The Law, the Prophets, and Wisdom

On the Functions of Literature

John E. Becker

College English, November 1975

By the time the evening is over, Mr. Taylor has identified the Creation with the Pilgrim landing on Plymouth Rock, colonial society as "Before Eden," and the troubled trio of Adam, Eve and lake (it rhymes with snake) in hillbilly heaven with "So Long Eden." In the highly emotional "West of Eden," a lawless frontier town is the setting for the story of Cain and Abel, while in the wittiest section, "The Flood," Mr. Taylor and Miss deJong are seen as a riverboat captain (Noah) and his wife.

THE BIBLE, IT WOULD SEEM, stubbornly maintains its claim on America's artists as their most valuable tool for shaping a vision of America. The text I cite is the New York Times account of American Genesis, choreographed by Mr. Paul Taylor and danced recently by his company in New York. It is too bad to have to say that the idea was more cogent in the Times than on the stage, since America remains a land, a culture, a history which invites allegory. Though Mr. Taylor's allegorization of America by way of the Bible in dance may be novel, the allegorization of America is not. It lives on even in the contemporary critical writing about American literature. Critic after critic has tried to show how the whole mighty current belongs between the banks of one sophisticated narrative stream. R.W. B. Lewis, in The American Adam, tells our literary story in terms of a Biblical myth; Roy Harvey Pearce roots The Continuity of American Poetry in the problematic social role of the American poet; Charles Feidelson discerns a narrative unity based on the symbolistic epistemology of American writings; John F. Lynen spreads out a grand Design of the Present; David Minter, an Interpreted Design. There are more. Though these critics might object to having their efforts called allegories, each turns American literature into the twice-told tales they are able to collect under their own unifying rubric. It is the aspiration toward unity that is fascinating. The aspiration argues to a need, a facet, no doubt, of our broader cultural need to discover if there is any quality by which we can all, disparate and divided as we are, denominate ourselves Americans.

The critics mentioned above refer us inevitably back to the Puritans, who solved their particular cultural need for identity by adopting a unified body of literature, the Bible, as their own. It is insufficient, I think, to ascribe the Puritans' elaborate use of the Bible to religious tradition alone. Over and above its religious value, the Bible had a revolutionary value for an exiled group trying to build a culture seriously able to counter the aristocratic and still too Catholic dominant culture from which they had come. The propriety of the Bible for such an effort resided partially in the fact that the Bible could stand alone as a total and sufficient literature in itself.

The cultural need for an identity that would set America off from England did not die with the lapse of Puritan belief. And as the cultural need remains, the Bible also has remained as a kind of cornerstone of American literature. Its prevalence as both literary source and interpretative context for American history has been documented abundantly by critics and cultural historians. I would like to exploit and extend their examination of the relationship between the Bible and American culture into a discussion of the functions of literature within American culture. Perhaps the analysis may apply on the more general level of the functions of literature in any culture.

The process by which the Bible was formed into The Book of a whole culture bears strong analogies to the process in which American critics are engaged. The Bible, of course, was compiled and edited–a physical cutting and pasting of literary works to fit them into the thematic unities of The Book. Our critics proceed by modifying our perceptions–a perceptual remaking of literature into a single tale. Instead of cutting and pasting, they strive for a discovered unity. In both cases the process strives for a close mutual identification of culture and literature. If the analogy between the editorial process which formed the Bible and the "allegorical" process which informs our criticism is valid, then the analogy may be taken a step further. The Bible, as a model of the relationship between a distinctive culture and its literature, should contain some interesting insights into the complexities of the relationship between our literature and its society.

Before getting into those complexities let us simply advert to the fact that the relationship between literature and culture is problematic. Recent experience bears this out as never before. We remember well the cries of the sixties for relevance and commitment. It is easy to say that students then tended to reduce the problem to sloganeering, but we who teach literature frequently responded with a testy reduction of the whole question to "mere sociology." The relationship of literature to culture remains an irritant in academe. The urgency of the irritation may seem merely pedagogical, but it is ultimately theoretical as well, and will have to find some sort of theoretical articulation before the hard won principle of the autonomy of literature is given a more effective defense than the one contained in the sociology sneer. I would like to introduce my consideration of the Bible as model for the relationship of literature to society by way of my own experience of the problem as an undergraduate and leave the theoretical problem aside, for the moment.

