A Student's Guide to Literature - R.V.Young.pdf

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Students Guide to Literature
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ISI GUIDES TO THE MAJOR DISCIPLINES
GENERAL EDITOR
EDITOR
JEFFREY O. NELSON WINFIELD J. C. MYERS
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY
BY RALPH M. MCINERNY
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO LITERATURE
BY R. V. YOUNG
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO LIBERAL LEARNING
BY JAMES V. SCHALL, S. J.
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY
BY JOHN LUKACS
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE CORE CURRICULUM
BY MARK C. HENRIE
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO U. S. HISTORY
BY WILFRED M. MCCLAY
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO ECONOMICS
BY PAUL HEYNE
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO POLITICAL THEORY
BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR.
L ITERATURE IS PARADOXICAL both in its nature and in
INTRODUCTORY NOTE:
THE PARADOX OF LITERATURE
ect upon readers. Although letters inscribed
upon a page or the words of a spoken utterance are the
media of a literary work, the work itself is neither the ink
and paper nor the oral performance. A successful poem or
story compels our attention and seizes us with a sense of its
reality, even while we know that it is essentially (even when
based upon historical fact) something made up—a
its e
ff
ction.
The most memorable works of literature are charged with
signi
fi
ection, inter-
pretation; but this meaning carries most conviction insofar
as it is not explicit—not paraded with banners
cance and cry out for understanding, re
fl
ying and
trumpets blaring. “We hate poetry that has a palpable
design upon us,” says John Keats. 1 The rôle of literature in
society is similarly equivocal. It can be explained simply as
entertainment or recreation; men and women have always
told stories and sung songs to amuse themselves, to pass the
fl
fi
R. V. Young
time, to lighten the burdens of “real life.” At the same time,
literature has assumed a central place in education and the
transmission of culture throughout the history of Western
civilization, contributing a sense of communal identity and
shaping both individual and social understanding of hu-
man experience. The intimate part played by literature in
cultural tradition has been a source of alarm to moralists
and reformers from Plato to the media critics and
multiculturalists of our own day.
Literature, then, must be approached both with cau-
tion and abandon. A primary purpose of the study of litera-
ture is to learn to read critically, to maintain reserve and
distance in the face of an engaging, even beguiling, object.
And yet, like any work of art—a symphony, for example,
or a painting—a novel or an epic yields up its secrets only
to a reader who yields himself to its power. It is for this
reason that literary study is a humane or humanistic disci-
pline, not an exact or empirical science. The ideal researcher
in the physical sciences, insofar as he sticks rigorously to
science, will be absolutely objective in the sense that his
humanity will exert no in
4
uence on his methods or conclu-
sions. Even a medical researcher will be interested in the
human body only as a biological mechanism, not as the
fl
A Student’s Guide to Literature
outward manifestation of a person with a soul. The literary
scholar must of course be objective in the sense that he is
disinterested; he must not have an individual or personal
stake in the interpretation. And yet, although the critic’s
fate is not the fate of King Lear, the critic’s human sympa-
thy with the plight of that tragic protagonist is part of his
critical response to the play as literature. The human com-
passion of the cancer researcher for the victims of the dis-
ease, while it may be an important motive, is not part of his
research, not an element in his science as such. The natural
sciences, therefore, provide a very poor model for scholar-
ship in the humanities. To be sure, there are factual,
“scienti
5
c” elements of great importance to inquiry in all
the arts: a knowledge of Elizabethan stagecraft and printshop
practices can furnish a good deal of useful information about
how Hamlet was seen by contemporaries and how the text
was preserved, but such facts will never explain why the
play is still moving and important. Works of literature are
not natural phenomena or specimens; they are rather part
of the cultural fabric of the world that we all inhabit. A
poet, says William Wordsworth, “is a man speaking to
men.” 2 We cannot approach poets and poems as an ento-
mologist approaches ants and ant hills.
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