"Something Prompted Me to Touch Him": The Heart as the Matter in Literary Studies
Reprint only with written permission of the author
© copyright 2002 Warren Rosenberg
When Bill Placher came into my office in the fall of last year I was both relieved and anxious. I had a feeling he was going to invite me to deliver the Lafollette lecture. Bill does not have what we call a poker face, and he looked like someone pleased to be giving a gift, but aware that the gift needed to be assembled. My relief came from the fact that, as I had realized several years before, I was the only tenured member of the English Department not to have delivered the lecture. Professors Herring, Hudson, Herzog, and Campbell have given lectures and my former colleague Professor Stern has given two. Of course I do not see being asked to deliver this prestigious lecture as an entitlement, but the pattern was becoming a bit obvious and troubling. Was I not worthy? After Bill invited me, however, I was extremely pleased and realized that I was asked last for an obvious reason, one I make my colleagues aware of every chance I get. I am, at least for now, the youngest tenured member of the department. Clearly, at 53, I have now achieved the requisite seasoning for the task.
As I look into the audience I can see my wiser and certainly still older department colleagues nodding their heads in agreement. As I continued to think about my age in relation to this lecture I had an additional realization. In two months I will mark the fortieth anniversary of the most significant event in the early life of a Jewish child, my bar mitzvah. At the age of 13, a Jewish male (and since early in this century, Jewish females) comes of age as a Jew by leading the congregation in morning prayers and singing, in Hebrew, the portion of the torah assigned for that day. My bar mitzvah was, I see now, and certainly felt then, a somewhat empty ritual. It was not quite as bad for me as for Bert Stern, who described his bar mitzvah experience in his second Lafollette lecture as "an experience of terror, a kind of nightmare examination that [he] must pass" (126-127). I also felt fear, but also pride at accomplishing what I was expected by others to accomplish. While I did not understand a word of what I was singing, even after six years of part-time Hebrew instruction, I believed I was at least pleasing my orthodox immigrant grandfather Max, with whom I was very close, by chanting correctly and becoming part of his tribe. But just like Bert, I had no idea what this initiation meant, and certainly no positive emotional understanding of what was happening to me.
Luckily, my bar mitzvah was not my only way of learning about Jewish traditions. I had parents, grandparents, and friends who passed on the values that helped shape me, through stories and by example. I also enjoyed attending Friday night services for the year that I was preparing for my bar mitzvah. Singing along with the congregation to the beautiful melodies of the liturgy, swaying back and forth in imitation of the movements of the men around me, smelling that musky synagogue smell, all engaged me on a physical and emotional level that the more formal studies did not. But the official initiation did not take. Soon after the event I stopped attending services and ceased practicing.
Six years later I had another initiation that really took—I decided to become an English major in college. Choosing one's major is, I realize now, a critical moment of self-definition, when a young person joins a particular community, often with no input from one's parents or relatives. I saw the importance of this decision in a new light during last year's Lafollette when Cheryl Hughes talked about what led her to study philosophy. She had studied and practiced nursing, but clearly her vocation lay elsewhere. As she said, she loved "pondering," spending evenings with friends discussing complex and deeply important ideas. She loved this so much she wanted to make it her life's work, her identity. She wanted to be a philosopher.
That day I left Salter thinking, what made me want to study English and become an English teacher? I realized I could almost pinpoint the moment. I was taking a political philosophy class in the second semester of my sophomore year of college with a wonderful teacher, Wilson Carey McWilliams. I was trying out political science after seeing my pre-med dreams evaporate. The final text he assigned, much to everyone's surprise, was Herman Melville's short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. When did Melville become a political philosopher?" we all wondered. I went to the library to read the story and that was it. I have no memory of how McWilliams tied this text into the course, although now I have some ideas about what he might have had in mind. Melissa Butler, our political philosopher, said in her 1991 Lafollette lecture on the gentleman's rule, that "civic friendship" should be the goal of our community. McWilliams, while he was teaching my course, was writing a book called The Idea of Fraternity in America, so civic friendship was clearly on his mind.
