NASSP Bulletin

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Literature and Visibility

Maxine Greene
NASSP Bulletin 1972; 56; 63
DOI: 10.1177/019263657205636109

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 Heightening a person’s visibility to himselfand
to others can be literature’s special contribu-
tion. The author concentrates on how the teach-
ing of imaginative literature helps the student
in his struggle for self-awareness.

Literature and Visibility

MAXINE GREENE

To humanize a school is to present curriculum in such a

fashion that it signifies live possibility for the student as exist-
ing person, concerned to make sense of his own life-world. The
academic disciplines can be presented, not as structures of
socially prescribed knowledge, but as occasions for ordering the
materials of experience with the aid of cognitive forms. Art
forms can be presented, not as finished artefacts or sacred objects,
but as opportunities for achieving personal visions, for discover-
ing dimensions of the self. I wish, in the course of this paper,
to explore some of the opportunities offered by literary art,

especially those which enable individuals to discover and map

their interior landscapes. I am interested in literature’s peculiar
capacity for heightening self-consciousness, for helping persons
become present to themselves. I believe, in fact, that awareness
of being present in the world may be a necessary background
for personally conducted cognitive action, for the process of
learning to learn.
Becoming Visible to Oneself
Because I see humanizing as a challenge to depersonalization
and to the statistical thinking young people so despise, I want

Maxine Greene is a professor ofEnglish in the Department ofLan-

guages, Literature, Speech, and Theatre, Teachers College, Columbia
University.
63

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64

to concentrate on the ways in which the teaching of imaginative

literature may help students become, visible as persons-to them-
selves as well as to those around. Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible
Man, is a symbolic rendering of what I have in mind. The story
begins with the narrator’s assertion that he is an &dquo;invisible
man.&dquo; He goes on:

No, I am spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan

not a
Poe; nor I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
am
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids
-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible,
understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like
the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows,
it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-
indeed, everything and anything except me.

Like far too many students, black and white, he-as a distinctive
personality, &dquo;single one&dquo;-cannot be seen because of the labels
a

and categorizations used to identify him. Not only do those who

look at him suffer from &dquo;a peculiar disposition&dquo; of their &dquo;inner
eyes&dquo;; he himself cannot affirm an identity. He internalizes the
assessments others make; the self-image available to him is the
reflection in the &dquo;distorting glass.&dquo; He is, in consequence, in-
visible as an individual; he is the abstraction others see. Because
of what he undergoes in the South and in New York, he becomes
(as it were) &dquo;educated,&dquo; at least to the point of acknowledging
what and who he is. At the end of the book, he is about to
emerge from the underground room where he has been &dquo;hibernat-
ing,&dquo; and where he &dquo;whipped it all except the mind, the mind.&dquo;
And then he talks about the mind that &dquo;has conceived a plan of
living,&dquo; about the pattern that must be given to the &dquo;chaos&dquo; of
his life.
One cannot generalize the experience in Invisible Man; nor
can one exhaust it by mere summary. Nevertheless, an exemplary

movement can be found there, a metaphor for what can happen

in a school. Teachers and administrators, trying to be humane,
cannot but be aware of invisibility as they are aware of lostness,

feelings of nothingness, feelings of despair. They cannot but

hope, therefore, to be able to help young people make the kinds
of choices that will move them from emptiness or formlessness

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 65

to making &dquo;a plan of living.&dquo; They cannot but strive to make

structures and patterns available for appropriation, so that mean-
ings-and a &dquo;point&dquo; to life-may at long last be found.

Struggle for Self-Awareness

The
It must begin, however, in the struggle against invisibility, the
struggle for self-awareness. How can we help the student become
aware? How can we bring him in touch with himself, with his
own inner time? By inner time I mean time inwardly lived, as