My teachers were not content to present me with literature as a leisure-time activity, a useful adjunct to professional life. Literature, they insisted, is good in and for itself, no matter what help or hindrance it might be in the practical arrangements of life. But, I kept hearing myself say, if literature is so basic and fundamental a human activity, so deep a need of every human culture that no culture is ever without it, how is it that so many of us have spent so much of our lives virtually unaware of it; how is it that it takes so much effort and explanation to make it available to us; how is it that so few of those to whom it is being made available will maintain their interest once the educational barrage is finished? Literature, in spite of what was being said about it, seemed too narrow. This was not, I am convinced, merely a personal myopia, though it was that. An academic definition of literature had formed itself around the academic study of literature. My vague sense that literature must be more broadly and actively related to society did not begin to shape itself into a communicable conviction, however, until I began to teach the Bible. It was then that I found myself, inexcusably late, at grips with a literary unity which had incorporated into itself an incredible, almost contradictory diversity. For our purposes here it is sufficient to categorize that diversity in the broadest terms. The Hebrew tradition divides the Bible into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Each division was incorporated into the Bible as it came to be recognized as sacred. But, to my eye, each of those divisions appeared to have come into the Biblical canon, come to be literature, as a result of a progressive recognition of certain perennial cultural needs that literature fulfills.

The Law

The writings included in the first five books of the Bible are not just legal, in spite of the name. They are historical, cosmological, at times liturgical and lyrical. Their social function would seem to have been to help a group of disparate tribes achieve cultural and theological identity, not just to set them off competitively from the surrounding cultures, but to fulfill the need each person has of knowing who he is within a coherent community. What the Law did for the Jews was, first, give them a history, then, a place in the cosmos, and finally, a set of moral obligations and liturgical forms for building and preserving their unity as a people. The writings of the Law are nation-building, race-building, people-building. They are supportive of a way of life, and they work not only by clarifying that way of life but especially by celebrating it. In spite of the heavy legal emphasis of this part of the Bible, I think it is best characterized as a literature of celebration.

This first part of the Bible points to one of the basic functions that literature serves in a culture, the supportive function. Clearly much of the literature of the European tradition is celebratory. Homer and Virgil are cases in point. But the bards of our more recent past found their function as well in celebration. Their business, discussed explicitly in their poems, was to hand on to future ages the glory of their kings and leaders. Interestingly, there is some hint that the need for this celebratory literature was made acute by their being but recently settled tribes, like the Hebrews. The bard's function was so clear and acceptable to contemporary men of power that it eventually won a form of economic security which, in the centuries after the migrations, came to be called patronage. The price poets eventually paid for their security was that they almost inevitably came to limit the perception of their function to the production of "pure" art. As with the Jews, this would not always suffice.

America, too, began with a literature of celebration, though without the economic foundation of patronage. The clearest example is Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation which, however uninteresting to a modern sensibility not interested simply in the historical document, must have been very interesting, because very supportive, to the people of Bradford's time. But the group identity Bradford was celebrating was too narrow and too vulnerable to the destructive forces at work within it. The literature of Puritan celebration rapidly declined into a series of laments for a lost Puritan order. In fact the decline into nostalgia is sensible within the very stages of composition of Bradford's history.

With Emerson and Whitman America got her first wholehearted celebrators. They celebrated a new, democratic man, liberated from the social systems in which art had been produced in Europe. Whitman self-consciously asserted that he was writing more than the powerless "pure" literature of the European past. He was writing a new American Bible, with all the power to shape a culture that the term Bible suggests. There is more than rhetoric and egoism in his claim. Whitman's poetry refuses to stay on the page. He is clearly striving to give words an almost supernatural, transtemporal. force. He constitutes himself a new Providence as he looks over our shoulders today when we cross, or would if we could, Brooklyn ferry. He refuses to say, "This is the way it is for Whitman." He insists on saying simply, "This is the way it is." He makes the same demand for assent when he says, "I celebrate myself and sing myself" that the Bible makes when it says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As the Bible goes on to define for the Jews a new sense of reality that sets them off as a people from the morass of Middle-Eastern fertility worshippers, so Whitman went on to define for Americans a new sense of radical individual independence which is based on the conviction that every American man is his own poet who will write his own Bible out of his own self-celebration. To create America is to celebrate the self. It is not important to decide whether Whitman succeeded in his design, but rather to grasp the function he felt impelled to fulfill: to celebrate and thereby create the new American man.