But in 1968 as an undergraduate looking for a major none of that mattered. Reading the story, to use Sixties parlance, completely "blew me away." I was puzzled by it, depressed when I finished it, but also strongly but inexplicably moved by it. It aroused feelings in me that at that point I could not name. I simply had to read more stories like this, and obviously my best chance of doing so would be as an English major. Over the past thirty years I have written about and taught this story—I take a line from it for the title of this talk—and I will discuss it in more detail later. The point I want to make now is that the complex emotional reaction I had to reading this one story led me to change my major to English and, ultimately, established my career path. I was drawn to the field of literature not through some process of rational decision making, but as one decides whom to marry or whether or not to have a child. The really big decisions in our lives include a strong emotional component. You will see shortly why I think this component needs to be more fully acknowledged and honored in a liberal arts education.
I would like to use this occasion then as a bar-mitzvah redux, a second chance at not merely getting it right but at making it mean something more. At this point in my life and academic career, after a year's sabbatical that included teaching an American literature course in Belgium, I want to reinitiate myself into my teaching life here by reflecting on a connection between my field, literary studies, and the humanities broadly conceived, the charge for this talk. I promise I will not suddenly break into Hebrew, although Tony Kushner in his play Angels in America uses that device to startling effect. Rather, I will consider one central aspect of the humanities, and of being human, that connects, I see now, every aspect of my life as a teacher, scholar, member of the Wabash community, husband, father, son, and friend.
Because we are talking about the humanities, and because I teach Emerson and Whitman, I feel fairly confident that what I intend to talk about connects every aspect of your own lives as well. Whitman wrote with characteristic Transcendental cockiness in "Song of Myself," "What I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." But the academy is distrustful of such assumptions, and, until very recently, the subject of my lecture today was taboo. To talk openly about emotion—there, I've said it—was not only discouraged, emotions were seen as the human faculty that the entire university was created to overcome. Reason was and continues to be our raison d'etre. It's an old story. Plato banned the poets from his Republic, we put the Fine Arts Center safely across Grant Street. The arts arouse emotion and emotion is dangerous.
Perhaps I overstate the case. We do study emotions in biology and psychology courses; learn how to employ them rhetorically in speech, consider them as themes in literature, if we are very careful to call them "affective responses" or, more chillingly, "affective fallacies." We even encourage our students to feel emotions at concerts, during plays and sporting events, and at art openings, as long as they turn in a one-page analysis of their experience after the event. The problematic word here, of course, is "study." We are obliged as college instructors to educate our students' emotions, to harness them, to refine them, and this is an obligation I fully accept. But it is in fact only half the story, and misrepresents the interrelationship of intellect and emotion. We should be just as active, I believe, in allowing our emotions to educate us.
As John Dewey, the great American philosopher and educator, wrote, feeling "is coextensive with mental life; it is the internal aspect. All knowledge occurs in the medium of feeling, for in knowledge we render internal, or make belong to our consciousness, something which exists in the universe" ("Psychology" in The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898, p. 215). In other words, without feeling we can never make knowledge our own; it will literally have no meaning to us. And lest we fall into the trap of believing that feelings are merely subjective and internal, Dewey again enlightens us by saying that exactly the opposite is true. The "wonder" that we feel when we connect to some new object in the universe, the same feeling I had when first reading Bartleby, is "the source of science and philosophy...[it] is the sole spring which can take a man [sic] beyond his subjective states, and put him in that active relation to the world which is the sole condition of getting at its meaning" (262).