compared with chronological time which is measured by the

clock. I mean the time of the inner self, of the stream of con-
sciousness that is unified by original perceptions, cumulative
meanings, private memories. It is the time Thoreau lived when
he spent those months at Walden Pond. (&dquo;It matters not what
the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is
when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.... To be awake
is to be alive.&dquo;) It is the time of Stephen Daedalus’s childhood
in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (&dquo;Once
upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow
coming down along the road....&dquo;) It is the time of Frankie’s
adolescent memory in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the
Wedding. (&dquo;It happened that green and crazy summer when
Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a
long time she had not been a member.&dquo;) To be able to enter
or reenter that dimension of
private time is to come in touch
with what Merleau-Ponty called the &dquo;interior silence,&dquo; with what
Paulo Freire named &dquo;background awareness.&dquo; It is to regain
one’s own biography, to discover one’s own true vantage point,
to recover possession of oneself. An authentic encounter with a

literary work thrusts a reader, by way of his imagination, into

his own inner time; since what a work does must be experienced
as an event in each reader’s
personal history.
The work-Hamlet, Moby Dick, Stopping By Woods on a
Snowy Evening, or Waiting for Godot-can best be conceived
as a particular writer’s
symbolic rendering of his own subjectively
experienced world in and by means of the medium of language,
which is formed in such a way as to achieve an aesthetic realiza-
tion. It is not possible to define &dquo;art&dquo; finally or
absolutely, since
no single definition
(and no single theory) can account for every
phenomenon called &dquo;art&dquo; since the beginning of time. It can

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66

be said, however, that there is always some expressive element

in an art work. A living human being wrote it, after all, trans-
muted his particular feelings or perceptions into form; so, to
some degree, the work presents what he felt or perceived, albeit

imaginatively transformed. There is always a sensuous as well

as a formal element: figurative language is used; connotations,

ambiguities, sounds are exploited. We need only recall Hamlet

saying &dquo;How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable are all the uses
of this world ...&dquo;; Captain Ahab’s &dquo;Leewardl the White Whale
goes that way ...&dquo;; Estragon’s &dquo;How would I know? In another
compartment. There’s no lack of void.&dquo;; or Frost’s &dquo;And miles to
go before I sleep.&dquo; Once the work is created, the tale or the
poetry written, however, it simply exists, autonomously in the
world. If no one picks it up to read it, it is a dead thing, realized
though it is, exquisite though it may potentially be. When a
reader engages with it, perceives it as a work of art, he lends
the book some of his life. Speaking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and
Punishment, Jean-Paul Sartre said that &dquo;Raskolnikov’s waiting
is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of
the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred
of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which
has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the
police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred
I have for him via Raskolnikov.&dquo; Only at that point does the
book come alive; coming alive, it becomes an event in the reader’s
consciousness.

The Role of the Teacher

For this to happen, the teacher, aware that works of art do

not automatically become occasions for aesthetic experience or
confrontation of the self, must do what he
make the work can to
available-without imposing interpretations of his own. The
critic Randall Jarrell once said that a person must earn if he is
to possess a work of art. He must learn to take a
particular
stance, engage in a particular mode of perception, exclude for
a while conventional and
stereotyped modes of coping with the
world. I believe, for example, that it is crucially important to
communicate to students some of the ways in which works of
art differ from documents: newspaper articles, chapters in history
books, psychological case histories. They, too, are constructed of

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 67

language; they, are composed by human beings. The differ-

too,
ence, however, is that they report on, interpret, describe, or
evaluate phenomena in the &dquo;real,&dquo; the public world; while
imaginative literature creates illusioned worlds, equivalents or
analogs perhaps, but fundamentally &dquo;unreal.&dquo; Discursive or
documentary writing is, in a sense, transparent. The reader is
expected to look through it to what it represents; he is expected
to look away from it, to its referents in the external world. An

imaginative work is, in contrast, opaque. Attending to the

language in its permutations, to characters in their relationships,
to the movement of motifs, the development of themes, the
reader is moved to build-out of the materials of his own con-
sciousness-an imaginary, fictive world, what Tony Tanner has
called a &dquo;city of words.&dquo;
Sartre has gone into particulars about the activity involved.
He has pointed out that reading is a synthesis of perception
and creation, that the &dquo;object&dquo; (meaning the novel or the poem,
with its own distinctive structure) is just as important as the
&dquo;subject&dquo; (meaning the reader, who discloses the work of art,
brings it into being) : .~.

