BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
417
century activated itself under the name of William Blake.) Why is it im–
possible to gain a hearing for Michel Serres's remark, "You can always
proceed from the product to its conditions, but never from the conditions
to the product"? Surely that's a simple idea and a true one, but if you
point to Shakespeare or Aeschylus or Milton or Blake for proof, you're
accused of claiming that these geniuses float free of conditions, historical,
personal, political, and economical. No such claim is entailed. The only
claim is that no account of the conditions, however detailed, will explain
the emergence in their times and places of
King Lear
and Blake's Pro–
phetic Books.
I'm not sure how useful it would be, in present circumstances, to
contest these prejudices. Or how useful it has been when they have been
contested.
It
is a mark of intellectuals that they find it easy not to listen
and therefore not to hear. They hear only what their ideological associates
are saying. Surely the conditions of conversation at large are not propi–
tious. If you try to say that politics does not provide a comprehensive
account of life, you are denounced for trying to instate the values of re–
ligion, myth, and ritual - as if that attempt were by definition insidious. If
you claim that the Enlightenment has not removed mysteries, though it
has solved certain problems, you are accused of wanting to spread confu–
SIon.
Suppose you merely want to say that literature is literature: you still
find
it
hard to persuade readers who prefer to think that literature be–
comes a serious activity only when it is construed as something else. Even
those who are well disposed to literature often think that they are doing it
a favor by turning it to another purpose, apparently a better purpose than
itself. Martha Nussbaum is a case in point. I have been reading her new
book,
Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.
Much of it is
admirable, especially its emphasis upon ethical concern and "the good of
other people whose lives are distant from our own." But it becomes a
doomed undertaking when she argues that a reading of Dickens's
Hard
Times
will persuade economists, politicians, and judges to modify their
pursuit of utilitarian, cost-effective ends.
Hard Times
and
Native Son
are
the only works of literature she discusses, and in both cases she presents
the novel not as a work of art but as a parable, a transcript of a case study
from which a workable model may be drawn. Novels should be, she says,
"essential parts of an education for public rationality." But her commen–
tary on
Native Son
ends with these sentences:
Engaging the reader in this tragedy of social helplessness, the novel constructs a
reader who is a judicious and neutral judge of Bigger Thomas, but a judge whose