So it was with some concern that as I lurked over the e-mail exchanges and Wabash faculty meeting minutes while I was in Belgium, I noted a strong reaction by my colleagues to a motion Peter Frederick had proposed. He had moved that we add educating student emotions to the Wabash College mission statement. Reaction became particularly strong when Peter suggested we should be able to teach students to "feel authentically." "How could such a thing ever be agreed upon?" colleagues argued, as if consensus had already been achieved on how we might judge a student's ability to "act responsibly," "live humanely," "lead effectively," and even "think critically," phrases currently in the mission statement. One of my colleagues worried, and I share this concern, about the dangers of "prescribing how students should feel." "Prescribing" is a troublesome word. Our reservation about linking it with feeling is based on the assumption that feeling is so personal as to be inviolate.
Yet I believe the assumption behind the proposal was that there is an unquestionable link between what we feel and what we think and, consequently, how we learn. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, as teachers, we do engage our students' emotions every day in the classroom. We try to turn apathy for our subjects into excitement; we try to balance enthusiasm with careful observation; we try to kindle a love for Mozart and a distaste for the second rate; we want students to develop a sense of wonder before the processes of nature and the universe. Emotion is already a constituent element in each of our fields and in each existing charge in our mission statement; Peter's proposal was merely asking us to make that element visible.
For teachers who are conscious of what they are doing can be more effective than those who are not. As Eric Dean stressed in his 1982 Lafollette lecture, "To be concerned for the humanities is to realize that important considerations are rarely to be left to chance" (47). It is wonderfully appropriate for my talk today that what Eric was telling us not to leave to chance was what he saw as "the desireable social product of academic work—friendship." Yes, Eric Dean, the Humanities division head who seemed to many of the younger faculty when I first arrived on campus in 1980 as an imposing intellect, was, as we also felt, much more than that. Eric saw connection and community as the ultimate mission for the liberal arts. I think Eric would have bristled at the phrasing in the first line of "Our Core Values" that follows our mission statement in the college's official bulletin. Under the first value, "A rigorous liberal arts education that fosters" is written "An appreciation for the intellectual and physical aspects of a good life." Values listed afterwards do include the creation of "lifelong relationships," but the implication of the first value is that "rigorous" is connected only to the intellectual and physical. But what is "a good life" without emotions and the spirit? Eric and others would argue that they are not separable and that they are not incompatible with rigor.
Then why do we act as though they are? Why do we in the academy struggle to keep the emotions invisible? I believe that at Wabash there are two interlocking reasons. The first derives from the academic culture itself; the related reason has to do with gender. The prevailing image of Academic culture in America and, as I saw this year, in Europe, is deeply rationalistic in method and restrained in mode. As an undergraduate over 30 years ago I questioned whether I could ever be a professor, as the majority of instructors seemed so modulated in speech and movement. How could you not wave your arms when you discussed Byron or Russian novels or Cezanne? How could their voices maintain that monotonous rhythm and tone? Obviously there was something suspect about becoming excited while giving a lecture. An attitude of cool skepticism seemed de rigeur in academia, especially when I arrived in graduate school. In a graduate level Faulkner seminar at Michigan, I got so excited after reading the novel Absalom, Absalom that I brought a poem I had written late at night to share with the class. You can perhaps imagine the reaction. The professor, a patrician Virginian, was too much the gentleman to betray his true feelings, but my classmates' looks combined amusement, horror, and pity. Even allowing for the strong possibility that the poem was just bad, the real mistake I had made was violating the rules of academic etiquette. I myself had not been a gentleman. I had imposed my private feelings, admittedly dressed up in literary form, on others. I was acting inappropriately by revealing my emotions, especially as we were all then engaged in becoming professional literary critics. The analogy is perhaps to a medical student fainting at the sight of blood.
