I want to return to my initial query: why

study literature?
Why study humanities?
Let me turn that into a verb.
Do the humanities humanize?
It seems like a legitimate question.
It seems like a self-evident question.
It also sounds rather bizarre.
I mean, "humanize" is kind of a hard word
to get over your tongue.
It's a little bit like tenderize, like we
need humanizing, we need being turned
into humans?
Maybe we do.
But maybe literature doesn't do it.
It's not at all clear that the humanities
do it.
The French writer Andr Gide once said:
"Ce n'est pas avec de bons sentiments qu'on fait
de bon roman".
"You don't make good novels out of good
notions, ideas, good feelings."
And you can turn that around.
It's not merely that you don't make good
novels out of good ideas because then
you're looking at a sermon.
It's also the case that good literature
itself may not produce good behavior.
Now I want to play with this for just a
moment, and it's serious play, because
it's one of the most central, I think,
stubborn obstacles that I run into all
the time when I teach.
So here's my point:
A novel is not a sermon.
It's not something that you listen to in
church.
It's not something that has a clear
evident bottom line.
It is not a guide book to life or to
behavior.
It is an exploration.
It is not wisdom literature.
It is not a series of moral or spiritual
injunctions.
It's instead speculative, explorative.
It's a kind of what-if picture of the
world.
The reason it's so stubborn is again that
kind of pragmatic feeling that, what am I
going to get out of this book?
I mean, after all I've got to have
something usable, useful once I've
finished reading it.
One reason that I feel so strongly about
this is that we have too much evidence
everyday that good books do not make good

people.
To give one example, the SS officers who
ran the deaths camps were frequently
classically educated they could quote
Goethe and Schiller as much as you
might have wanted them to.
It did not change one thing on the
operation of the camps,
of the holocaust.
And this is true throughout history.
Rousseau, in the middle of the 18th
century, writes a letter arguing against
the building of the theater in Genva.
Where- and he signs it, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ,"citoyen de Genve"
"citizen of Genva."
Why would he argue against building a
theater?
Well, here is one of the reasons that he
says.
He says, you go to theater, you watch a
play, you're moved, you weep, allAristotle would be delighted.
This is cathartic.
All of your emotions are being appealed
to and in play.
And then the play is over.
And then you walk out of the theater.
And you walk right past the poor beggar
who is on the streets there
because you've already had your little
affective workout.
Your little moral workout.
So what Rousseau was saying, in a very
tough minded way
is that the play of emotions,
the touching of the heart that, perhaps
literature
creates, doesn't necessarily translate
into behavior.
It's a tough thing worth remembering it
seems to me.
Why then study the humanities if it's
not going to produce more ethical, more
thoughtful behavior?
Everyone knows the injunction ascribed to
Socrates: the un-examined life is not
worth living.
Kurt Vonnegut did a number on that by
suggesting that the examined life might
be a clunker and not worth living either.
I used to teach a course at Brown called
Order and Chaos in Literature,
and I think, most of the students who
took the course came with the assumption
that, of course literature offers us a
version of order, that life itself, they
knew, is sloppy, messy.
They could experience that everyday.
And that by reading books, we would get
some kind of a tentative fix on things,

some sense of pattern, or of order,

should help us establish some kind of
form, or cogency.
Art in the service of order sounds like a
kind of militant injunction.
It's a familiar notion.
What I tried to argue in the course is
that art frequently turns this sweet
notion totally upside-down.
Art turns order into chaos, not because
it loves chaos, but rather that life
itself, culture in particular, is filled
with innumerable little truisms and
one-liners and sweet little ditties about
life and great art invariably explodes
them.
Art is trouble.
It complicates things that we thought we
knew, such as what others are really
like, such as what we ourselves are like
in the pit, in our feelings, sensations,
thoughts.
The two worlds that we inhabit.
The world that is outside us, that is
made up of other people, other places,
and the world inside of us, our own
interior, and the strange connections
that are established.
Now, I want to say as an aside,
professors love to put the line out that
I just did.
Professors are addicted to complexity.
If you took the phrase "on the other hand"
and withdrew it from the discourse of
professors, they would turn mute.
You've got to be able to say there's
this, and there's also that, and then
there's also that, and there're all these
other possibilities.
Nonetheless, I'll stick with my initial
claim:
Art doesn't so much expose chaos and
anarchy as it does to expose the
brittleness, the reductiveness,
and often, the fictiveness of the
patterns of order that we subscribe to.
Now this sounds, perhaps needlessly,
negative.
Trouble, I said.
It's also the case that it's fun.
The word that my students always have on
the tip of their tongues, although they
usually cautiously wait a little bit
before asking me, is, what's the workload
of this course?
And I usually say, they don't believe me,
is that workload is an inappropriate
term
for reading literature.
It's not work.