The serious literature of celebration in America today would certainly include the literature being written by those critics who seek out in our literature its unifying and unique genius. Unfortunately their celebrations run the risk of going unheard outside the walls of our universities. Meanwhile, within the broader culture, the literature of celebration has undergone a terrible trivialization. Much of our celebration consists in commercial messages that, instead of building a culture and preserving the richness of our approach to life, merely prod us into buying, stimulate the economy, keep us going faithfully to work every day.

At the end of his chapter in "La Legende," André Jolles asks where the saint's legend may be found in our time and answers: in the accounts of athletes whose miraculous power is the power to break records. Whatever the validity of the cultural identification of athletes with saints, it seems certain that athletes alone inspire the verbal pyrotechnics that once characterized the poetry of the bards. It is on the sports page that we find the Homeric epithets, the constant measuring and re-measuring of heroic deeds, the coy and self-conscious cultivation of air hammer alliteration. But sports writing is merely the stylistic aureole around our true celebration–the half-time show of any big game. It is typical of these secular liturgies to define our identity by tracing the history of our nation under one rubric or another: technology, music, war, or education. These solemnly repeated recitals of our history celebrate the sense of inevitable progress which, on the conscious level, we all disclaim, but which, on the level of psychological survival, still contributes mightily to keeping us loyal and industrious

It seems most logical to search for a serious celebration of our culture at the movies. They alone constitute a form that remains close to all the people even though they have achieved a relative freedom from the intense commercial sanctions hovering over TV. Movies like those of Howard Hawkes, or like Gone with the Wind are ways we have found to define ourselves and our ideals. The difference between a book like The Great Gatsby and the movie of that name is not simply a difference of medium. The book was not a celebration. But the movie has inflated the book into a typically nostalgic celebration of a way of life that once was. Certain features of the original lyric novel had to be sacrificed to create the epic sense of the twenties.

The Prophets

We come a little bit closer to the ambiguities of the academic sense of literature when we come to the prophets, the second body of Biblical writings to achieve sacredness. The so-called "Former Prophets," the name for those historical books which follow the Law, are not of interest here; rather that large body of literature gathered around the names of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve lesser or "Minor Prophets."

In the time of the Biblical prophetic movement there was a body of establishment prophets whose vision was much sought after by kings and statesmen. These seers were naturally tempted by their role to say what kings and statesmen wanted to hear. The great prophetic voices of the Bible, however, had nothing but contempt for official prophets, whom they called false prophets, yea-sayers. The form of prophecy forged for us by the great prophets is a speaking wedded to action. The words of these men are not spun out of the ecstatic dancing of the seers but out of a strong commitment to direct, life-on-the-line witness. Though they meditate on man, God, society, and power, they do not stand off in esthetic contemplation and reflection but throw themselves at the centers of power, attack, protest with the extravagant gestures of their outrage. Their words are the weapons that accompany them into action, or they are reflections wrung out of the anguished alienation forced upon them by their resistance. The roots of the Biblical prophets were deep in the democratic traditions of the Jewish people, traditions very much less absolutist than those of the surrounding kingdoms. The Biblical prophets, then, are the voice of this radical democratic tradition demanding, during an era of monarchy and empire, that the king and the people both recognize that they are accountable for the way they treat their fellow men. The admission of the prophets into the Biblical canon signifies a recognition by the community of the perennial validity and necessity of their very non-supportive use of the power of words.

Roy Harvey Pearce, in The Continuity of American Poetry, has spoken of the radical insecurity of the poet in America, an insecurity that has been both economic and cultural (pp. 4-5). It would seem that what Marcuse calls the essence of art, saying the Great No to society, is a development especially proper to a society in which the poet's role is virtually ignored and therefore powerless. In America the very act of writing a poem has a social significance at the opposite end of the spectrum from the act of the bard praising his leader. Writing a poem has been among us an act of self-assertion against society and its leaders, a kind of prophetic gesture as radical and as scandalous to our ethic as Amos's taking a whore for his wife in witness against the Jewish people's lapse into fertility worship.