Gender's role in academias distrust of emotion has particular importance to us at Wabash. As a college that defines itself as all-male, we place ourselves within a particular historical discourse that sees the intellect and the emotions as separate and distinctly different. When Wabash was founded in 1832, the reigning metaphor for these separate faculties was the Head versus the Heart. Margaret Fuller, the Transcendental writer and friend of Emerson, called the split "the great radical dualism." Fuller, who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1810, but could not of course attend neighboring Harvard like her friend Ralph Waldo, was given a rigorous classical education at home by her father. Yet she, like most of her contemporaries, saw men as identified with the Head. They were the thinkers, classifiers, and doers. Women were identified with the Heart, and seen as great "harmonizersÉintuitive in function, spiritual in tendency." (The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women. Norton Anthology, 771.) Obviously, all-male colleges have their origins in this specious romantic dichotomy. Women were perceived as not constitutionally suited to work with their heads, but they were designed to improve the world at home or in church through their emotional, and related, moral superiority. As a transcendentalist, however, Fuller, writing in 1843, did not see the Head versus Heart dichotomy as ineluctably fixed, but as a function of abstract categories "maleness" and "femaleness," which did not necessarily define or limit individual men and women in their capabilities. "Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism," she writes." But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman" (772).
This was a rather radical view in its time, and when we consider the rigidity of current gender socialization, it unfortunately still appears radical. Men today are still encouraged to limit their emotional expression, if not their range of feeling. As Anthony Rotundo tells us in his history of American manhood, this socializing process, one he labels "boy culture," began in the 19th century and continues with only slight modification today. In order to enter Boy culture the initiate must "master his inner world of emotions." Peer pressure forces him to control feelings labeled "weak," and restrains him from seeking comfort in times of stress through the the use of names like "crybaby" (and today no doubt anti-homosexual taunts.) "As boys learned to master pain, fear, and the need for emotional comfort," Rotundo writes, "they were encouraged to suppress other expressions of vulnerability, such as grief and tender affection" (44). Some non-vulnerable emotions, however, were encouraged, like anger and violence. The result, Rotundo tells us, was the "curious marriage of violence and affection" that characterizes male friendships (45).
The students in my Men and Masculinity freshman tutorial explore these psychic realities in various ways, but it comes home perhaps most powerfully when we read the classic novel of boys growing into men, John Knowles' A Separate Peace. I'm sure many of you read this book as adolescents. I did. But only recently, after teaching it in this course, have I fully appreciated Knowles' emotional acquity. Gene, the novel's narrator, returns as an adult to the Devon prep school he attended as a teenager, seeking to solve the mystery of his friendship with Finney, a gifted natural athlete who was his closest friend, and rival, at school. Finney had fallen from a tree as he and Gene waited together to jump into the river, part of a prove-your-courage ritual Finney had created. The question for Gene (and for the reader) is, did he shake the limb intentionally or was it an accident, a fatal accident, because Finney ultimately dies from his injuries. A gender sensitive reading of the text reveals that it is Finney's divergence from normal male socialization that brings about his death. Gene is all too normally socialized. One day when they skip school and head for the beach, Finney apologizes for dragging Gene away from his work but says one must do these things with "your best palÉwhich is what you are." Gene is silent in response, but is in awe of what Finney had said: "It was a courageous thing to say," he reflects in the narrative present. "Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide."
Gene realizes as an adult that he should have responded, but something held him back—competition. Gene is competing intensely with Finney, but is incapable of accepting that Finney is actually not competing with him. When it strikes him that Finney is not playing the same game, that his friendship istotally selfless and thus on a higher human plane, Gene recalls, "I could not stand this." The awareness that now he can never win coupled with the fact that he cannot even imagine an escape from the masculine game of one upsmanship leads him to shake the branch, sending Finney to his death. It is no accident. Without a self-conscious gender perspective neither I, nor my students, could have gotten to this level of the story's meaning, and I learned to read literature this way as a result of feminism's entry into the academy. While I reject the historical idea noted above, that women are essentially more emotional than men, feminism, by validating female experience and arguing that the personal is political, has undermined the hegemony of male reliance on and appropriation of rationality. I will not here go into the many ways that feminism and, its offshoot, men's studies have changed the way I and the field of literary studies sees its subject, but suffice it to say that I would not today be talking about the subject of emotion without the support of this relatively new academic gender paradigm.
