Thoughts on Education and Literature

It's odd what results from teaching an afternoon schedule this semester. Some people come home from work and turn on the television and just sit and watch whatever comes on next without caring what it is. This afternoon, I finished teaching my classes, went to the library to look for a couple of things, turned on the computer and started following an incredibly long thread that normally I would never have wasted time on. And yet, strangely enough, I eventually found that it tied together a number of things that have been on my mind recently.

I got into this thread via sci.psychology.misc, a newsgroup created a number of months ago when sci.psychology was split up. As I saw it, sci.psychology.misc was designed in large part to become a sort of ghetto, somewhat analogous to those homelands which years ago the South African government, back in the evil days of Apartheid, had set up for their second-class black brothers. Or, from another perspective, one might think of it as analogous to the famous Salon des Refuses [acute accent over the final e] where the French Impressionists made their debut in the Nineteenth Century. In any case, sci.psychology.misc was meant to be (at least as I saw it) the independent homeland (or salon, if you prefer) for those who, like myself, persisted in posting articles in sci.psychology from perspectives other than the academically sanctioned ones.

It all relates to the attitude that certain people know the correct values, attitudes, and topics to be discussed and taught in various academic environments. Academically Correct, one might say, in analogy to the phrase Politically Correct.

The irony of the Salon des Refuses is that the Impressionists, who were castigated so mercilessly by the academic painters in Nineteenth Century France (i.e. the 1800s, for those who don't understand about Centuries) eventually became the most well known and popular school in all of Western art history and have become the focus of academic attention to such an extent that the academics who opposed them have been relegated to almost footnotes.

I've always thought that this was a little comparable to what happened with jazz in the forties and fifties. The pioneers of bop (originally known as bebop) were thoroughly castigated and ridiculed by the jazz traditionalists and in the daily press and popular magazines. And yet eventually they -- musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane -- took on the same favored role in the world of jazz that the Impressionists have in Western painting. A lot of pre-bop jazz is certainly worthwhile, but lots of the time one wants something not quite that simple. And after bop, on the other hand, a lot of jazz started becoming a bit too weird for a lot of people.

As to South Africa, of course, we all know what eventually happened there. (Or at least I hope we all know. In a world in which professors have routinely started saying ``the 1800s'' because it can no longer be assumed that students will understand what is meant by the Nineteenth Century, it's a little risky to take any common knowledge for granted.)

And sci.psychology (to perhaps descend from the sublime to the ridiculous), the newsgroup that was intended to disappear, is still very much alive and still provides a forum for some quite lively discussions, almost completely disdained by the academic psychologists, whereas sci.psychology.misc is generally arrived at only by those who have completely lost their way. (I have an idea that some day my own preferred approach to psychology, NLP [Neuro-Linguistic Programming], may some day acquire the same favored status among psychologists that the Impressionists have among art devotes [acute accent over the final e]. But only time will tell. For the moment, most academic psychologists do not see it as something they need to learn about.)

First of all, I think that the examples given above -- Impressionism, Bebop, and even Neuro-Linguistic Programming -- are illustrations of the folly of believing that one can ever know for sure what is worth learning about and teaching and what is not.

And second of all, one can ask whether or not there's any real value in all the little academic erudite flotsam distributed among the preceding paragraphs -- recent South African history, Nineteenth Century French painting, terminology for designating centuries, acute accents (as contrasted to grave accents and circumflexes). Is it worth getting an education to acquire this sort of erudition? Or is all this simply a very fancy kind of trivia? Or maybe, as many would claim, a very elitist form of entertainment.

I know that for me, having this sort of education has value. It is odd that, just before tuning into this thread on usenet, I had in fact been in the library to look for Harold Bloom's book, The Western Canon (that infamous collection of praise for various dead white males). As a mathematician, this is certainly way outside my own discipline, and if it is be to considered entertainment, it certainly looks like it will prove to be a heavy-going form of it. But I've decided that I want to know what Bloom has to say about numerous authors who have been important to me at various times in my life.

I've also been sitting in on (not completely coincidentally) a course in French literature (in translation). Among other things, this has involved my reading Swann's Way. I must say that, for me, just the very fact that I've been able to read this volume all the way through has been a major accomplishment. (Fortunately, I had already figured out for myself the strategy that my French teacher would later recommend -- that I not try to read it in a few days but instead read about twenty pages every evening for a month or so.) The fascinating thing is, though, that after having finally got to the end, I've realized that this book, which I would never have chosen to read on my own, was exactly the book that I needed to read at this point in my life.