In a word, the reader is conscious of disclosing in creating,

of creating by disclosing.... If he is inattentive, tired,
stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will escape him.
He will never manage to &dquo;catch on&dquo; to the object (in the
sense in which we see that fire &dquo;catches&dquo; or &dquo;doesn’t catch&dquo;) .
He will draw some phrases out of the shadow, but they will
’

appear as random strokes. If he is at his best, he will project

beyond the words a synthetic form, each phrase of which
will be no more than a partial function: the &dquo;theme,&dquo; the
&dquo;subject,&dquo; or the &dquo;meaning.&dquo;
Wideawakeness is important; so is the ability to generate (again,
out of the reader’s own accumulated experience) the structure
of the literary work. Not only is the reader released into his own
subjectivity, his own inner time; his imagination can-and usu-
ally will-move him beyond the artist’s traces &dquo;to project beyond
the words a new synthetic form,&dquo; an order of meanings which
is distinctively his. ... ~ ’ &dquo;
c ..

.
A Journey into the Interior Self ..

I would stress the fact that this approach is neither permissive

nor relativist. Attention is continually drawn to the work and its

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68

multiple facets. Its structure, its multivalent levels of meaning

must be slowly and carefully explored;’ &dquo;one must wait for it,&dquo;
Sartre wrote, &dquo;and observe it.&dquo; But the work as such refers to
the subjectivity of the one who reads. The reader or the subject
goes on a journey, as it were, into his own interior under the
guidance of Robert Frost or Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett
or Shakespeare. There may have been woods and snow, horses
and sleds in a person’s experience, for instance. He may have
grown up in New England and known the winters there with a
certain intimacy; and, somewhere in the background of his
consciousness, there may be imprints of very early perceptions of
sleighbells, mysterious silences, the sudden fall of darkness. En-
tering the poem &dquo;Stopping by the Woods ...,&dquo; engaging with
its images and sounds, he will discover some of those perceptions
coming to the surface, accompanied by feeling-tones and shreds
of memory. There is the poem, however, ready to impose its
structure on materials that are amorphous; and, as he slowly
discloses that structure, he will find himself forming those ma-
terials as he has never done before. (&dquo;The woods are lovely, dark
and deep....&dquo;) He may feel, as never before, the dangerous
seductiveness of darkness and all it represents: sleep, forgetful-
ness, even death. (&dquo;But I have promises to keep....&dquo;) He may
experience the tension of obligation, the risks involved in leav-
ing village conventions behind-&dquo;withoutt a farmhouse near.&dquo;
Almost certainly, he will see what he has never seen before
in his own stream of consciousness, his own inwardness. And yet,
even as he recognizes the newness of the perspective, he will

very likely feel that that is how it truly was-except that he

never realized it before. This is what I mean by a person becom-

ing visible to himself, discovering his life-world by patterning it,

looking upon it with new eyes.
It is no more necessary, of course, to have lived in New England
in order to respond to Robert Frost than it is necessary to have
sailed in whaling ships in order to understand Moby Dick. What
human being has not felt a conflict between his &dquo;promises&dquo;
and his desire to lose himself, simply to be? What human being,
feeling self-destructive and despairing, has not wanted to make
the transition &dquo;from a schoolmaster to a sailor&dquo; and go off in
search of whatever he imagines the &dquo;great whale&dquo; to be? . .

The teacher, clearly, must first leave his students to their own

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 69

devices with the works he asks them to read. The experience,

I think, must begin and end in private possession of the story,
the play, or the poem. The initial encounter should be, in effect,
a spontaneous one, without any thought of the &dquo;right&dquo; inter-

pretation, the proper reading of symbols and the rest. Then

there should be talk, free and vigorous interaction in the class-
room. If the students have explored in their own fashion, there

will be a great wealth of diverse readings; because each one will

have responded in terms of what was thematically relevant to
him. Some will have focused on language and imagery; others,
on event and the movement of plot; still others, on character or
theme. A number will have been &dquo;inattentive, tired, stupid, or
thoughtless&dquo;; and their fellow-students will point out what they
have missed in the work itself, how they have projected, how
they have misread.
The teacher, the humane teacher, may well function as a good
critic functions-affording &dquo;new perceptions and with them new
values,&dquo; as one philosopher of criticism says. He will not try to
explain individual students’ experiences with what they have
read. He will realize that nothing he does can bring about instant
appreciation or enjoyment on the part of those who have been
unmoved. But nevertheless, he will attempt to make his students
see certain qualities in the work they have read, qualities they