It is encouraging as well to note that the importance of emotions in learning is also currently being explored by science. According to biologist James E. Zull, the new brain science reveals that the creation of neural pathways associated with long-term memory, the kind of memory that defines real learning, depends on specific connections to the emotional centers of the brain. "The new understanding of the brain," Zull writes, "confirms that emotion, personal involvement, and caring, are required for deep learning. There may be no such thing as rote, or unemotional, learning. Every learner must activate the emotion centers in her brain in order to remember, understand, and learn" ("The Brain, Body Learning, and Teaching." The National Teaching & Learning Forum. Vol. 7, Number 3, 1998, p.4).
Today, I want to focus on one aspect of this vast subject—the ability of literature to move us in both senses of that word—to move us emotionally and then to move us to some kind of change or action. My original overly ambitions plan was to look at the effects of all the arts on our emotions. Why does a particular piece of music make us cry? How does looking at a painting send chills up our spines? Why might watching the same scene in a play make some students laugh and others angry? Current scholarly books, like Tom Lutz's Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears and James Elkins' Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, assured me that such questions are being asked in the academy today. I intended to illustrate my responses to these questions by showing you and playing for you images and moments in music that literally make my skin tingle and take my breath away. I had already selected the Puccini aria and the Van Gogh painting that did the job for me, but then I realized that what excited me might not excite you, and this could be embarrassing.
So to illustrate how emotion can be an integral part of teaching I will try something not done before in a Lafollette lecture—audience participation. I am going to ask you to think of a story, poem, painting, photograph, piece of music, a moment in a film or play, that has affected you deeply in some way—made you angry, sad, giddy, empathetic, revolted, aroused. To give you an example, for me a surefire emotional response is elicited by a sequence in the film Glory, about the Massachusetts 54th, a black regiment in the Civil War. Matthew Broderick playing Major Robert Gould Shaw rides his horse up to the ocean just before leading the charge against Fort Wagner. As he looks out to sea and prepares for what I know (after 10 viewings) will be his certain death, the music swells and I completely "lose it" every time. (Interesting how we call getting emotional "losing it.") Now please take 1 minute to try to recreate a feeling you've gotten from a work of art. Do it. Now turn to a person near you and talk for a minute about the work and the feeling it aroused. Then listen to that person's story.
I have taken an emotional chance here, and left a white space in the future printed version of this talk. Yet as Bill Placher noted in his Lafollette lecture in 1990, the academy is not "a place dedicated altogether to safety." If learning is truly to change us, he argues, we must be prepared to take risks. I have handed over control of the podium, of the space, of the moment. This is the strongest illustration I can give of the power of a pedagogy that puts feeling first. You may not take very much away from this lecture, and in a few days or weeks (I hope not hours) you may forget it almost completely. But I would suggest that you might remember the moment you actively participated far longer.
Emotional learning, I would argue, provides the "essential link" President Ford was referring to in a recent issue of Wabash Magazine between thinking critically and living humanely. "Even if these two notions are not naturally or easily linked," he writes, " they need to be joined if one is to live a good life" (Wabash Magazine. Spring/Summer 2002, 7). In the rest of my talk I want to illustrate how the study of literature can provide that connection. I do not wish to slight poetry, whose emotional power is inarguable, but I want to focus on narrative literature which I think is particularly suited to provide the kind of emotional education that can lead to a life humanely lived. Those moments of intense feeling we all remember experiencing in art are wonderful. They reattach us to our emotions and to our bodies, yet deeply connect us to an object and an artistic sensibility outside ourselves. But then what? What happens after that moment of intense feeling passes? Without a narrative context I believe we cannot easily move on to a new moral stance. We cannot achieve the integrity that Cheryl told us last year should be an end point of the liberal arts education.
