Notes towards an applied literature
The spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher
Literature as a part of applied history
In a recent Substack post on Niall Ferguson's Time Machine, the historian Niall Ferguson wrote about the idea of applied history, which aims to
illuminate contemporary problems with past experience derived from serious study. But the fun of applied history is quite simply time travel itself.
Concerned about increasing ignorance of history, despite a clear interest in the subject, and the failures of most podcasts to provide proper information, and about the decline of academic history, Ferguson’s Substack aims to bring elites and ordinary readers closer to proper historical understanding. As you know, that is what the book I am working on, The Reader’s Quest, is all about, but for the great literature of the past, rather than for the study of history.
These two projects are related. It is not just for the pleasure of reading that we should preserve great literature (though it is a deep pleasure), just as it is not only for the thrill of riding a time machine that we should study history.
Applied history, the idea that we can usefully apply the lessons of the past to our own time, relies on avoiding simplistic, cut-and-paste, history. From the historian Collingwood, Ferguson derives several principles, which I shall paraphrase.
a) The past is not dead: its traces live on in ruins, documents, and so on.
b) “All history is the history of thought.” We have to discover what historical evidence means.
c) That requires an imaginative leap to re-enact the thoughts of the past.
d) When we juxtapose past and present we re-enact the past in the present.
e) The historian derives not rules from this process, but insights.
f) Historical insight is thus a distant mirror or a shining lamp to the present (my words). As we “incapsulate” past thoughts in present times they show us the present differently.
g) Thus: “We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.”
The principles are remarkably close to some of the uses we can make of literature. Literature, too, lives today, and as we discover what it means we make imaginative leaps that juxtapose us with the minds of the past, thus offering some insights to our own times as well as to the contemporary times of the literature. It is common to hear people say that the great works remain canonical because they become newly relevant to each generation: that’s the same point made in slightly different terms.
We do not only study literature “to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act”, but it does have that quality.
Literature can be part of applied history.
The power of naming
Ferguson gave examples from finance. Literature cannot derive laws, such as the law that once a great power spends more on debt than defence it will decline (Ferguson’s law).
Literature offers no answers, as such. Sometimes an author is explicitly moral, as with Tolstoy, but literature is the great art of pluralism, and life keeps breaking in. Literature, more truly, is what George Eliot called “a companion in the struggle of thought”.
But it can give us the power to name things.
Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.
It is because of Chaucer that you call bird-song “twitter”, or that you can identify “femininity”. Thanks to Shakespeare you can “swagger” or be “bedazzled”.
Great writers give us phrases, too. Love at first sight. All the world’s a stage. A little learning is a dangerous thing. The child is father to the man. Love is blind. All that glitters is not gold. Wear your heart upon your sleeve. The Ministry of Fear.
By naming these ideas, so concisely and memorably, poets give us the means to see them for ourselves. Without these words and phrases, we have feelings and intuitions, but not ideas.
The more we can name, the more we can see; the more we see, the more we can challenge, debate, and re-imagine.
From the Garden of Eden onwards, naming the world has been a means of holding power over it. It is a principle of magic that saying a name can act as an enchantment. Even in secular culture, think of the power we credit to marriage ceremonies, job titles, and official names. Think of how instant the change of mood in a relationship when different names are used.
To name something or someone is to give it or them place and position in the world. And to be able to re-name something is an important power.
Political arguments are largely a competition to baptise ideas—inheritance tax or death tax, community charge or poll tax, assisted death or assisted suicide, pro-life or forced-birth. So much of what Trump and Brexit achieved was held in simple slogans.
This idea is familiar to psychology, too. To remove a fear, you first have to name it. To purge a repressed emotion, you must give it the right label. One friend tells me all the young women she knows spend hours discussing Sally Rooney novels and in this way are examining their romantic lives more closely than they ever would otherwise. Another reports that it was reading literature that first taught them what death means. Anyone who has experienced or heard about dysfunctional relationships will know how important the simple naming of something like Narcissistic Personality Disorder can be.
To exorcise a human problem, you must use a touch of naming magic. And naming is very often a form of applied literature. It relies on the words, phrases, characters, and incidents of the great writers, who see these things more clearly than we do. To recognise someone—a public or a private figure—with the language and ideas of the poets and novelists is to see them more clearly than psychology can show.
We can even characterise some scientific breakthroughs as reliant on applied literature. It was while reciting Goethe that Tesla had the idea for the induction motor, the one now quietly spinning inside all the white goods in your home. Without his obsessive reading of Milton and Dante as a young man, Darwin might not have had the grand majesty of imagination to write On the Origin of Species, a very literary work that reimagines the universe just as do Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy. Without Shakespeare, Freud’s work would have been very different.
