Back when I decided to become an English major during an American Literature class at the local community college, I was overwhelmed by many of the wonderfully creative pieces that we studied. Chief among the works that captivated my attention was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I don’t mean to overstate the situation, but I teach English today in no small part thanks to that book. It’s a tragic story, so its positive effect on me may be a bit surprising. But anyone who has read it can testify to Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring to vivid life the fully realistic character of Maggie and to garner sympathy and concern for her and those like her.
Somehow these marks on the book’s pages filled my mind with empathy for the less fortunate, challenged my preconceptions about poverty, and—among other things—helped me better understand American history and culture. Reading this novel impressed upon me what an astounding thing is language. Used well it fills us with joy and enobles our existence. Language can entertain us through stories and verbal games. It can delight us through brilliant literary expression. We can use it to convey our internal experiences and to get a peek into the experiences of others. In short, we can do wonders with words.
I felt as much when I wrote my end-of-term paper on Crane’s novel. I found such satisfaction in engaging Crane’s story, having responses to it formed in my mind, and turning those inchoate thoughts into something structured, something readable and understandable by another person. That was my first experience, I think, in writing an essay of which I was truly proud. What was true at that time remains true now: for me, there is little better than bringing ideas to heel in a well-crafted sentence. If I may engage in hyperbole, it sometimes feels like a miracle.
But as valuable and worthwhile as language and literature is, there is a danger of overvaluing the written word for those like us who spend our time dwelling on it. We risk overestimating literature’s worth and putting on it a burden it simply cannot bear. As we think about our love for literature, we can understand sentiments of writers like Samuel Coleridge who elevate literary expression to the apex of human activity. In Biographia Literaria, he says that “poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”[1] Emerson, in his quintessential grandiosity, takes this notion a step further, making poetry foundational to reality itself and placing it beyond humanity’s comprehension or control:
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.[2]
On Emerson’s terms, we are unworthy mortals who can only glimpse poetry’s greatness.
Still others have put much hope in poetry as the means of personal or communal salvation, as does Matthew Arnold who, Culture and Anarchy, stakes his social agenda on advancing transformative cultural education:
Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.[3]
It’s an enchanting vision to be sure, of society in full cooperation and prosperity. But literary genius as the source of such conditions strikes the ear as a bit of wishful thinking.
Yes, Coleridge, Emerson, and Arnold affirmed the existence of God and saw poetry or cultural activity as in some way or other directly tied to a divine source, but in their writings that so highly elevate poetry, we can see the makings of a disconnection between the two, a displacement and eventually an elevation of one for the other—and the wrong one. In Screwtape Letters through the mouth of his titular demonic character, C. S. Lewis warns of such a temptation regarding social justice. Rather than the so-called “patient” prioritizing Christian doctrine with social justice concerns flowing from that, Screwtape wants him to reverse the order: “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”[4] The temptation process he describes to Wormwood could work just as easily for literature. What this amounts to, of course, is idolatry, a status for poetry that Wallace Stevens makes explicit in Adagia: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”[5]
Christians would, of course, assiduously avoid embracing Stevens’ conclusions, not least of all because we retain a belief in God. But Christian or no, we’d do well to pause for a moment and consider the absurdity of Stevens’ claim. Poetry is wonderful, but life’s redemption? What a bunch of nonsense. In the face of death, disease, war, atrocities, we’ll respond with figurative language and some prosody. Grievous loss? Here’s a sonnet to remedy the situation. To offer lyricism alone as rectification for horrific abuse is frankly grotesque. Justice may at times be poetic, but poetry is far from justice’s source. At best it is a salve for sorrow, an intimation of a world set right.
But before we start patting ourselves on the back for recognizing the error of Stevens’ ways, I wonder if we don’t sometimes verge the same idolatrous thinking about our vocation. It’s often the subtle errors that are the most perilous and insidious. Do we ever ourselves prioritize literature and language at the expense of something more vital? Do we ever use it to overindulge our own longings or boost our own ego? Does our love of literature ever interfere with or displace our deeper callings, especially our highest calling as Christians to love God and love our neighbor? Do we mine literature’s truths as means for self-advancement instead of with kingdom-building aims? Have we ever allowed our God-given gifts for appreciating and analyzing literature to look down on others who don’t share those gifts? Are we guilty of imperialistic thinking, believing our discipline the most important, implicitly saying to another part of the body of Christ that we have no need of them?
In a poignant passage, William James well articulates the danger of mishandling literature:
All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.[6]
Again, literature is a beautiful thing; prizing it over actual human beings is abhorrent.
In the literary field, we also sometimes see self-indulgence of a different kind, that which is practiced from a critical stance where a scholar or reviewer uses the work of another as merely a soapbox for self-promotion. W. H. Auden captures the temptations to pride involved in literary criticism:
If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”[7]
A piece of literature is no human being, of course, but treatment of a book or literary work surely has implications for treatment of the one who wrote it and who poured so much of themselves and their time into it. It also has implications for our own character formation.
Christian literary critics must center our Christian identity as primary, with our study of literature flowing from that. John 13:35 says that love is the distinguishing mark of disciples of Christ. In Matthew 22, Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two greatest commandments, ending with the profound but mysterious truth that “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets hang on [them].” Alan Jacobs uses this claim as a springboard for his worthwhile book, A Theology of Reading, which is intriguingly subtitled A Hermeneutics of Love. An adaptation of a well-worn scripture passage might frame our thinking here:
If I read through the lens of Marx or of Greenblatt, but do not have love, I am only a noxious judge or a nagging critic. If I have the gift of soliloquy and can fathom all poetry and all fiction, and if I have a style that can stir passions, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I pen all I perceive to the crowds and give over my essays to journals that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient reading, love is kind interpretation. It does not envy another writer’s gifts or troll another’s work, it is not vain about its own intellectual blessings. It does not dishonor others in the guise of criticism, it is not self-promotional, it is not easily angered when edited or evaluated, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are novels, they will cease; where there are odes, they will be stilled; where there is critique, it will pass away. For we read in part and we analyze in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
The challenge I want to pose—as Christians studying literature and language—is for us to contemplate what loving participation in the literary discipline looks like. What kinds of words do we use; when and how do we use them? What kinds of stories do we tell; why do we tell them? How do we handle the words and stories of others?
Literary studies today can give us critical frameworks for reading, terminology for literary criticism, insights into the creative process and lives of poets. It can provide us with untold lists of books to read, ways to understand them, and thematic angles for interpretation. But it cannot instill in us love for God or others. Even politically charged theories, concerned as they are with questions of justice, have no mechanism for personal transformation—they can tell us to be good but cannot make us good, as Jacobs points out in regards to cultural studies.[8]
What makes a difference for literary studies as for life—what makes possible our love for one another—is that God first loved us. He entered into our world to redeem his creation, thus enabling our free responses to his overtures of love. A belief in the incarnation, as Roger Lundin argues, should make all the difference in how we conceive of “the nature, scope, and power of words.”[9] Our words have value, they have meaning, they have purpose because of the Living Word, the Word made flesh who chose to dwell among us. This truth should ground our engagement with human words, our own and those of others. Done well and right, even our study of literature, if subsumed under the lordship of Christ, can become a way for us to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, to discharge our God-given vocations, to do the good works for which we were intended.
