Literary Humility: The Case of Russia under Its Old Regimes

In his luminous reinaugural plea for "civilian scholarship" (Common Knowledge 8.1), Jeffrey Perl writes that both the traditionalists and the postmodernists among us rightly claim to work on behalf of justice and truth. Neither orientation is wrong—first, because there are too many truths to contend with in the world, not too few (thus "being right is not such a big deal"); and second, because no single appeal to justice, in an era when "skeptical theories of knowledge, meaning and value" have become "fields of battle," can defend itself definitively against competing perspectives. But there is a third virtue indispensable for maintaining the world, he notes, and that is rest or peace. It has had a much poorer press. In the humanities especially, agreement and consensus are suspect. Both are associated with coercion, mental sloth, stupefaction, philanthropic sentimentalism, a callous indifference to difference—so it is safer by far to be split off and in opposition: one is then "ironic-brutal-cool" and secure from parody.

However, Perl bravely insists, "the assumption that strife is productive is a prejudice." In the past, this prejudice has drawn strength from the reductionist idea that each individual is a "stable, self-identical type." If I am what I am, then "I" will be made more articulate and precise by being opposed to the unity that is "you." But in fact, the languages we use to mediate warring parts of our selves are as ingenious, as inventive, and as much of a moving target as anything in the public sphere. Our multivalence as individuals (which most of the time does not rip us apart, compromise us fatally, or prevent a working unity to our personality) is one possible model for looking upon "disagreement. . . as a kind of sharing" and on dispute as "almost a community." Step back, Perl suggests, and you might discern what it is that unites you with others even in the language of your quarrels.

When bombs are falling on one's constituency, theory tends to follow action, not precede it. Perl's audience includes social scientists, public intellectuals, and policymakers required to act quickly under confounding pressures. But his advice strikes me as applying most poignantly to those humanists in the academy whose full-time job it is to teach about dissension and consensus at second hand, somewhat in the abstract, through books. Habits of the mind start there. For to read an account of a complex human event (factual or fictional) adequately, one must possess the virtues of "civilian scholarship" in high degree: patience, a lowering of defenses, a willingness to empathize, and time. Compared with that same event danced, sung, filmed, performed on stage, witnessed in person, or televised as a debate, the printed page is static and miserly in immediate stimulation. Readers must work hard to fill in the particulars of the scene, cocreating (by conjuring up from words) that which in other media is a sensual given. In compensation for this arduous solitary work, the reader is more individuated and free.

This freedom is curious, as phenomenologists of reading attest. The book being read falls away, I sense a living consciousness rather than an object, I begin to think others' thoughts, they become mine—and my world becomes deceptively, idiosyncratically complete. Arguably, it is harder to achieve and measure a consensus among readers (and especially readers of imaginative literature) than among participants in the flashier, more public and performed genres. Readers do not relate to one another as do audiences in a concert hall or viewers before a screen. Can we ever know whether any two readers hear and see the same thing? Instead of consensus, what is common to readers of words is a sort of humility: the sense that a context accretes very slowly, is intensely difficult to reconstruct, is differently realized in each mind, and is almost certainly impossible to transmit intact to others. Thus, for all our efficient new...