How (not to) Teach Literature

The opening parts of an essay on the unique nature of literary meaning.

Part 1

Teaching students to read literature well is one of the most challenging tasks facing English professors and high school teachers—and the requirement to score them on their ability to do this often pushes squarely back against what you are striving to get them to understand. The primary challenge is somehow to get them to fully embrace the notion that the language literature uses to express ideas is fundamentally different than the language I am using to write this post—the language I used in the classroom, dry erase marker in hand, trying to drive home this essential point.  

And with that dry erase marker I’d frequently write the following on the board:  

A⊃B 
B⊃C
______
⸫ A⊃C

If A implies B and B implies C, therefore, A implies C. 

This is a logical syllogism, and most of what we write/think/express is grounded in this  structure—all our arguments, any idea we hope to communicate well using logic and reason. Ascribe values to these letters from formal logic, and you’ll see what I mean. Say A= “a good chef’s knife.”  B= “are sharp”—so the first line would read, “Good chef’s knives are sharp”—a simple claim of fact. This is something that cannot be refuted (though we seem to have lost a grasp on even what factual claims are these days….). Ascribe to value C something like “can cut food into fine slices,” and the second line, the “universal claim” reads, “That which is very sharp, can cut food into thin slices.”  Those three triangular dots mean “therefore” in symbolic language, and the final line should be obvious: “A good chef’s knife can cut food into fine slices.”  

While this is a rather simple argument, and pretty much really just an extended fact, I use it to show how we develop arguments working from facts to universal claims to conclusions most of the time. I am currently working within this structure, trying to argue that the language of literature is fundamentally different than the language of logic we use most of the time—and what the consequences of this are for students of literature (and all readers). I’ll refrain from writing out a much more complex syllogism for that argument and put the following on the board. 

A/B    C/D

Note, there is no therefore symbol present—no conclusion, no final point. A is to B as C is to D is all we are given. This formula is “analogical,” whereas the first is “logical.” In analogical reasoning, you juxtapose things and out of those relationships grows a more complex understanding of something;  ideas emerge, though these ideas, these contemplations, are not driven by the need for a reductive, conclusive, final idea that everything adds up to. I tell them that literary expression is grounded in something much more like this than the former.  

And now here comes the real problem, especially given that I have to issue a grade, and students have to write things that show me they are “good” at reading literature:  they need to write about the one mode of expression using the other—to write about that which is analogical (metaphorical, symbolic, non-rational) using that which is logical (argumentative, rational, literal). They have to be literal about that which is literary, to use one language to say something about a language that, while it looks a lot like the one they are writing/thinking with, is, in fact, fundamentally different.  

The primary “danger” here, and the thing that all too many English profs and teachers mistakenly nurture is to think about the task of understanding and writing about literature as a way to “solve” a poem or story or play or novel—to reach into its midsts and pluck out a coherent, conclusive “therefore” at its center.  

The meaning of the white whale is X. The scarlet letter represents Y. Both students and teachers of literature often mistakenly ascribe the rationale of other disciplines—and syllogistic thinking—to what should happen in the English classroom:  answers must be given, learned, repeated on exams and quizzes and tests. But the work of reading and understanding literature is surely more about provoking questions than providing answers….  

But lest this get too abstract, let me set down a brief example. The following is a “prose poem” by the surrealist writer Russel Edson:  

Father, Father, What Have You Done?

A man straddling the apex of his roof cries, giddyup. The house rears up on its back porch and all its bricks fall apart and the house crashes to the ground. His wife cries from the rubble, father, father, what have you done?

I like turning to literature like this—writing that is more overtly non-rational, and that forces us to reach for different cognitive muscles to find a way to approach it. Clearly this poem/story is not operating under the same rules of syllogistic argumentation (just as all good literature is not). Clearly this is more grounded in an analogical structure, where the images and actions and lines of dialogue in the story when set alongside each other evoke other ideas, questions, problems, mysteries.  

One first thing we might notice is that Edson uses allusion, the wife’s words echoing those of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane in the Bible, knowing he will be sacrificed, calling out to heaven for an answer, yes, but also making a proclamation about the immensity of what is unfolding. “Father, father, what have you done?”  Christ’s words might even be positive in nature, admiring the complexity and beauty of what God has set in motion. So Russell’s poem not only juxtaposes the elements of the story itself, but now brings the whole, central story of Christianity to bear on things.  

The story certainly also speaks to the man’s hubris, something that echoes all classical tragedies—this man expecting his house to behave like a horse just because he commands it. And like Hamlet whose hubris allows him to murder innocent people even in his utter belief that he is justified in all actions just because a ghost has told him what to do…so too, the man’s actions lead to his utter demise, the total destruction of his house.  

The poem/story also asks us to envision the impossible, to find a way in our mind’s eye to see a house behave like a horse—and notice how those two words “house,” “horse” are even very nearly the same (but for one letter), so the poem/story is also reminding us that this is all playful, that his invention which we work to find a way to imagine is finally just a jumble of words, black and white marks on a page….  

If one were to work hard enough, you could fashion what you might imagine to be a kind of syllogistic equivalent to this work of art, but I would argue that no matter how brilliantly you tried to execute this, you would always come up short, that there isn’t some one, univocal idea hiding at the center of this expression, but rather a multitude of possibilities to consider—and this process of considering is surely a part of the “point.”

I find the word “analysis” in particular to be  problematic when writing/thinking about literature. “Analyzing” is something we do with sets of data, points on a graph. I would love to see the term “literary analysis” or even “literary criticism” abolished from the English classroom, from all discussion about literature, would love to see an attendant attitude toward responding to literature emerge, one in which meaning isn’t seen as reductive but quite the opposite.  

What problems, what complex ideas does the story invite us to think about? What mystery does the poem help us to more fully envision? In what ways does the action of the novel, an image from a story or poem, a line of dialogue…evoke in us a new way of conceiving of something in our own lives?  

Consider in the Edson poem/story how it is not just any man and woman, but a man and his wife, for instance. Even as you worked to make a brilliant argument about Edson’s critique of classical hubris, you would now have to work to include the dynamic of a marriage relationship—to weave that into your syllogistic reasoning somehow….  

“So what am I to do?” many a student would ask me, and this is where the real challenge begins. Too many students and teachers falsely consider their task incorrectly—that the discovery of literary “meaning” is necessarily reductive, that you can transform a poem into a series of simpler, more coherent utterances: “Edson shows us that the man’s hubris leads to his own demise. Therefore Edson is making a point about the dangers of hubris.  The end.” But what about the biblical allusions? What about the dynamic of husband and wife?  What about the house/horse word play? The first thing I urge students to do is to accept that they will not “solve” the literary text in the same way they might solve a calculus equation. They will never be able to write something that thoroughly and utterly expresses everything the text does (the literary text already has done that in its own way). Their writing must be infused with this acceptance. The second thing I urge them to do is to spend most of their time really looking deeply into the language of the text, aware that as a literary expression, the imagery, the dialogue, the action…are always doing more than one thing at a time—that none of its “claims” are anything like those you are using in your essay. You can’t read a story or poem and put it aside and just start writing about it. You must return to it again and again. Read it aloud. Listen for the different registers of language;  immerse yourself in its rules and universe…. (to be continued)

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