Trying On: The American Education

Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice grants us an account of a question that isn’t often asked of literature (at least not explicitly)–its moral “worth,” what and how a literary text might do to direct us in our otherwise wayward lives. It is worth asking why it is that this question isn’t often addressed. Or, more specifically, we might ask why it is that Nussbaum begins her book with a meditation on her experiences teaching literature as evidence for reasoning in a law school classroom. Nussbaum premises her approach to literature on an assumed and unspoken difference, which seems to run something like this: for all of the excesses of cultural materialism, marxist ideology-readings and psychoanalysis and its discontents, we are still ignoring one basic thing about books: that they matter to us, in ways which augment and indeed decide the small ways and courses of our lives; and that this often occurs whether we are conscious of it or not. 

Nussbaum’s treatment, then, calls back into question every English Department’s golden Verboten: an ethical approach to literature. She almost goes so far as to align herself with some of the contemporary struggle over ’symptomatic reading’ and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’–almost, but not quite. And this not going far enough becomes a “too far” that I just can’t overlook. How’s this? Well: Nussbaum sets out to read literature–Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, specifically, and, later on, in her “Poets as Judges” chapter, key passages from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass–without the apparatus and (one might presume) baggage of critical vocabularies. She achieves this, to some extent, and gives us a few fine lines that would set her on the old Quaker benches with the fading order of critics and philosophers who call themselves “aesthetic” readers. In other words, she reads for affect. Nussbaum is not afraid to tell us that books move her–nor is she timid about extending that me to an “us.” And–more importantly for her work–nor is she terribly concerned about getting behind the how and why of it.

Thus, Nussbaum takes a turn that few readers of “affect” or critics of cultural materialist approaches would follow–instead of delving into the “richness of meaning,” the numinous quality of textual detail and formal element that produces the arresting aesthetic (and even moral) effect that literature wroughts us with, Nussbaum turns straight to the meaning. You’ve got it: she’s concerned with morals, with endings and lessons, with applications and the the specificity of the character. And assumes a sort of transparent banking model of the depositing of meaning: you drive through, you say the names of all of the characters that you meet, you “get” what’s happened to them, and how you should do or not do the same or different things in the same or different situations, and you drive off, deeply enriched. 

Nussbaum gets two things wrong here: first, reading doesn’t work like that. Even if one is a very good reader, and comes away with a bundle of morals, who’s to say that these “morals” work on the level of categoricals and moral principles? It seems much more likely that literary “morals” (insofar as we must buy in to a sort of metaphysics of presence of clear and transparent moral lessons to meet Nussbaum at this crossing) work in a far less clear and tractable manner. Some literary experiences may shake us–as per Abraham’s moment of religious conversion in Kierkegaard’s Fear in Trembling (or Johannes de Silentio, rather, since FT itself was intended as a work of literature)–and render us dumb; others may trouble us or awaken in us strange wills and passions that we must either confront as wily and insidious beyond the bounds of good-natured principles, or as the dark twin of literary “morality.” One only has to think of Dorian Gray’s terrible–but ultimately futile–desire to look away from the little yellow book (Huysman’s Au Rebours) in Wilde’s Picture, or the rash of “fashionable” suicides that seized Europe after the publication of Goethe’s Werther to see that, insofar as literature affects us, Nussbaum’s definition does not suffice. Either we need to expand the notion of literary “morals”–so much so that we include questionably rule-governed affective experiences like quaking, vomiting, or, in the case of Updike’s Rabbit series, sudden obsessive interests in Mr. Goodbar candy (at which point the thing definied threatens to become insolvent); or, we must submit ourselves (and the books that teach us) to a far more rigorous investigation of exactly how it is that books teach us stuff.

Nussbaum isn’t without her overtures to this later method. She’s no dummy about literature’s affective quality, and nor does she ignore the imaginative power of metaphor or the Bakhtinian play of authorial intention over and against the voices of characters (she doesn’t site Bakhtin, of course–but, after all, this is Law School). However, Nussbaum is guilty of what I will call a supervenient not-taking-seriously of the literariness of literature.  I say that Nussbaum is guilty of a “not-taking-seriously” precisely because I do not wish to say the other things: that Nussbaum does not or fails to take the literariness of texts seriously; nor do I wish to imply that she is ignorant us literary specificity or the fullness of literary meaning, or that she cannot see it. I give Nussbaum the benefit of this vat of doubt: it really just seems like she isn’t interested in that sack of potatoes. After all, the debate about literary specificity (whatever that means!) is already raging in the field, and Nussbaum, as she told us at the beginning, is interested in doing interdisciplinary work: namely, in teaching lawyers, moral philosophers, and other maenads of John Rawls that literature is sort of like a form of reasoning, too. But that initial appeal to a specific, limited audience, no matter how much it fulfills Kenneth Burke’s insistence that we get beyond the myth of the universal audience, doesn’t get Nussbaum off the big hook she thinks she’s swerving left of. Eating bones outside of the doghouse doesn’t make them cake. 