The most fascinating thing of all, though, was a remark which my French teacher made the other day in class. She told her students that the reason they are getting an education is not so they will be able to go out in the world and earn more money -- altho that will in fact be a by-product (or at least so she claims) -- but in order to enrich their lives. And I sat there looking at this class of undergraduates and thought to myself, ``My, there certainly is an enormous gulf between that part of the university she belongs to and my own part! If I ever tried to tell my calculus students that they should consider mathematics as something worthwhile for its own sake or something that would enrich their lives, they'd look at me as if I were stark raving bonkers!''

As far as the idea that a lot of the things one picks up as education are just a form of elitist trivia, though, I think that in large part the reason one becomes educated is the same as the reason one reads the newspaper and listens to the news on television. One wants to have some familiarity with the environment that surrounds one. The cultural environment, the cultural landscape.

In article <43elbe$b3n@b.stat.purdue.edu>, Herman Rubin (hrubin@b.stat.purdue.edu) wrote:
>
>I wish to raise a question which seems to be ignored; what is the
>purpose of the reading assignments, or in fact of any other assignments?
>The purpose of education should be to attain knowledge and ability;
>to justify the reading assignment, it must contribute to this.
>
>The reading assignments which have been questioned are largely in English
>classes. The objections have been based on issues not of understanding
>of the English language, or even of understanding of forms of expression
>such as the short story or the novel, but of the specific philosophy
>promulgated in those books. Possibly a discussion of the use of disguised
>propaganda based on part of the book might be relevant, but much of what is
>called Literature (I have deliberately used the capital L) is very thinly
>disguised philosophy.

And in a later article, he amplifies:
>
>The content of most works of fiction can be easily summarized in a
>few pages. Stretching it out into several hundred pages does little
>for the purpose of understanding.
>
>As for esthetic appreciation, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
>What one considers art, another considers garbage.

Herman, one can see that literature is not your forte [no acute accent over the final e, although the word does come from Old French]. Well, okay, then. I guess a tone-deaf person wouldn't see much value in a musical education either.

Now that you mention, it though, I do think that our system does place too great an emphasize on the verbal arts and not enough on the visual and auditory ones. It seems quite strange to me that a person can be considered educated who knows nothing about Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or, for that matter, the Beatles. Or, come to think of it, about Martin Scorsese, or Frank Capra, or Francois Truffaut. Or actors. How is it that one can get a college degree without ever seeing a Charlie Chaplin film?

But there's so much stuff an educated person ought to know about, and so few courses a student can take.

Ultimately, when someone presumes to be able to specify the body of work than an educated person should be familiar with, what it comes down to is that the person presuming to specify thinks that the goal of education should be to produce people like him/herself. So one doesn't find Herman Rubin recommending the study of literature any more than one finds Harold Bloom recommending a mastery of mathematics.

As to literature being philosophy in disguise.... Yes, sometimes.

When I was much younger, I used to feel it important to give reading lists to people I knew. I felt that through my reading, I had achieved a profound understanding of the world, and I wanted my friends to achieve the same understanding.

The books on my list were mostly literature, and some of them were indeed philosophy in disguise. Few of these books were to be found in the syllabuses for English courses. For instance, I recommended The Razor's Edge, by Somerset Maughm. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell. And The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I thought that The Fountainhead was very important, because it represented an important stage of growth in my thinking. When at first read it (at about the age of twenty), I was very impressed by Rand's philosophy, and then later I realized how completely wrong it was. So I would recommend it to friends, so that they could go through the same stages of growth. But, to my dismay, many of them totally bought into Rand's ideas, and I would then say, ``But don't you see how wrong this all is?'' but I couldn't get them to go on to the second stage.

(I think, incidentally, that it's really important in one's education to be required to read books that one disagrees with. It's important to learn that just because something is written down, or even considered a classic, that doesn't mean that one has to believe it.)

But I recommended many other books simply because they had had a profound emotional impact on me. It's hard for me to remember many of them now, but there were some of Eugene O'Neil's lesser known plays, in particular ``The Great God Brown.'' And a collection of stories by Carson McCullers, called The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. And T.S. Eliot's most popular poem, ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' (``Let us go then, You and I, When the Evening lies against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table....'') I don't think that any of these can be called disguised philosophy or propoganda, but something in them spoke very deeply to me. For one period in my life, Dostoievsky was very important to me. And although Herman might say that Dostoievsky is disguised philosophy and propaganda, I often disagreed with Dostoievsky's overt philosophical message, and yet found that his books spoke to me on some deep emotional level.

Then, later in life, films began to play the same role for me. Jules and Jim was one example, Last Tango in Paris was another. And many Woody Allen films (just in case anybody doubts that I'm a liberal!)

Hermann Rubin writes:
>The content of most works of fiction can be easily summarized in a
>few pages. Stretching it out into several hundred pages does little
>for the purpose of understanding.

There seems to be something to a painting, or photograph, or novel, or film, or poem, beyond the mere ``content.'' What is this thing that one misses out on if one reads the Cliffs Notes synopsis?