may have missed. He will do this by putting into the clearest

language he can find certain of his ideas about the work. These
ideas may take the form of directions for focusing, tracing the
emergence of various patterns, identifying particular events in
the life of the language out of which the work was made. This
does not mean he will necessarily try to persuade his students to
share his evaluation or his feelings. It only means that he will
try to make them see more than they saw before.
Hopefully, the students will return to the work after the
discussion of it has taken place; hopefully, they will find less
resistance to their full engagement with it. (The inability to
comprehend certain episodes, for example, unfamiliarity with
certain types of expression, a certain innocence with respect to
motivation and behavior: all these may have raised barriers
during their first encounter with the book.) What happens this
time can never be entirely known to the teacher; in fact, it
should not be known. This is what I meant by saying the

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70

experience should end with private possession, just as it began.

No one will ever be able to exhaust such a work as Moby Dick;
no student can be expected to approximate the achievement of

the &dquo;Ideal Reader,&dquo; surely not when he is young.

I think the humane teacher has to express the most tender
regard for the student’s own privacy, once he has done (in
classroom conversation and personal interview) what he can to
help him &dquo;see.&dquo; The object, after all, is to launch him on a
journey in his own inner time; and no outsider, no teacher, can
accompany him there. Nor can the student accomplish his jour-
ney if he tries to perceive as the teacher wants him to. If he is
going to see his own interior, it must be through his own eyes.
Although I believe much can be achieved in classroom inter-
change and in articulation of responses, I think a delicate bal-
ance must be struck between the regard for
privacy and the need
to know how the student is performing. An experience that is
reflected on at its conclusion clearly becomes more meaningful;
and the deliberation that takes place may well feed into the
mainstream of cognitive thinking. Also, it seems to me that a
decision to write about some aspect of a literary experience can
do much to make that experience more significant. To transmute
the kinds of encounters I have been describing into one’s own
language, to impose a logic and a form upon one’s responses in
order to say clearly and truly what they are, is another way of
becoming self-conscious, visible to oneself. I would simply warn
against demands for confessional compositions, for the kinds of
papers which reveal what is most deeply personal (and therefore
likely to be falsified) .
Where Hamlet is concerned, for instance, there is much to be
said about the corruption, the &dquo;hidden imposthume&dquo; in Denmark,
the infection that every character is trying to discover in his own
particular way. There is a great deal to be said about the
language, about the use of rites and rituals, about the connections
to classic tragedy and the intimations of a modern world to
come. There are
exciting implications to be traced for a con-
ception of the Renaissance and Elizabethan England, for ap-
proaches to kingship, chivalry, moral codes, and existential
choice. All these are possibilities worthy of exploration, provid-
ing subjects to write about thoughtfully and authentically. None
of them, however, require a student to give away secrets he ought

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 71

not to be asked to give away: his discoveries about his own con-
tests with his father, his struggles to be the heir, to gain a position
as the &dquo;true prince,&dquo; his sense of something being &dquo;rotten&dquo; in

his own world, his suspicion that he himself might be &dquo;sick,&dquo;

or any of the other memories regained, or strange disclosures

made.

TheHumanizing Function of Literature

My view-my hope-is that the reaching out towards subject
matters, the active search for meaning can be provoked and
sustained by the recognition of inwardness, the inexpressible
uniqueness of each person in our schools.
This, as I see it, is the humanizing function of literary art and
encounters with such art. Traditionally, as is well known, the

teaching of literature was justified by referring to an ideal of

humanitas, meaning the essence or the perfection of humankind.
Great works of literature were seen to be imitations of universal
patterns in the cosmos, of representative &dquo;forms of human
action.&dquo; It was as if they opened windows through which some-
thing higher and nobler could be seen: the heroic seekers after
excellence in the Homeric epics; the great flawed heroes in the
Greek tragedies; the larger-than-lifesize kings and princes in
Shakespeare’s plays. Apprehending them, readers were expected
to feel purged or exalted; they were expected to emulate what
was purest and most rational and, in that manner, to learn.