We need to begin with an understanding of where and how Nussbaum goes wrong. In the same sort of move that Derrida finds happening all over the history of metaphysics, Nussbaum makes a fundamental assumption in her reading of literature as moral repository, and stays silent about it. This assumption is not so much a big, bold statement as it is a failure to distinguish carefully. To distinguish what? Character from literary effect, phrase from action, Gradgrind against Grandgrind’s language. Nussbaum does treat literary effect–the fact that what’s going on is actually occuring in a book, that was published, that we are holding before us now, dancing on the grave of Charles Darwin, who moderated his own frequent declarations of “I am” in face of the effacement of his literary death–some. Her most moving remembrance of the power of effect–and especially, of the cross-cutting effect of language against portrayed narrative action–comes in her meditation on Dickens’s description of the Grandgrind children’s neat cubbies. The cubbies are tidy, bare, intricately lined with catalogues of objects of rational inquiry that would make Aristotle and Linnaeus forsake the bathhouses:

The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science too. They had a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinent, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instrumentd their own names; and to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper…                    (Dickens, in Nussbaum 41).

Dickens’s narrator’s description is anything but: he is posh, elaborate, and, as (most of us) can’t fail to see, hilariously inappropriate to the intentionality of the arrangement that careful Mr. Gradgrind is trying to effect. Nussbaum gets this–in fact, she likes it. According to Nussbaum, the narrator’s move “deliberately embodies and evokes forms of desire and sensuality profoundly opposed to those it imputes to Gradgrind’s version of economics. Imagine language as a way of touching a human body, Dickens suggests, and you have a way of scrutinizing the claims of Gradgrind’s theory to stand for us in the fullness of our selves…” (41).  Nussbaum likes language–style, though she does not ever put it that way–because it wakes us up to the “fullness of ourselves”–it is the little knot that shows all of Gradgrind’s grand reductive theories to be just that (41). Nussbaum’s problem is that she also likes Grandgrind, Sissy Jupe, Bounderby and Louisa–and doesn’t distinguish in any sense what we might learn from each domain (the stylistic fullness and richness of the text vs. our “full person” reading of a character), or how, as most of us already-poisoned English Department folks would expect, the one influences the other.

I can be less coy: by “one influencing the other,” I mean that Nussbaum does not significantly engage the fact that the literary medium through which we get these characters is itself a highly constructed and mediated thing. This critique is important for two reasons, and for two (perhaps not wholly) different contingencies: first, by not taking the literariness of the literature seriously, Nussbaum denies all of the “outside” socio-political elements that bear in on a text and are the things that speak its language. Here, I mean culture, discourse, society–Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt wearing party hats, everybody else’s spit roiling in the authorial mouth. Second (and managing, miraculously, to offend both sides of the road), Nussbaum fails to take seriously, if not the intentionality of the author, his willful binding up of those characters and those words in that way in that book, with 509 pages instead of 232, or beginning with Stately and not Fat. The problem here is that, in a hopeful anti-utilitarian crusade like Poetic Justice, Nussbaum’s chief line of talk is taking seriously the irreducible specificity and uniqueness of persons: Sissy Jupe is not What’s-His-Face who gives the “rational” description of the horses; we shouldn’t treat them alike because they speak differently, think differently, and imagine differently–what might elate Sissy would be lost on Bitzer, and what Louisa really needs is a bit more Linda Williams and a bit less time with the Little Miss Curie training set. But what about the irreducible specificity and uniqueness of the author? Charles Dickens is not William Faulkner. Fleshing out–and respecting– what this different means demands paying more attention to language (and by that I mean literary style). And, in a return to the first problematic, it may just mean paying attention to conditions of cultural production, to power and circumstance, to the conditions of serializing novels or the laughing shadow of satire in realism. Nussbaum doesn’t want to be Greenblatt or William Empson. But if she wants to take literature seriously, she has to take literary difference seriously–and that means talking about some of the things they talk about, jargon or no jargon.