Prophecy, then, is not just a form of writing peculiar to a certain period of Jewish history, nor to this or that romantic or modem poet. It seems to me that it defines a second essential dimension of the functioning of literature in society–a kind of mirror image of celebration. As every society needs a literature of support to help it identify itself as a coherent culture, so every society needs a prophetic literature to rage against its injustices and its failures to live up to the ideals it proclaims to the world. The prophetic writer is the writer who establishes his life and his action as the ultimate poem. The result is that the written poem inevitably tests and often cracks the limits of convention. Language is made to perform tasks no one has thought it possible to expect. As a consequence, the poetry which survives the life retains its power and its value as a perennial act of resistance against the complacency of the mind.

Such writing is not rhetoric, an attempt to persuade a particular audience at a particular moment of its history and retained as a model for future performances of this kind. It is assertion and rage with a deep disdain for persuasion. It is a demand for honesty, for a radical change of heart and vision. Reading the prophetic poet is neither the enjoyment of a curious historical document nor of a static verbal artifact. It is the acceptance and entering into a relationship with him as the alienation imposed by his resistance drives him into deeper and deeper self-scrutiny. Prophetic writers present us with intense problems of credibility. They make very extravagant claims; they seem egocentric, theatrical, perhaps even clownish or ridiculous. Moreover they are aware of our problem with them. They throw themselves defiantly on our mercy as they throw themselves on the mercy of the political powers they attack. They discuss themselves in front of us, as did the Hebrew prophets: they discuss their vocations, their anguish, the processes of their art. They refuse to try to seduce us into a created world that will take us out of the real world they want us to do business with. They tend toward confession rather than drama. They demand that we stand beside them, uncomfortable as such pushy intimacy may be to us, as they try to put into words what is awry with the established order of reality.

A large number of American writers share, it seems to me, at least some of the characteristics of prophetic composition. Hawthorne's self-conscious worries about the legitimacy of his role as an artist go along with very probing and ambivalent reflections on American history and ideas. Melville gestures, rants, jokes, and agonizes with an ambivalent rage against a society that will not be honest or true to itself. Today, Robert Lowell witnesses with his prison term for conscientious objection during the Second World War and his continued public resistance to America's military arrogance on the steps of the Pentagon. Next to him is Norman Mailer posturing, wondering about his art. Out of the posturing comes his Armies of the Night--as much an exposé of the self and of the nature of art as of the government he resists. Berrigan bums draft records and has movies made of it. He stands trial and puts together a documentary play from its records. Using the liturgy of the courtroom–the only liturgy we all must try to believe in–he shows how inadequate our legal institutions are to deal with our own American ideals of justice. Modern black literature is our most luxuriant growth of prophetic literature. Its writers bear an extreme physical witness; its style tears violently at literary convention; its effect is scandal and outrage among the conventionally religious, among the conventional of all kinds. Its writers bear an extreme physical witness; its style tears violently at literary convention; its effect is scandal and outrage among the conventionally religious, among the conventional of all kinds. Its esthetic perfections is vulnerable but, at times, undeniable. American writers, self-conscious and unsure of themselves, are always engaged in a love-hate relationship with their middle-class culture, always fighting for a credibility and acceptance just below the range of aristocratic sophistication, always creating the ground they stand on because there is no accepted ground for them. They seem very close to the alienated Biblical prophets fighting to make the Jews, tempted by the prestige and power of surrounding monarchies and lapsing into comfortable ritual theologies, stay faithful to the commands of their wilderness God.

Prophetic writing does not quite fit into the well wrought urns of modern criticism. In the universities we have learned and taught an esthetic which does not like to recognize a relationship between language and political power. We have submitted to the drift of literature into its own separate world and tradition, a gravity of literary forces playing within the illusion of an autonomous literary universe. Any attempt to project words into action or to test them by action has seemed to constitute impurity.

But we cannot so easily dismiss the contemporary literature produced out of resistance. Our very idea of literature, as Alvin Kernan has pointed out in "The Idea of Literature," dates from the latter half of the eighteenth century and "seems to have come into being and to have defined itself at least in partial opposition to the new industrial-democratic-scientific society." We are engaged, de facto, with a body of writings constituted in terms of a prophetic dimension. The heart of what we know as literature is to do violence to the mind's complacent structures. Eventually that violence of the mind results in a drive toward changing social structures. When that begins to happen, the temptation is very strong to reject the prophetic dimension and reread our prophetic literature in a historicist way as a collection of beautiful antiques. Literature as antique seems to be a solution to the problem of what we see as rhetorical dross. We transform the dross into an esthetic curiosity borne to our detached contemplation out of a now dead time.