Today, when we can no longer posit a designed and purpose-

ful universe, when we know too much about the diverse styles
of human existence to talk of an &dquo;essence&dquo; of man, the old
justifications no longer hold. We cannot (even though most of
us would like
to) utilize works of literature as sources of &dquo;moral
exemplars,&dquo; means of educating people to know what is right.
Painfully aware of the brutalities and violence still rampant in
the world, we can scarcely claim that acquaintance with litera-
ture has sensitized or improved the masses of literate men. We
have been informed many times over that, as George Steiner puts
it in Language and Silence, &dquo;we have very little solid evidence
that literary studies do very much to enrich or stablilize moral
perception, that they humanize.&dquo;
I am not using &dquo;humanize&dquo; to mean such enrichment or
stabilization. I am using the term to mean making it possible

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72

for individuals to choose themselves freely, to make of them-

selves what they can. Like Willy Loman’s widow in Death of a
Salesman, I am saying &dquo;A~ttention must be paid.&dquo; If attention is
paid-seriously and tenderly-the persons who are our students
may be enabled to move beyond themselves, to project their
futures, to constitute meaningful worlds. Everyone needs, on
some level, to make sense, to &dquo;bring it together,&dquo; as the young

people say. It is when structures (and labels) are imposed from

without that order per se is rejected and scorned. Once students
feel free to conduct their own explorations, they take action in
order to learn. We have seen this happen repeatedly outside of
schools-in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the
consumer movement, the movement for clean water and air.

Striving for Authenticity and Completion

.

Without summoning up the old idea of &dquo;essence,&dquo; without

identifying human-ness with any specific &dquo;moral perception,&dquo;
I should like to say that it is distinctively human to strive
towards authenticity and completion; and this we can help
people do. Can we be assured they will choose what we consider
to be &dquo;good&dquo;? Can we guarantee that their tastes will be cul-
tivated, their actions humane? Of course we cannot. No teacher,
no matter how doctrinaire, has ever been able to predict posi-
tively that his students (because they are his students) will spend
their lives choosing the Beautiful and the Good. That is one of
the risks of teaching, a risk that must be confronted (perhaps
especially) by those concerned with teaching literary art.
The irony is that the teacher of literature who presents himself
as a missionary from a &dquo;high&dquo; culture come to redeem the natives

(because he has something precious they do not possess) is almost

bound to alienate his students. He will strike them as a repre-
sentative of what D. H. Lawrence once called &dquo;monuments,
museums, permanencies, and ponderosities,&dquo; and they will turn
away. If, on the other hand, he brings his own deepest human
convictions to his work and, at once, tries to respond to their
concerns and their questions, they may pay heed. Their con-

cerns, their fundamental projects have to do with a heightening

of consciousness and sensibility. They have to do, as we all know,
with a search for personal styles-for what is authentic and
&dquo;real.&dquo; Many of them come into their classes convinced that they

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 73

hold the keys to transcendence. They may even say that they
perceive (because of their music, light shows, films, drugs, &dquo;be-
ins&dquo; in the open air) dimensions of reality, even dimensions of
subjectivity, of which their elders have no idea. Surely we cannot
make pronouncements about the superiority of &dquo;serious&dquo; art; we
cannot lecture about the necessity for good taste. We cannot even
describe the wonders of the literary experience to those who do
not have the discipline required for penetrating a book.

Being Present to Students

We can only be present to them as human beings who are also

engaged searching and choosing, human beings who are com-
in
mitted-and who care. The teacher of literary art certainly wants
his students to realize how criticism, for example, can function
in opening works of literature to them, making them available
for possession. He wants to communicate some awareness of the
norms that govern attentive reading, to suggest that norms or

standards often can expand opportunities for discovering mean-

ings and also for delight. Most of all, however, he wants to help
his students feel that, outside of his talk and their talk, something
exists on its own-beckoning to each person, &dquo;soliciting,&dquo; as
Murray Krieger puts it, &dquo;our willful subjugation to its power to
change our ways of seeing and living.&dquo; He can only, having
identified himself as a lover of literary art, offer possibility. He
can only try to free his students to love in their own way. If he

succeeds, if they dare to chance the dark woods and the open
sea and the void, there will be interior journeys taking place

unexpectedly in his classroom. Roads will be open for the move-

ment towards meaning as persons become visible to themselves.

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