But, to return to the two problems:

Among the significant lacunae–lacunae, and not faux pas, since Nussbaum, again, is conspicuously silent on these issues–that Nussbaum makes is not taking seriously the meaning and history of the 19th century Anglo realist novel as genre. There’s an assumption behind that–an assumption which governs what she is able to conclude in Poetic Justice, and how she concludes it. Presumably, Nussbaum takes the 19th century omniscient narrative voice as her example because it sounds the most like us. She picks realist because, if you squint hard enough, we can read it like it’s a window–which is to say that we can forget that we are reading at all. With this squint still on our brow, we can take Gradgrind, Sissy, Bounderby and the rest of them as people like us–more people to know, more people to learn from, people who, interestingly enough, live in Industrial-era England, and who are alternately quite dumb and quite wise about how best and most expansively to get on in their circumstances. But the difficulty–and the trouble Nussbaum’s argument–is that they aren’t just people. There’s something wrong with taking literature as a sort of cheap brothel for interesting exemplars. We get in trouble on all fronts, syphilis in the Attic and climydia smoking on the stairs: either we forget that literature is literature and think (opposite those folks from Soliant Green) that “it’s people!”, and thus subject ourselves to the prejudices of Jason Compson, the bafflement of Leopold Bloom, the nihilism of Raskolnikov; or we get really disappointed and disaffected with the text, and fail to be moved by it at all. The consequences of the first mistaking is our relinquishing of a necessary distance–not the ability to judge Raskolnikov as if the narrator weren’t there, but the ability to productively deliberate between what the narrator says and how the narrator says it. Which are the only gates of access to Nussbaum’s people (I’ll call them characters) that we have, anyhow. The consequences of the second mistake, I think, are somewhat more dire–in being disaffected by literature, in sticking too strongly to our moorings in philosophical and scientistic discourse to grapple with the problem of what Derrida calls “fictional discourse,” we lose something: not just the canons of experience (factories in England, the horse-riders at the circus, angry utilitarians) or moral lessons (don’t teach, or for that matter, marry off your children according to a quanta theory of happiness) that Nussbaum acknowledges so well, but the deliberative struggle of deciding, almost “on our own” but always within the strong arms of the author’s language, by what and how to be moved. 

Even so, Nussbaum’s theory assumes altogether too much clarity: why are we to presume, considering all of these factors, that literature will allow us to better come to a clear moral consensus on the decisions we make in our lives, in our subsequent reading experiences? Nussbaum’s clarity is possible because of her initial reductions (bracketing out, except in a few places, style and context in exchange for “higher-order”–and less specifically literary–concepts like “imagination” and “fancy”); it’s much more likely that an actual reader (and a careful reader) would land fairly firmly in confusion. We can assume that Nussbaum doesn’t want to go there, because it’s a scary thought: what good is it to make the case that literature produces muddle and not clarity, moral chaos instead of a quiet citadel of deliberative reflection? Certainly this case wouldn’t be persuasive for perplexed law school deans looking for a course to cut (“Joyce for Jurisprudence”?); neither does it pass the hopeful-cum-messianic markers required for a basic sort of later-day Humanism. Nussbaum effectively must argue that literature does real moral work. After all, she’s presumably writing this book because literature fulfills some need in reasoning, in the demands of being a good person, a good judge, that theories of moral reasoning don’t quit get to the bottom of. To put it another way: Nussbaum thinks that learning to be a good reader isn’t just analogous to learning to be a good person or lawyer or doctor or judge–rather, literature is additive: it gives us something more, something sort of mysterious, something that’s in there in the book somewhere, something that is so truly great and transformative and on the diminishing horizon of public consideration that someone–Nussbaum–should make a case for it.

Aristotle, one of Nussbaum’s darling, writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that phronesis (or, practical wisdom) helps us shoot with the right aim at the right target. Nussbaum, bless her with contemporary necessity, has the right target: there’s something to literature, alright. But her aim is somehow askance–pointing to the book and saying it’s in the book is enough to get those vaguely mystic souls who are compelled by conversion experiences that can’t be articulated to file down from Mount Moriah and into the local Barnes and Noble. But if Nussbaum wants her book to talk–not just to lawyers, but to the people who were already taking literature seriously–she needs to do something more. If we aren’t to view persons as mere “containers of satisfaction”–which Nussbaum poignantly argues we should not do–means that we need to be open to hearing all of literature,  instead of treating it as a convenient sort of “containers of persons” for possible moral experience (Nussbaum 50).  We must tread in its confusions, in its clarificatory power out of the muddles it makes real to us–the muddles that are as much muddles of language, and of language and interpretation over and against character and happening.