Every age seems fated to defend anew the cause of literature. Sir Philip Sidney felt compelled to write a defense, as did Wordsworth, Matthew, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and others. In our own century, serious literature is threatened not by those who, as in the past, believe that certain works are agents of the devil, but by the pervasive pressures of pragmatism and overspecialization. Despite exposure to literature, college graduates generally abandon their interest in it when they enter the working world. Few continue to feel that the great works of literature have any vital relationship to their personal needs and goals, their sense of life, the intimate problems they must resolve. Why, after long-term academic exposure to literature, does this happen?
In the first place, it is clear that most people believe literature expresses experiences too far removed from their normal lives. The tragedy of Oedipus may be interesting because of the Oedipal complex, but few see any connection between their own situations and his. After all, how many men kill their fathers and marry their mothers? Beowulf may have been a great and valorous ruler, but there are few Beowulf's in American society. Wordsworth's passionate love of nature touches few modern lives. And is it likely that any of us will ever hunt Moby Dick? Or succumb to decadence with Mann's Aschenbach? Or confess our ideological crimes with Koestler's Rubashov?
Even in an age when literature deals largely with the common man, how many readers can identify intimately with Clyde Griffiths or Jay Gatsby? Times change and so do societies. Those who love Jane Austen's novels would admit that life in a small English parish is hardly like our urban existence. Even our small towns bear little resemblance to the social life Austen knew so well. War and Peace is a magnificent novel, but the characters move in a different social sphere. The grim Puritanism of Hawthorne's world is a thing of the past.
An additional impediment is the brooding pessimism so common in modern literature and even in some of the major works of the past. Doggedly clinging to our optimism, despite our flippant cynicism about politics, big business, and a society predicated on hucksters, we hold the belief that literature, like other forms of entertainment, should amuse and divert us, momentarily relieving us of the boredom and routine of our daily lives. Americans have not surrendered their passionate desire to see life as potentially full of exciting experiences and golden opportunities. We are the heirs of William Dean Howells, who insisted that literature should extol the charming promise of American life, not wallow in the muck of corruption and violence. We may echo, for the sake of conversation, current clichés about brutality, irrationalism, and the darker recesses of the human unconscious, but essentially we want to be uplifted, warmed by mellow reflections on love, friendship, and family life. To enter the heart of darkness in Conrad's works or the hallucinatory nightmare of Kafka's seems pointless and short-sighed.
A LOSS TO UTILITARIAN VALUES
To all this can be added our deep-seated suspicion that literature is, after all, an impractical pleasure, consuming time better spent in more utilitarian and rewarding activities. As an elderly woman once said to me, when she was young she loved to lose herself in a good novel, but to do so now would be wasting time. There are far
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