in his final years.
Things go wrong for Lear, however. To decide how he should break up his kingdom, he devises a test of love for his daughters. He requires that each express her love to him, and two of them, Goneril and Regan, pass with high marks. But as they praise their father, their sister Cordelia concludes that she cannot match their hollow praise and resolves to say “nothing.” “I love your Majesty / According to my bond, nor more nor less,” she tells her father. Angered by her refusal to flatter him, the king banishes Cordelia from the kingdom and divides the land between Goneril and Regan.
Though Lear hopes to hold on to the symbols of kingship while giving up its responsibilities, Goneril and Regan have different plans. They see their father as an unstable old man who may go back on his word and attempt to reclaim the authority he has given them. Realizing that they face the possible loss of all they have acquired, Goneril and Regan set out to strip Lear of his remaining power and dignity. To that end, they determine to take from him his knights, the symbols he has kept as a reminder of his former authority.
Lear and those who still serve him are quick to notice the change in his status. His knight says that Lear is not treated with the same ceremony and civility as he had been; Goneril’s servant calls Lear not “my Lord” but rather “my lady’s father”; and Lear’s Fool, a court jester of sorts, says that Lear is an empty egg-shell, a zero without a number before it, and a shelled pea-pod. When Lear cries out, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” his Fool replies, “Lear’s shadow.”
At this point, a reader might ask, “What is the problem? After all, these are only metaphors and symbols. What does it matter that people no longer see Lear as a significant man?” The Fool could answer these questions, because he knows what is at stake in Lear’s having given up power. That is why he chooses images with a quality of emptiness to describe his weakened king. These images depict form without content, for the Fool knows that Lear had been foolish to believe he could retain the symbols of power without bearing its burdens.
As Lear struggles to retain his dignity, his daughters taunt him about the number of knights he wishes to keep in his service:
LEAR | What, must I come to you With five–and–twenty? Regan, said you so? |
REGAN | And speak’t again, my lord. No more with me. |
LEAR | … [To Goneril] I’ll go with thee. Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty, And thou art twice her love. |
GONERIL | Hear me, my lord. What need you five-and-twenty? ten? or five? To follow in a house where twice so many Have a command to tend you? |
REGAN | What need one? |
LEAR | O reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady: If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wears’t, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need …. (2.4. 248–65) |
Goneril and Regan argue that as a matter of practicality, Lear does not need to have any knights with him. The knights are rowdy, and the daughters can provide whatever service or protection their father needs. To their calculating claims, Lear can only cry out, “O reason not the need!” If life is only a matter of mechanics and calculation, he asks, why do his daughters dress themselves in such splendor? We have been created to make symbols and seek meaning, Lear argues, and everything in our life is significant. Everything signifies something. If the symbols with which we surround ourselves mean nothing, then our lives also mean little or nothing, because they have no human purpose: “Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
Lear had believed that he could keep the symbols of power without bearing its burdens. In some ways, he is like those who claim that literature can have symbolic power without being responsibly engaged with the cares of the world. And if Lear resembles those artists who believe it possible for art to have power without responsibility, then Goneril and Regan may resemble those who claim that literature is a waste of time. When they mock their father about his need for “useless” symbols, they sound like the people who cannot understand why anyone would want to spend time reading poems and stories, instead of learning money-making skills. Lear’s response is that all of us care deeply about symbolic things. Without our symbols, our lives would be “cheap as beast’s,” for in our power to make and comprehend symbols resides a good deal of our unique nature as human beings.
The arguments Goneril and Regan make against their father’s need for symbols may seem familiar to anyone who knows the history of the Christian church. From prohibitions against images in the Old Testament to modern injunctions against ministerial robes, the church has struggled with the question of the place of visual images in its worship of the unseen God. In political movements sparked by the Reformation, for example, certain Christians destroyed stained glass in cathedrals and statues that depicted sacred scenes. Typical of such disdain for images is an observation by Nicholas Ridley, an Anglican bishop of London in the sixteenth century: “If by virtue of the second commandment, images were not lawful in the temple of the Jews, then by the same commandment they are not lawful in the churches of the Christians” (Pelikan, 4: 217).
Although Ridley’s reasons for rejecting visual images are different from the reasons Goneril and Regan give for denying their father’s requests concerning his knights, the bishop seems to share Lear’s daughters’ belief that truth is a matter of facts and has nothing to do with symbols. But that is a hard thing to claim consistently, for all of us take verbal and visual symbols seriously. If we object to the fact that a Lutheran minister or Episcopal priest wears a robe, what do we say about the fact that our own minister always wears a dark business suit? Is not the suit as much a symbol as the robe? Does it not signify a number of things about the values of its wearer and his culture?
Though we may choose not to read books, we cannot avoid “reading” our experiences to discover the meaning of the symbols we encounter and the stories we enact. Whenever we make a judgment about something, we engage in the act of interpreting. Many of our judgments seem to be matters of “common sense,” because we reach them effortlessly and are convinced we could not possibly have made them differently. Yet even “common-sense” judgments are interpretations of a kind. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger explains:
An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us. If, when one is engaged in a particular concrete kind of interpretation, … one likes to appeal to what ‘stands there,’ then one finds that what ‘stands there’ in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpreting. (Heidegger, 191–92)
All of our knowledge relies upon such “undiscussed assumptions.” For example, in recent decades, historians of science have come to speak of paradigms, which are basic pictures or models that scientists use to bring the facts of the physical world into a coherent whole. The Newtonian image of the world as a great mechanism was a powerful paradigm. For several centuries, that model of reality helped to explain many things about the created universe. If we could ask an educated person of the late eighteenth century to explain his or her assumptions about nature, we might well be met with laughter or confusion. At that point in history, Newton’s theories seemed so conclusive that the average person would have been likely to consider the Newtonian model of reality to be a matter of common sense rather than an assumption of any kind. In the past century, however, following the work of Einstein and others, it has become much more difficult to argue that Newton’s understanding of nature provides an exhaustive explanation of the created order.
Just as scientists use paradigms to organize their data, so do all of us use models to comprehend the world. Models enable students of the Scriptures to emphasize unifying themes as keys to the Bible and help political observers to put into perspective the events and trends of political life. Even infants are constantly about the business of organizing patterns of experience and expectation to help them interpret the many new things they encounter each day.
Paul Ricoeur argues that human actions are like books that stand in need of interpreters. “Like a text, human action is an open work, the meaning of which is ‘in suspense,’” writes Ricoeur. “Human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations which decide their meaning …. Human action, too, is opened to anybody who can read” (Hermeneutics, 208). The understanding we acquire through reading of literature can help us make sense of human actions, just as an understanding of human behavior is essential for a deep appreciation of literature.
Reading Books
One of the most important ways that we can deepen our understanding of our world and actions is through a careful reading of books from the past—whether they be recognized classics or less familiar voices from that past. For the Christian, whose faith is rooted in the events of ancient Palestine and in the life of the Church and culture over the ages, history matters. “In life,” writes Alasdair MacIntyre, “we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not our making” (213). To learn how to act in our present scene and to make sense of the stage we find ourselves upon, we explore the earlier scenes of our play as they have been r...
