The Treasure that is Literature: Re-Reading for Self-Discovery

How can one be false to be true? Literature is falsehood that persuasively conveys truthful essences of human life analogously through imaginary worlds, invented characters and devised plots. Devoted readers discover, via literature, meaning by which we may live more nobly and wisely. It is axiomatic that an author plumbs human consciousness while disclosing the author’s own. I was unaware until my sixth decade that literature reveals the reader to himself.

Re-reading literature mines diamonds of self-knowledge. It is akin to watching one’s childhood home movies; it reveals what we have forgotten, what we have grown away from, what remains and what new qualities have developed. The autobiographical knowledge I gleaned from re-reading is in itself of little interest to you, so I ask your forbearance to demonstrate the life-long value of literature, showing, by example, that a decades-spanning re-reading harvests abundance of insight. Upon a re-reading, the present state of our consciousness appears in bright relief, our knowledge of it clarified and deepened, revealed in the light of its past.

40 years after I first read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), I read it again. While searching for nutritious entertainment among the TV zombies, drug dealers, prison stories and pornography that makes waste of our precious time on this planet, our family stumbled upon the 1994 Louis Marks BBC adaptation of Middlemarch.

Surely, I thought, Juliet Aubrey enacted a steamier Dorothea Brooke than I remembered the character to be. Well, an adaptation on film is just that: Not the book, but something else again, though based upon it. In my recollection, Dodo was physically unprepossessing and unconscious of herself sexually, but possessing a passionate mind and an unsettled soul that yearned to understand Divine truths, obtained at the feet of intellectual giants. I could not reconcile the Miss Aubrey’s depiction with the character I had recalled.

Then it hit me: Perhaps I no longer saw these characters in the same way because I had changed. That did it: I just had to re-read Middlemarch. As I re-read it, I discovered just how far I had come in consciousness. I felt like a mountaineer attaining the peak, looking back, astonished, over the ranges and the rivers he has, incredibly, crossed.

Here are three of my self-discoveries, gleaned from a single re-reading of Middlemarch. 1) Characters whom I at 18 had admired and by whom I measured myself, I now pitied for their ignorance and foolhardiness. 2) Characters I had contemptuously dismissed as abject and unforgivable failures of will had become objects of wistful commiseration, deserving, instead, mercy and compassion. 3) I recognized the appropriation of divinity for ulterior motives, so as to camouflage evil under a mask of moral righteousness. This last was especially galling, for at 18, it had sailed passed me like a cannonball might pass within an inch of Helen Keller’s head.

1) DOROTHEA AND IDEALISM As a young man, I read myself into the young idealist, Dorothea. She yearns to epitomize a fantasy of holy scholarship that discovers secrets of higher being, embodied, so she thinks, in Casaubon, who becomes her husband. “Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!”

I saw myself in precisely the same way, intensely focused upon my esoteric studies no other student I knew had the least interest in (like Dorothea), and idolizing several scholar-instructors (who were not hacks like Casaubon). Unlike Dorothea, I had a bit more on the ball intellectually than Eliot gave her, but at age 18, I conjured her what I had, and in so mistakenly imagining her to be like me, I admired her most fervently: I worshiped. I was probably worshiping myself.

But upon re-reading… Dorothea, I find now, is a harmless creature, perhaps even well-intentioned, but blindered by an obsession with her own spiritual yearning. Yet, while she yearns, she never seems to act, settling instead into a comfortable discomfort, the state of passive recalcitrance. I recall wondering, years ago, why she had the nickname, Dodo. But now I understood: What a silly girl! I wondered, was the younger me congruent with the Dorothea I know saw? To a goodly extent, I am sure of it. One sighs at such a revelation, only to immediately thank goodness that is no longer characteristic of oneself.

Unbelievably, I had totally missed the gag factor: she threw over a handsome, vibrant, steady, reasonable, intelligent, caring and wealthy young man, who had begged for her hand, for a withering, gray, dilettante 30 years her senior, who could not even give her a good roistering. Yikes! The idea is totally vomit inducing to me now that I am Casaubon’s age, but at age 18, I thought nothing of it. Was her motivation all the while to avoid sex? Did she finally give in when Ladislaw’s sexual inevitability proved insurmountable to her? Neither of these questions would have ever occurred to me at age 18! Talk about innocence that is its own kind of ignorance…

2) LYDGATE AND FAILURE Dr. Tertius Lydgate enters the novel promising great advances in medicine; he dies at 50 having failed to achieve anything of note, other than “leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life.”

At 18, I had only the most abject spite for him. I remember asking, incredulously, how was it possible for a talented man of high ideals to fail? Lydgate must have been the progenitor of his failure, for it was certain to me then that the world was just, that talent was always rewarded, that ideals were achievable, that greatness was in the palm of one’s hand for the taking and that failure was the product of a weakness of will: a flaw in the person. To the 18 year old me, the man who was not John Galt was Biff Loman.