In my opinion -- at least in many cases -- what a work of art gives one is an experience.

And experiences are one of the main things we think of when we think of how to give another person an education. Experiences are, at least to a large extent, what make us up, what make us the person that we are. And we think of educating another person as a process of giving them the same kinds of experiences.

I sometimes talk to people who have little in the way of formal education, who left school after maybe the sixth grade. Often these people are impressed by my education, almost to the extent of being in awe of it. And yet at the same time, many of them feel that they themselves got a more valuable education on the street, through the School of Hard Knocks, then they were ever offered in school. And if they are old enough to have children of their own, they are frustrated that their kids are not getting the same kind of rough education that they themselves had. They value the formal education that their kids are getting, and they are willing to make sacrifices to help them get that formal education, but at the same time they are sad that their kids are not learning the important lessons that they themselves had to learn the hard way.

I think that we all have this desire to give important experiences to our children -- and to our intellectual children, which students are for those of us who are teachers. But there's no way of giving one's own experiences to someone else.

Art, in my opinion, is the closest one can come. By writing a book, an author can attempt to recreate his experience for the reader. I read that book, and I have a profound experience, although probably very different from the author's. I would like you to be able to have the same experience, so I recommend the book to you. Most of the time, you read it and have an experience which you don't especially care for. You return the book to me with no comment, or say, ``I found it pretty hard to read,'' or ``I thought it was kind of depressing.''

But, if it's a really good book, sometimes one of my friends will like it as much as I do, and have an equally profound experience reading it. And then that friend and I will feel that we really understand each other, especially if we don't compare notes too closely and realize that we got completely different things out of the book.

That, to me, is education at its best.

Addendum -- January, 1998

All literature is not only representation, but a giving form to and a making sense of experience.

Someone visiting or living in Iowa in the early part of this century would have seen a diversity of many different sights and many different people. After a while, one would start to give a meaning to one's experiences in Iowa, and if one were asked, "What is Iowa like?" one would give an answer which would actually leave out some of the things that exist in Iowa and overemphasize others.

Grant Wood produced a painting called "American Gothic" that actually shows only a minute part of the American Midwest. In fact, it shows only two individuals standing in front of a particular building. Yet by his choice of the individuals to portray, by the way he has posed them and the expressions he has shown on their faces, Grant Wood showed more than an exact representation of a certain small piece of the Midwest, such as might be shown in a snapshot or postcard. He conveyed a meaning, a comment, that goes way beyond two specific individuals.

This is the way that art functions.

April, 1997

[Since] only personal experience, only life itself can bring us to ourselves and any kind of personal experience, why do we have literature? The most stalwart of writers, among them Proust and Tolstoy, affirm that literature cannot ever be a substitute for experience. But -- and here is the point -- it is not therefore excluded from any role in shaping our experience.

Literature acquaints us with a special and intensified repetory of feeling and events and possibilities. Later when we come upon an event, we may have a counterpart already at hand, forgotten but available. And the movement of our mind is to say: ``This is it.'' For we have lived it once already.

Literature can foreshorten the complex, two-part process of full living; what we participate in through reading becomes the first half of that double process. Our own life, our personal experience, can then move directly into the second beat: recognition.

To read genuine literature is to accumulate within oneself a fund of possible experiences against which to achieve an occasionally intensified sense of what one is doing, to recognize that one is alive in a particular way....

Literature then, like all the arts, plays a formative or preparatory role in training our sensibilities. In a limited way it supplies the first beat of a duple rhythm of existence. It offers not true life, but the potentiality of true life if we go on to complete that rhythm.... This sense, this secret, is what allows certain people to live life at all times as an adventure. Others simply do not recognize that what they are doing, what is going on around them, has any significance as life at all. Literature is one of the keys.

May, 1997

Let us summarize some of the major conclusions so far:

1. The aim of the novel is to produce wide-angle consciousness. Everyday consciousness is narrow and limited; the novel is one of the most interesting compensations that man has so far devised.

2. The novel is substitute experience. Most of us have an appetite for a far wider range of experience than our lives afford. To some extent the novel can provide it. It can even provide forms of experience that would have been impossible in reality.

3. The novel is a form of thought-experiment. Like the thought-experiments of the philosopher, its aim is to teach us something about the real world.

4. Ideally, the aim of the novel is not only to produce wide-angle consciousness, but also three-dimensional consciousness -- something allied to the opium experience (the sense of relaxing and opening up), but with an unimpaired sense of reality -- a recognition of the enormous and fascinating complexity of the world.

5. Unsuccessful novels are thought-experiments that have failed to ``come out right,'' like a calculation that has gone wrong, or a laboratory experiment in which the experimenter has made some crucial error.

6. The aim of all these thought-experiments is the exploration of human freedom.