You should say what's the pleasure load?

What's the hedonic level of this course?
Breaking up simplistic patterns of life
into something more complicated, more
provocative is fun.
It's not labor.
Seeing the ambiguities of life is not
always welcome news,
but it does make for a more intersting
world.
Reading is fun, reading is exploratory,
reading is expansive, reading is virtual.
Now I'm going to throw another
metaphor at you.
We try on the books we read.
Now you know that you try on the clothes
that you're tempted to buy.
We try on the books that we read.
Now when you go to buy new clothes, you
often have a mirror that has many
different panes in it at different angles
and you look at yourself to see how you
look in this new jacket or skirt or
whatever and those mirrors can be very
disturbing because they show us things
about our bodies like our backs, our
butts,
that we are not equipped to see with our
own eyes.
I said to you that literature is always a
mirror, a visionary hollow in which we
may catch a strange sighting of
ourselves.
We try on books of literature.
You do not try on math,
computer science, business, or chemistry.
You're expected to master a certain
amount of data.
There's nothing experiential about it in
the same way.
It doesn't become a suit of clothes where
you sense how it might fit.
Trying on books is a version of living
other lives, trying them on.
Reading is a way of living other.
You can't do it in reality.
You're stuck pretty much in what you are.
But you can do it in your mind,
and you can do it through the benefit of
art and literature.
It's the vicarious experience of being
there,
of being elsewhere, of being other.
And this is why, in my view, it is so sad
that the academy and in particular, my
own field, literature, cautions its
students never to identify with the books
that they read.
Oh no, no, no, no, that's something you're
not supposed to do.

Instead you are supposed to read

critically.
Now I have nothing against criticism; I
do a lot of it.
Read critically, establish distance, see
things ironically,
see things that the person who wrote the
book, of course, did not see.
We have words for this, we call them
aporia, the blind spots of a text.
We often say, well of course this
author was a victim
of the particular prejudices of his or
her- usually his- own moment.
He, like all creatures in culture, was
brainwashed.
Usually the implicit notion is we,
however, who are Olympian, who live on
clouds and have a 360-degree view of the
world, we can see through these things.
Sometimes there's a good deal of truth in
this.
Many of the books that we read do expose
the fault lines and blind spots of their
culture, and believe me, the books on this
reading list are filled with that.
Yet I will stick with my point: try on
the books that you read.
Distance is fine.
It has its benefits and virtues, but
becoming is far more provocative and
stimulating and destabilizing.
Becoming the other is going be a formula
that you're going to hear me use over and
over in this course, not just from a
professorial point of view,
but as a way of trying to encapsulate
what is going on in these books.
Becoming the other.
It stamps almost all of these stories.
It's literally enacted in Kafka's work,
but its near impossibility, like "Can you
become the other stamps?" many of the books
that you're going to read.
What else does it stamp,
Becoming the other?
I would argue, it is the hallmark, the
very signature of love and of
understanding.
That's what this course is about,
becoming the other, the route, the trip
between you and me that I have to make
to get to you.
In some sense,
these books illuminate and measure, if
there is a metric, that journey,
that distance.
As I say, this is the requirement of
understanding.
How do I understand you if I can't

somehow make the trip towards you,

and to see what it is you are made of,
why you are what you are?
What are the obstacles?
They are what we call differences.
Capital D.
And they're what we know of as race and
class and gender and much more still.
They are the huge obstacles, barriers
between you and me, between understanding
and between love that prevent them, that
make them difficult, arduous, and yet the
project of understanding, and even more so
the project of love, is about the energy,
the desire to cross that territory, that
bridge.
Reading is a variant
of the same voyage.
So reading is not so much infection, as
Strindberg suggested, it's about being
brought to another place or to another
self.