20 years after I first read Middlemarch (and 20 years before today), I had achieved, if not none, but then very few of the “high-minded goals” I had set out seemingly so resolutely to achieve. As mirthfully as one might put it, I had become the “sadder, but wiser girl” Meredith Wilson had Robert Preston croon about. So it came as a shock and a powerful intoxicant to read, around the age of 40, George Orwell agree with my sentiment at the time that “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” (from All Art is Propaganda) Surely the 18 year old. who would have disinherited the 38 year old me, didn’t know this; and the 58 year old would forgive them both their pitifully limited understanding.

Eliot did not give Lydgate the chance to renew and overcome. Where the writer fails her character is in the aspect of a male life that was unknown to her, and is, in fact, poorly known by men even now. Daniel Levinson, in The Season’s of a Man’s Life, a study of transitions in the lives of men, writes: “Those who betray the Dream [like Lydgate] in their twenties will have to deal later with the consequences. Those who build a life structure around the Dream in early adulthood have a better chance for personal fulfillment, though years of struggle may be required to maintain the commitment and work toward its realization.” (at 92) However, even after the “mid-life transition,” which usually comes in the fourth decade of life, some men are able to turn things around and yet achieve a full life in later years which fulfill the “imagined drama in which he is the central character, a would-be hero engaged in a noble quest.” (at 246)

Now, a decade older than Tertius at his fictional death, I have fulfilled many goals and ideals which as a young man I had set for myself, and altogether in a wiser, more satisfying, intelligent and compassionate way—compassionating myself as well as others. Poor Tertius never had the chance, because Eliot did not give it to him. In another imagined world, he might have turned it around, as did I. Such a reversal is, in fact, the premise of a comic novel I have just completed. But the 18 year old me, so convinced of his omniscience, could, of course, never have known any of this; the 38 year old would only barely consider it, yet think it impossible; the 58 year old would prove the both of them entirely erroneous.

3) BULSTRODE AND MORAL SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS Nicholas Bulstrode is the village banker who once worked for a fence in London. He married the fence’s widow and, though he professed to help find the widow’s missing daughter, kept secret the daughter’s whereabouts, thus engineering his duplicitous inheritance of the estate intended for the girl. When Bulstrode’s colleague visits years later to blackmail him, the townsfolk see through the man who had for decades draped himself in pious fabric to hide his iniquity. The unmasking comes with a grand sense of divine justice that is as pitieous as it is satisfying.

At 18, Bulstrode was to me just a disgusting old man. His thrilling public unveiling I had somehow found anti-climactic. I was totally unmoved by Bulstrode’s public ruin, or his recondite and cathartic penance before his suffering, innocent wife; I was indifferent to the reputational injury Lydgate suffered by association. Was I so insensitive to personal catastrophe? I must have been. Perhaps I thought it just desserts and left it at that.

Little did I know then the camouflage of piety which hides in assertive self-righteousness the deep shame of one’s own immorality and imperfections. The fear of being found out that one is not really what one would like others to believe is so strong as to compel the creation of an alternate reality in the mind that convinces oneself of one’s own righteousness and rectitude despite one’s own self-loathing.

I caught none of this at 18. Now, I see deception and self-deception of a similar nature demonstrated every day, especially among the soi-disant woke; I pity Bulstrode’s honest, steadfast, long-suffering wife for whose reputation has been inalterably stained owing to no fault of her own; indeed, I pity Bulstrode.

That is what I learned about myself from re-reading of Middlemarch. Quite an unanticipated harvest.

Joseph Bottum, in his Decline of the Novel, writes, “…for nearly three centuries, the West increasingly took the novel as the art form most central to its cultural self-awareness as the artistic device by which the culture attempted some of its most serious attempts at self-understanding. And the form of that device was developed to explain and solve particularly Protestant problems of the self in modern times.” (at 15) It may be that “as the main strength of established Protestant Christendom began to fail in Europe and the United States in recent decades, so did the cultural importance of the novel.”

But readers – my hunch is there are many of us – can and do continue to enjoy the harvest of self-discovery the novel engenders. My experience is that the importance of the novel to the culture of the individual, especially the American, has never been greater than right now. Circe’s wand-touch turned into pigs those piggish weak-willed, pleasure-seeking, moly-drinking warriors; even after they had seen the lions and wolves feeding from her hand. Eurylochus, alone among them to fear a trap to sap them of all resolution, hied to the ship for the uncorruptible Odysseus, who returned to the cave and overpowered her. Thus persuaded, Circe grants his men their original form, younger and stronger. I predict that as more of us reject the culture of nihilism that would annihilate what is good and hopeful in us, the novel will turn a deaf ear to the siren song of anomie to once again answer its original call to instruct, to inspire and to uplift.

Print