Read an Excerpt
Naïve Readings
Reveilles Political and Philosophic
By Ralph Lerner The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-35332-6
CHAPTER 1
Looking for the Figure in the Carpet
The chapters in this volume are presented as experiments in reading complex texts. However diverse these texts may be as respects author, subject, and period, they are alike in appearing daunting and in some cases even impenetrable to readers today. It is worth pondering why that should be.
Let us grant from the outset that it is hard to gain entry into these writings of another age. Many of the works to be discussed here are anything but plain and simple, nor are their authors transparent and direct. Confronted with such challenges and sensing, often with good reason, that there is treasure to be retrieved from deep within these writings, we readers yield to impulse. We rush to dig deep, dissect, and deconstruct what we take to be the core of the text, the better to discover a writer's intent and meaning. As we move briskly along, we eliminate from consideration whatever we deem irrelevancies and superficialities. We ignore the surface of the work, gliding blithely by its tedious features that seem irrelevant to our needs precisely because they are so obvious and "unthematic." Yet this hasty dismissal is almost always an error fatal to our gaining a better insight into an author's intent.
Our incapacity appears to have less to do with the impediments of archaic or technical language, or an author's highly abstract reasoning, or for that matter the limited historical and cultural knowledge we may be able to bring to the task — though all of these may also render a text opaque to some degree. Rather, our reading problem has more to do with the manner in which we approach unfamiliar and challenging texts and our presumptions about how authors choose to communicate their thoughts to others. I do not mean to suggest that these barriers to comprehension are simply novel or symptoms of a diminished age. Not so. Authors typically have had an audience in mind, and not all authors have had the ability or desire to emulate the ingratiating lucidity of, say, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Spectator essays. Indeed, there are authors (Maimonides and Sir Francis Bacon being prime examples) who designedly made sure that their readers must sing for their suppers. It is especially with regard to these most challenging authors that, I would maintain, our current habits of reading need reconsideration.
The premise of this book is that when confronting the works of notoriously difficult authors, writers of extraordinary ability and artistry, we should proceed with caution and patience and refrain from drawing hasty conclusions about what is being said. This stance is especially appropriate when confronting writers who display great self-consciousness about their art. In proposing that we approach such works naïvely, I am suggesting that we not give short shrift to the obvious. Indeed, as Sherlock Holmes repeatedly had to draw to Dr. Watson's notice, it is precisely what lies directly under our eyes that we have greatest difficulty observing. When it comes to engaging with the literary productions of uncommon authors, attention to their surface may be especially rewarding. The proof of that assertion, like that of a pudding, can only be in tasting the result. But a few words may be devoted to exposing the premises and assumptions that have led me to make that claim.
We need not belabor the distinction between competent and incompetent writers. But it is harder to accept the notion of authorial control that goes far beyond taking care to reject slapdash methods and shortcuts unworthy of one's craft. Such an author will also strive to control all aspects of his production, mustering all his powers to have his intended message (or messages) embodied and reflected in every feature of his work. Is such a degree of control possible? There is no difficulty accepting a more modest claim. Even readers of limited experience know that authors have choices of forms to make before putting pen to paper: will it be fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, a broadside or pamphlet, a satire, a dialogue, an epistolary novel, a treatise, a commentary? The possibilities are several, and the challenges and opportunities each presents will test both author and reader. Here, to begin with, is an unassuming fact — the choice of form — that deserves consideration and has not escaped the notice of even the nonscholars among us. But press onward and insist on the possibility that every jot and tittle of the work is a product of deliberation, even its seeming inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies, and we open ourselves to disbelief and likely derision. It is much easier to accept the "logographic necessity" of a sonnet by John Keats than of a work comprising hundreds of pages. Can we seriously claim that the most banal features of a work — even and especially a simple plainspoken account of the movement of its argument — can disclose artistry and intent deserving of our scrutiny? Even if we grant that some few authors privately (or, rarer still, publicly) entertain such grandiose notions of perfect control over their text, we are not obliged to assume that the author never stumbles or slumbers. But neither are we obliged to project our own all-too-evident shortcomings onto others. If we provisionally accept someone's claim to mastery and adopt a preliminary stance, not of awe, but of patient attentiveness, we open ourselves to possibly learning something important and to not missing something. If we subsequently discover we have attributed too much control and precision to an author, we can always back away. That is more easily done than trying to correct the effects of our having been oblivious to such possibilities.
