Why does teaching literature in college not arouse more enthusiasm among students? Why isn’t the reading of literary works, at the center of general education, the heart from which thought radiates? Why are there so few readers at a time when everyone writes, if only on social networks, as if one could write without reading, without making the detour to the works that have read the universe before us? This scarcity or disappearance is obviously explained by the reign of the image which is “worth a thousand words”, but which often prevents us from seeing, as when we hasten to take a picture of what is beautiful so as not to see that beauty flees everywhere, that it comes from further than the object it illuminates.
Jorge Luis Borges, who read everything until he became blind and from whom I borrow this idea that the universe is a book, attributes this desertion of reading to the “superstition of style” which, by attaching itself to parts of the work, misses the life of it: “This inhibition has become so widespread that now there are no longer any readers left in the ingenuous sense of the term: they are all potential critics. In short, the evil comes from a conception of literature that has little to do with the experience (sensitive, affective, intellectual, spiritual) from which the works are born and which consists in describing, understanding and imagining the universe. of which we are a part. Before being an art, literature is an experience, this is what to write on the blackboard before each lesson devoted to a work.
Read or study?
Someone, one day, was struck by a place, a person, an idea, an event, a work, and starts writing to try to preserve, to transform, to support what happened to him. Someone, one day, has been exposed to something beyond them, something beautiful or ugly, happy or unhappy, familiar or strange, which compels them to stop and write to be able to continue to live better or otherwise, both stronger and more vulnerable.
The worst mistake a teacher can make and pass on to the student is to underestimate the power of the work
It is this experience that the student must first and foremost retrace in the work, it is to a similar experience that he is invited, and for that there is no need to be a scholar, it suffices to read and reread until the work imprints itself on you, awakens or reawakens in you what you had forgotten or did not want to (re)live, because “at the age of four, we have already done the experience of just about everything a writer of fiction needs: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death” (Nicholas Delbanco).
This is why Peter Handke can affirm that “a writer, one should be able to study him by reading him”. Reading does not require any particular talent, since it is the work that gradually forms the reader, reveals to him that he has a sensitivity, a depth, an imagination that he did not suspect. The worst mistake that a teacher can make and pass on to the student is to underestimate the power of the work, to lock it in itself to better study it when it tends to reach the world, to melt into it, that she asks for nothing more than to be received by someone who receives from her what she lacks and gives her a bit of his own life. “To train readers, people who will not be afraid, neither of silence, nor of loneliness, nor of complexity, nor of depth, to train people who will be sensitive to the beauty of the world, to what remains of it , and who because of that will want to defend it, that should be our job. (Bernard Émond)
The substance or the form?
If the main thing in teaching literature, even to anyone who wants to become a professor of literature, is to train readers capable of being shaken by the meaning of the work, the academics who form the literary broaden their vision (sociological, rhetorical, political, etc.) of literature, and that we question the learning of literary analysis and the dissertation (explanatory, critical), a kind of staircase that We must edit, taking care not to confuse the introduction and the conclusion, the main ideas and the secondary ideas, the subject introduced, posed, divided, without forgetting to note in passing some literary devices.
It is necessary to simplify the study of the works, to ask the pupil to release the tension between the truths or contrary values which animates the work, to follow the various phases and ramifications, and why not to write small texts of creation inspired by the work read, which would be like an extension of it, since it is true that we also learn to read by writing. Thus, we would no longer dissociate content from form, which is not so much the set of means to which the work has recourse, but the end it pursues, that is to say the possibility of achieve the harmony that arises from the sustained movement between opposites: “Form is the notion that one thing correctly follows another. (Virginia Woolf).
This is how, it seems to me, we could liberate teachers, students and works and give new life to literature, “this knowledge invested in immense ignorance” (Maurice Blanchot), which helps us to read the world and perceive its beauty.