One could conclude from watching the present political moment that it will soon be time for us to return to the liberal arts, and in particular to the arts of language. I say this because the studies which comprise the liberal arts, and particularly the first three subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, have to do with teaching ourselves to think—how to think, not what to think. The term liberal in the liberal arts refers not to a political leaning, but to those skills, or arts, which free, or liberate, us from an almost tyrannical isolation when we do not command the confidence to articulate what we feel and think deep in our hearts and minds.
The liberal arts, and most especially those first three arts of language, give us a way up and out from under the servility of remaining in a self-imposed silence in the face of what others may tell us is the incontrovertible truth of things. The study of language should grow from the technicalities of grammar and style into an intelligent appreciation of literature. Stories present a world within whose created boundaries we can learn to think out the character and motivation and will of the figures who people a literary built environment. Such a consciously constructed world, which we bring to life just by reading it, holds still for a while, and we find ourselves awakening into a new space and time vicariously, a world deputed as a substitute for our own too present one, giving us the chance to think out our choices before taking action.
Reading imaginative works closely for their symbols and meaning can be an off-putting affair, particularly when one tries to tackle classical works of length and complexity. But if we are convinced that stories can be a way to train ourselves to think out—to live out—the sum and substance of our assumptions, we might begin with an anthology of smaller pieces, such as the very nice (and still readily available) selection edited by the novelist Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine entitled Short Story Masterpieces (Dell Publishing, 1982). In a prefatory note, the editors make two important observations about what literature does for us. The first points to the imagination:
A good story gives pleasure and satisfaction to anyone who is curious about, and sympathetic with, his fellow men, anyone whose feelings are fresh and can respond to the funny, the pitiful, the noble, or the terrible…, anyone whose imagination is strong and healthy enough to create, from the words put before him by the writer, people, things, and events—the movement and color of life.
Our imagination, perhaps part of the specific difference of being human, is that faculty which fabricates mental images, for which we then find words to share our mind’s ever-active life with others. It can be with words that those imaginative images expand into new life-forms with which we can engage hypothetically and vicariously. Warren and Erskine see that work as an enlargement of the humane:
Behind the good story, no matter how light its tone, how trivial its subject matter, or how cranky its end, we feel that an interesting mind and temperament has made contact with life. Even though the point of the story, stated or implied, may be contrary to our personal conclusions about things, it enlarges our own sense of human possibility, for good or bad. The really fine story is by a writer who has some characteristic slant on the world, some characteristic reading of human values.
Imagination and enlargement. The arts of language and the works of literature they craft give us a way to expand ourselves into more life not with might, but with integrity. An older meaning of the verb enlarge is to set free, to liberate, and isn’t that an interesting coincidence when we think of the enlarging effects of imaginative literature. It is an ancient wisdom that we hold a human obligation to ourselves and to those around us to be intelligent—not merely clever or inventive, but intelligent, able to read between the lines on the old and seasoned assumption that things may not always be in truth what they appear to be at first. Keeping the road open for such insight is what the pleasure of language and literature is all about.
We need, that is to say, a touch more of that ironical spirit which reading literature closely can bestow, that incisive but yet wry-smiling disposition that can see acutely through appearances—and piercing through, can liberate a better, because more discerning, way of being in the world. Together imagination and enlargement conduce to discernment, and that, I think, is what we’re really looking for in a time such as the present.
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Enough said. I have shared your essay liberally this morning. You restore the study of literature to a place that’s radical in today’s climate, including our schools and universities. My goal launching a Friends School in Phoenix had much to do with introducing opportunities for reflective and enlarged learning as a “corrective” to the study of short stories, novels, and dramas as social commentary on gender and race from our benighted past. At some point in the past fifty years, the study of literature became a branch of sociology. Look at course catalogues at leading colleges and universities. We no longer study the formal properties of language, character, and plot as elements of human actions that expand our understanding of others, including those completely unlike us. Thank you for a serving of common sense on a Tuesday morning in March.