Speaking of great philosophers, I want to enlist Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and holder of an honorary degree from Wabash, in support of my choice of narrative literature. In her latest book, as chance or the zeitgeist would have it, called Upheavals of Thought and subtitled The Intelligence of Emotions, Nussbaum attempts to derive a "theory of emotions," a project prompted by her intense grief over the death of her mother. One of the foundations for that theory is her belief, shared she shows by the ancient Stoics, that emotions are in fact value judgments. Everything we feel—anger, envy, love—cannot exist apart from particular ideas we have about the object of our emotions. We feel grief in direct proportion to what the lost person meant to us. Thus, Nussbaum argues, "emotions...have a complicated cognitive structure that is in part narrative in form, involving a story of our relation to cherished objects that extends over time." This "narrative dimension" deepens and refines "our grasp of ourselves as beings with a complicated temporal history" Following Proust, she concludes, "certain truths about the human being can be told only in literary form" (2-3).
Nussbaum pays much attention to compassion, and it is the literary evocation of this emotion that I want now to consider, for compassion is a feeling with an inherent social and ethical dimension. "Compassion is a painful emotion," Nussbaum writes, "occasioned by the awareness of another person's undeserved misfortune" (301). We feel compassion when we see ourselves in community with another, recognizing that we too might feel that same pain if only conditions were different. This leads to an awareness of our own vulnerability and a heightened sense that what happens to others has deep significance for us. To live humanely, then, our students would surely need to learn to feel compassion for others, especially for others who, at first, may seem completely different from them in terms of class, race, religion, national origin, or gender. But such learning must go beyond the cognitive. We cannot read facts about the suffering of Africans on slave ships during the middle passage, for example, and necessarily feel compassion for those slaves. We must have something like literature to project us imaginatively into their situation, to put us on that ship, to make us feel that we could be one of them.
I have taught many literary works over the years that, I believe, evoke compassion, and I want to focus briefly on three of my favorites to illustrate that the heart is really the matter in literary studies. The first of these mini-cases is a novel I am sure all of you have read at least once—Mark Twain's Huckelberry Finn, published in 1886. When I heard about the faculty debate over "authentic feeling," Huck Finn was the first book I thought of. One of Twain's major purposes in the novel is to teach the reader to distinguish between sentimentality and true feeling. One could say this is the object of all serious art. Twain skewers sentimentality in his sketch of Emmeline Grangerford, the, "alas," deceased daughter of one of the feuding families Huck briefly stays with during his journey down the Mississippi. Emmeline, from an early age, was fixated on death. She kept a scrapbook in which she collected obituaries and accident reports, and she always made it to neighbors' deathbeds just after the doctor and before the undertaker. Huck reads one of her poems, which she made up "out of her own head," and is in awe of it. Here are some verses from the Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd, just as Emmeline penned them:
And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?
No: such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.
Huck responds that "if Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by-and-by" (1337). Twain spends many pages satirizing Emmeline, and Huck's taste, but takes only one sentence at the end of the Grangerford section to present real feeling. When Buck Grangerford, only 14, is shot dead during the feud, Huck finds his body. "I cried a little when I was covering Buck's face," he says, " for he was mighty good to me" (1345). To get tough little Huck to cry is no mean feat; it is a significant moment in the novel. But for my purposes I want to consider a scene that, no matter how many times I teach it, makes my arms tingle and tightens my chest, one that not only viscerally moves the reader but moves Huck to ethical action.
Huck and Jim have been separated in the fog for most of a stormy night, and when Huck makes his way back to the raft he finds Jim asleep. He immediately decides to play a trick on Jim, one worthy of his friend Tom Sawyer. When Jim wakes up he is overcome with relief and Joy to find Huck alive. "It's too good for true, honey," he says. "Lemme look at you, chile, lemme feel o' you. No, you ain' dead?...thanks to goodness!" (1316). Huck, for the first and only time in the novel, begins to lie, not