But Biblical prophecy has not come down to us because its Jewish editors, having forgotten its original urgency, found its rhetoric beautiful, nor because they were able to recreate through history a memory of the context in which it was originally spoken. They felt its urgency still. Its incorporation into the Bible bears witness to a perennial need for words that continue to destroy the weed-like growth of complacency. The prophetic dimension is inherent in the beauty of much of our literature. It makes present demands, and the historical evasion of those demands cannot fail to blunt its beauty.

It might seem, on the surface of it, that the function of prophecy in our time is fulfilled by newspaper journalism with its crusading reporters. The role of the media in the recent Watergate scandals would seem to verify this. But prophecy is something altogether different from muckraking journalism. The newspaper writer, even the crusader, is less concerned with the power of language than with the power of facts. Language is merely a useful medium for communicating his facts. Professionally the reporter can hardly allow himself to examine the most basic of all facts, that we enslave and exploit by our way of conceiving, conceptualizing, and discussing the facts. The reporter, backed up against his deadlines and ruled by the most rigid, if fragmented, of all literary forms, simply accepts the basic conceptions he shares with his readership. He speaks of liberal and conservative, white collar and blue collar, domestic and foreign, conceptions that constitute the moral blindness against which the prophet must rage. Though the reporter may snap at the heels of the establishment, quite often he merely represents one establishment snapping at the heels of another. The dragon is being slain by St. George, but St. George is equipped and paid by another dragon.

The prophetic writer, both Biblical and modern, is dedicated to something else again–to liberation from the enslaving power of conventional conceptions and comfortable convictions. That is why he is so frequently confessional. Because he attacks the social realities in depth, he must attack those realities in the depths of his own psyche. For the prophet, the power of language resides in the power to tear down the structures within which injustice looks merely like the facts. He knows that our careful distinctions are our way of hiding from ourselves the facts which betray us to all the world. Blasphemy and scandalous behavior are his perennial stock in trade, and in so far as he forges them into works of art he will continue to fulfill, as do the Biblical prophets, the community's continuing need to awaken to its own outrageous blasphemy.

Wisdom

We come, finally, to the last body of material to be considered sacred and incorporated in the Bible, a body of writings that the Hebrew tradition has called simply "The Writings." A significant part of this material is called Wisdom Literature; its most typical books are: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon, and some of the Psalms.

Wisdom literature is a much more pedagogical form of literature than celebration or prophecy. It is filled with the kinds of exhortations to read and study that teachers deliver in their classes. The wisdom writer, moreover, frequently laments the failure of the young to read or to listen to wisdom. Wisdom literature concerns itself with the existential problems of men: life, death, sex, commerce, living in the world and expecting to go out of it. Most importantly, perhaps, much wisdom literature had a non-Jewish origin. The presence of foreign literature and the fact that the ideal of wisdom was eventually personified–conceived as a pre-existent companion of God in the work of creation–argues that the Biblical community recognized a wisdom with divine authority existing among the gentiles as well as in their own Law and Prophets. The wisdom writings, then, are not concerned with what is specifically Hebrew, such as worship, the covenant, or salvation history. The wisdom writings are that part of Jewish literature which comes to grips with the whole community of man, and so the relation of wisdom literature to its own society is one of detachment. Most of what we teach in our literature courses either is or is taught as wisdom literature. We prefer the somewhat detached and existentialist relationship to our society that the wisdom literature of the Bible had to Hebrew society.

Clearly it is the verbal difficulty of the literature we teach which seems to cause the most trouble for our students. But underlying the verbal difficulty is the more important difficulty of wisdom's social function, the one function of the three which we as teachers are most clearly charged by our society to fulfill. The literature we teach is the literature of a very much broader culture than the one into which most families are able to introduce their children. It demands, therefore, that our students learn to adopt a point of view well outside the spontaneously laid down boundaries of their own experience. It calls into question the comfortable reference points which orient their personal ambitions. It reorients them from their ingrained hostility to or their naive benevolence toward the larger society of strangers. It demands a deliberate sense, cultivated with considerable effort, of the common plight of all men.