The task that confronts us when engaged with a demanding text by an uncommonly challenging author may be compared to attempting to detect the figure in a carpet. Somewhere in that dazzling array of colors, curves, and lines is a figure, out there in plain sight (so we are assured or assume). But where? When presented with a visual conundrum, our mind's eye often has to engage in multiple revised perceptions until it "gets" the puzzle of a trompe l'oeil or the perspectives of an Escher print. We might think of this as a conversational exchange in which we venture a preliminary understanding, only to have it tested, rejected, modified, tested again, and so on. Some such process takes place in confronting a written text as well, and in that case we can think of the exchange between attentive reader and artful author as dialectical. (Obvious instances of that would be the way we come to recognize irony or satire or parable beneath a surface.) Ultimately all may be revealed, although some works (such as Sir Thomas More's Utopia) are remarkably resistant to being reduced to a single generally accepted understanding. We have to allow as well for the possibility that it may be no part of an author's intention to bring his readers to a fixed conclusion at all, but rather to open their minds to an enlarged and enlarging series of reconsiderations. In any event, we are free to assume that the way the author shapes a work matters. All these seemingly incidental features — its form, initial appearance, order of presentation, peculiar mode of opening and reopening its sundry themes, to say nothing of its irregularities and idiosyncrasies — are not to be ignored because they are possibly deliberate on the part of an author who has or had his reasons.
No more need be claimed for present purposes. In accepting or confessing that the approach I adopt here toward texts of great subtlety is naïve, I am mindful that speech that is charming in a nine-year-old may expose an adult to ridicule or pity. Nonetheless, everything has its costs, and some outcomes are worth the price.
CHAPTER 2
The World through Ben's Bifocals
The degree of Benjamin Franklin's "secularism" cannot even be approximated by any simple word search through his voluminous writings. There is no recorded appearance of the noun in English before the middle of the nineteenth century; and Franklin uses the adjective "secular" in its various early meanings only rarely. In the case of this author, at least, one must seek not the telltale word but the overall stance. From his first appearance in print to his last — a span encompassing sixty-eight years — Franklin exhibits and promotes a way of viewing, thinking, and acting that sets him markedly apart from that little world of Bostonian orthodoxy into which he was born in 1706. His aged parents later had good cause to be concerned that he had imbibed some erroneous opinions, and his respectful response to their voiced misgivings (13 April 1738) can hardly have allayed those anxieties. Indeed, it is safe to say that Franklin had turned his back on their world of pious submission even before his escape, as a sixteen-year-old, from the correcting hand of paternal and clerical authority. But the evidence in support of that assertion has to be sought in Franklin's own nuanced presentation of his thoughts and deeds. Considered in detail and as an ensemble, they tell a memorable tale — in muted, ingratiating language — of one man's radical self-assertion.
Typical autobiographers see no need to explain or excuse offering up their life stories to the world at large. Having a tale to tell, they plunge in. Not so the author of one of the most widely read of all autobiographies. Benjamin Franklin finds it fitting to open his unfinished account of his life with the reasons or "inducements" impelling him to undertake such a project. They are several, a fact that might prompt the reader to be alert for redundancy; Franklin may be overdoing it. To begin with, he says he has always enjoyed hearing little anecdotes of his ancestors and imagines that his son (to whom this narrative is addressed) would enjoy hearing of his father as well. Beyond such idle sharing of enjoyment, however, is the thought that Franklin's descendants might find some utility in applying to their own situations the means he used in raising himself from poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. Accordingly he promises to show them how he did it. Furthermore, Franklin is so pleased with his present happy condition that he says he is ready to relive his life, even without the opportunity of correcting some of its "errata." But that kind of repetition being out of the question, he settles for mere recollection; and to make that recollection "as durable as possible," he will commit it to writing. The final reason given in this catalog of inducements is Franklin's admission that writing about himself will "a good deal gratify my own Vanity" — a gratification for which he is very grateful indeed (43–44).
This opening paragraph, occupying a scant page and a half, is a tour de force, opening as it does a window into the mind of one of the subtlest and most charming observers of humankind. Looking in, we see that Franklin's most powerful inducement has been left at mere insinuation. Rather than sermonize, rather than state explicitly his largest lesson on how to look at the world and how to view our place in it, Franklin enacts a series of scenes in which we observe the drama and draw his conclusions on our own. With finesse and wit he accustoms us to borrow his bifocals and to observe and interpret the story he tells through his eyes. Consider again how this opening paragraph works.
