Why Read? by Mark Edmundson Page B

might
do the same for them. Or at least it might begin the process. Such puritanical resolve on the part of early twenty-first-century
American students struck me as both a little frightening and quite moving.
    As someone who far prefers Emerson to James, indeed who prefers the young Isabel to James, as a temperament, I was temporarily
saddened that people so young could be drawn to puritanical self-dislike. But I soon saw that my response was neither here
nor there. It didn't much matter. I had done my job, which was to put students in a position to read and then to be read by
the work at hand. Everyone who sat through that class was in a position to know himself better by virtue of the exchange.
In this discussion, the process of "identification," of seeing oneself in a literary character, was essential.
    Few activities associated with literary study are in worse repute than identification. Teachers in middle school—grades six
to eight—by now caution against it, seeing it as a block to serious study. Surely it has no place in a college classroom.
Surely no professor should endorse it publicly.
    Sometimes what worries teachers about identification is the belief that it's inseparable from wish-fulfillment. You become
one with a heroic figure and leave your small, timid self behind. What you have then is a mere daydream. I find both wish-fulfilling
fantasies, as literature provides them, and daydreaming to be precious human activities, for reasons that I'll later explain.
But the process of identification that went on with Isabel—by young men and by women both—was not a matter of wish-fulfillment.
On the contrary, in the identification process any simple narcissism underwent serious challenge by James. This is so because
in studying James, as in studying any consequential writer, the step that follows identification is analysis of a firm but
generous sort.
    Still there's something about the process that can make the professional critic squirm. Perhaps it's the release of emotion
that's involved, the fact that when we work with identification we don't sound like scientists who command a rigorous discipline.
Perhaps we don't sound official or academic enough. Maybe we're worried about our authority. But as inspired religious teachers
and artists of every stripe demonstrate all the time, the process of human growth—when it entails growth of the heart as well
as of the mind—is never particularly clean or abstract. To grow it is necessary that all of our human qualities come into
play, and if some of those qualities are not pretty, then so be it. But to keep them to the side so as to preserve our professional
dignity—that is too much of a sacrifice. (Men and women die every day, perish in the inner life . . . for lack of what we
have to offer.)
    In general, academic literary study over the past two decades has become ever colder and more abstract. But there is one area
of exception. Many feminist teachers have been willing to deal with emotion and the facts of daily life in their classrooms.
Against prevailing orthodoxies, these professors have insisted on speaking personally, and have made sure that their students
have had a chance to do so. Some feminists, it's true, have surrendered to pressure for high-toned theoretical respectability,
but many have stuck to their guns and talked intimately and immediately about experience. It's in classrooms of this sort
that students can at times connect the books they read to their own lives. Something similar can be true in classes on race,
at least when students can talk candidly. (For a variety of complex reasons, though, they almost never can be direct and honest
on this subject, even with the best-intentioned professors presiding.) But such classrooms are, alas, just about the only
places where bringing together word and world is still the objective.
    Milan Kundera speaks about novels as being populated by "experimental selves." These selves are persons whom we might be