Moreover, wisdom literature, or literature taught as wisdom, is a literature of long-range, even death-centered perception. To teach it is to ask a student momentarily to forget the short-term materialism induced by his anxiety about getting a job or achieving a position in society. It is a literature of meta-ethics derived from abstract reflection on the varieties of ethical codes rather than absorbed within the bosom of one of those codes. It is a literature full of considerations of death and failure, of skepticism and disillusion. It tries, like Job, to dig us out of our conventional sense of a reasonable, a parental universe.

It would seem that the prevailing psychic drive of a young man or woman in our culture is, and has to be, toward brightly illuminated, comparatively short term goals which offer some clear assurance of success. Into this picture comes the professor with his wisdom literature demanding that young people slow down, reflect, wrestle with startling or disturbing ways of twisting human thought around a problematic reality. The change of pace and focus is so difficult because it is so antipathetic to the rhythm of immediate needs. The resulting conflict between youth and wisdom is an explicit and common theme in the Bible's wisdom literature, as it is in our own thinking.

Here then, at last, is the beginning of an answer to my undergraduate question, that it is the wisdom dimension of literature rather than literature itself which is so hard for the young to accept. But the answer is incomplete. It touches only the generation gap, and the question has larger dimensions.

The Difficulty of Literature

It is conventional for presidents, whether of countries, corporations, or colleges, to say that every man has a right to an education. It is just as conventional for professors to say that most people are condemned to the literature of mass culture; and only a few, an intellectual elite, will ever be able to enjoy literature with spontaneity. This radical difference between a national ideal, universal education, and a tested fact, profound differences in intellectual capacity, tends to cloud our perception of the more basic difficulty of literature. If literature is what we professors say it is, then everyone, even the dumbest of us, needs it. On the other hand, there are too many smart people who, outside the area of their special competence, are quite content to let their intelligence drift over the surface of mass culture. The difficulty of literature, actually, crosses not just the boundaries between faculties and students but the boundaries among all levels of intelligence.

At the heart of the difficulty lies neither the linguistic extravagance of artists nor the intellectual inadequacies of their readers, but the inherently difficult demands that literature must make on us if it is to fulfill the functions which society has perennially needed it to fulfill. There are times when we all feel free, alert, angry at something, but more eager to act than to brood. These are the times when we are able to enter into the questioning of our ideals and our way of life which literature, with its prophetic dimension, demands of us. But at other times the prophetic dimension irritates, pushes at us when we would prefer the illusory warmth of mass manipulation. At these times the element of prophecy becomes an opaque verbal surface we simply cannot penetrate. Intelligence has little, if anything, to do with our incomprehension. There are times when we are quiet, meditative, but not fatigued, when we are ready and willing to be treated to wisdom: to a consideration of what it is to be a man, the ironies of it, the humiliating limitedness of it. But at other times we are frightened that we might be too successful, that we might, like Job, tear down all the easy answers and be left without shelter. At these times wisdom seems morbid, and wisdom literature appears to be mere verbal gamesmanship. There are times when it is important and good for us to celebrate what we are, to reconnect with our deepest values and reaffirm our sense of life. But there are other times when we are driven to the literature of mass culture, the cheap celebration we submit to when we are simply not up to the demands of prophecy and wisdom. We live in a society in which so many of us at all levels of intelligence are made so vulnerable by the speed of social change that to preserve any balance or sanity we protect ourselves from questioning. So many are fatigued, it seems, not by labor but by monotony, that frenetic economic activity seems preferable to any form of reflection. We tend to survive by locking ourselves into the rigidly controlled patterns of professional sports or by imagining our lives as one long situation comedy where the problems are allotted their hour in prime time, after which we can go on with our "way of life."

Literature, then, though it may in many instances require a high level of intelligence and a trained sensitivity to language, makes its most significant demands at the level of our deepest resistance–our need for stability and optimism. We surround ourselves, rather than open ourselves to literature, with an easy celebration which, instead of satisfying us with the sense of value we need, prods us along the rat race. The enjoyment involved in understanding is kept psychologically out of reach. Literature remains hard because the social need to which it responds is precisely the need for solid food. The hope is that, since the need for all three kinds of literature is genuine, the appetite may be developed for the food it requires. The labor involved in trying to understand, a labor which in the early years of education seems artificial and academic, may eventually become an unending labor that both sustains life and brings us our deepest moments of pleasure.