The first inducement rests on the assumption that I'm like you and you're like me. I have always enjoyed hearing about my forebears and so might you. This, dear son, is less a matter of your being a chip off the old block than of our sharing a common human curiosity about our origins. The next inducement, however, rests on the assumption that I'm not like you and you're not like me. I am the noteworthy instance of a man who lifted himself quite a bit above the common dust of humanity. This ability is rare and not simply to be presumed in one's offspring. You, my posterity, might nonetheless wonder how I did it and whether the like might work for you. Franklin acknowledges that he must have had the blessing of God, but emphasizes how much is owing to his own efforts. For though a kind providence may have supplied "the conducing Means" for the autobiographer, it was "I [who] made use of [them]" (43). In the very course of announcing that he is now prepared to teach what every generation needs to learn, Franklin nudges us to realize that he is an autodidact, having found out this teaching on his own.
On the whole, his has been a good life, not without its "sinister Accidents and Events" to be sure, but with what he calls "a considerable share of Felicity" (43). He sees no point in dwelling on what might have been; he has little taste or time for regrets and brooding. What's done is done, and one is better advised to get on with life. Yet, being an old man (he is sixty-five when writing these lines, though his brilliant diplomatic career still lies before him), he affects to be ready to indulge himself in recollections. Lest you imagine that this is an old codger in an assisted-living facility prattling away, note that Franklin is concerned that his recollection be made as durable as possible and spread as far as feasible. What we have here is not an aide-memoire of an old man with a short memory, but rather an ambitious production by a man very much possessed of his faculties and avid for ambitious readers. His audience extends far beyond his son, his immediate descendants, or even future generations of his countrymen. (It turns out that the full reach of this author's ambition for an audience does not emerge until later in the account.) Finally, there is this matter of vanity. There is no point in denying that it comes into play when I decide to tell you at length all about myself, nor is there any point in my apologizing for displaying this all-too-human trait. Franklin takes what earlier theologians and moralists had deemed a sin or a vice or at least a failing and adroitly transforms it into a socially and privately beneficial trait. In many cases, Franklin asserts cautiously, "it would not be quite absurd if a Man were to thank God for his Vanity among the other Comforts of Life" (44). With this amiable nod, the circle of inducements is closed with a blending of private and public concerns.
Franklin has suggested he will not hold back telling about some incidents that do him no credit, incidents where he would have behaved otherwise were he able to relive his life. In these pages, he leads us to believe, we shall see him portrayed warts and all. As he puts it later when refusing to excuse his decision to stop attending church services, "My present purpose [is] to relate Facts, and not to make Apologies for them" (198). He creates expectations that his story will be marked by candor, even if you the reader are put off by his open self-satisfaction and self-absorption. For now we need only to be reminded that we are not obliged by politeness to hear him out. We can close the covers of this book whenever we please. Ben's plain message is, Take me as I am. But that plain message is wrapped in such diffident language and delivered in so charming a manner that we are left with a general sense of warm geniality. Who can remain out of sorts with someone who confesses to having waged a losing war against pride and then wiggles out of this self-condemnation with this graceful flourish? "You will see it perhaps often in this History. For even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility" (160). Ben, tell us more! Please!
Nowhere is Franklin's mastery of artful speech more evident than in his discussions of religious belief. His tone of voice when alluding to divine providence suggests that he is on easy terms with the deity. His god is not that of his Presbyterian parents or of John Calvin, to say nothing of the Lord of Hosts who spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. Having planted in our minds the almost reasonable notion of thanking God for one's vanity, Franklin goes on immediately to acknowledge (as he puts it) "with all Humility" how much he owes to God for the happiness he has enjoyed up to this time. This expression of humble thanks is not without its own little twist. Ben speaks of "his kind Providence, which led me to the Means I us'd and gave them success" (45). It is not quite clear from this acknowledgment where the credit belongs: whether to the providence that pointed young Ben to the right means for attaining happiness or to the "I" who used those means so effectively. However one understands it, Franklin is ready to hope, though not presume, that his unknowable future fortune will be for the best. His is not a faith tortured by misgivings. He is ever-ready to enlist all of his human providence in support of whatever divine providence shines in his direction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Naïve Readings by Ralph Lerner. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