Shakespeare and politics
Applied literature becomes a fraught topic when it comes to politics. We cannot say that literature teaches us to believe in one set of ideas or another. Reading Tolstoy and Milton is no way to become a liberal democrat.
Rather than promoting doctrine, literature prompts the imagination. So you get a sense of what it would be like to believe different ideas.
This is what William Hazlitt said about Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about the opposition of a Roman tyrant and a seething mob.
Coriolanus is a store-house of political common-places. Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher.
Hazlitt’s phrase “the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher” is exactly right. Literature brings the the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher to applied history. How much better able we are to understand and absorb these two sides of a difficult question when they are handled with poetry as well as with philosophy. Caught up in the drama, we can’t help but feel both sides of the argument, even if we persistently take one side. Our sympathies flicker at poetry in a way they never do in argument—art is the breeze that catches every stubborn flame.
When politics is argued about, we can deafen ourselves; but in literature, we have the chance to be so taken up with the story we cannot help but see it all from different sides.
And in this way we acquire new ways of naming the world.
One of my favourite lines in Coriolanus comes from a speech by Volumnia. Her son, the tyrant Coriolanus, has been so supercilious in front of the public they are facing a revolt. He is too proud to withdraw his remarks. She counsels him to put aside his strongly held beliefs and be humble for pragmatic reasons, just as he would be in war (Coriolanus is a great warrior). Go out to them and act humble, she says,
humble as the ripest mulberry
That will not hold the handling
What a perfect description of the way politicians who have been too proud come crawling to the public—to make themselves look as delicate as a fresh berry that will be crushed by the slightest thing. From Nixon’s Checkers speech to Clinton’s “comeback kid” speech, politicians are adept at using humility to their advantage.
That image can act as applied literature because it names a political ploy. Once you have read this scene, you will be better able to see it when it happens in modern life.
That scene where Volumnia counsels Coriolanus to be cynical echoes a much earlier scene from Richard III, in which the aspiring tyrant Richard appears upon a balcony flanked by priests, holding a Bible. His supporter Buckingham says,
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity:
And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,
True ornaments to know a holy man.
There is an irony in “props” and “ornaments”, of course, and we have seen this trick played often in our own time, not least by Donald Trump. This is a much cruder example, one perhaps you don’t need Shakespeare’s help with. But once you have seen this play, the image of Richard and the priests never leaves you.
Once you have this “store-house of political common-places” in your mind, you will be able to hold them up against the events of today and see them differently, just as Collingwood said that “incapsulating” the past in the present would illuminate modernity.
Modern ideas?
So many ideas that we think of as modern can be found in literature. Hazlitt says, “The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.” In modern sociology this is called the Matthew Principle. Of course, such ideas need verifying and debating with data, but as a means of seeing, a method for understanding the world, they are more lastingly and presciently delivered to us in the drama of Shakespeare than the abstractions of science.
Think of the modern culture of political extremity. From Woke to MAGA, we are surrounded by people who are obsessed with their narrow ideas, left and right, liberal and conservative. So many of these people can be understood as modern Bazarovs, the tragic (anti) hero of Fathers and Sons. “Show me a single institution in our modern life,” Bazarov says, “which doesn’t call for total, merciless destruction.” Sound familiar?
Bazarov learns, by the end of the novel, how personally and culturally destructive his obsession with single ideas could—this was not a lesson many of the Bolsheviks who admired him had learned. They weren’t using applied literature. They were taking ideas they already believed, and finding justification for them in novels, without properly reading the whole message of the book.
One way we can inoculate ourselves against emotional radicalism is to read Turgenev and to see his multi-faceted picture of 1850s Russia not as an endorsement but as a mirror. Turgenev both sympathises with Bazarov and sees the flaws in his methods. If we are able to use Turgenev as a way of naming the modern tendency towards reductive radicalism, we too will be able to sympathise and resist. And from there we can find productive ways forward.
This isn’t to say that literature is a means of promoting “centre-ground” or “moderate” politics. Instead, literature is a means of freeing us from the demands of impulse and ideology, and showing us how to think in the round. Hazlitt was still in favour of the French Revolution and admired Napoleon after reading Shakespeare—what he took from Coriolanus was not a doctrine, but a means of thought.
In Henry V Shakespeare presents a hero king, but one who seems morally compromised. Henry is young, proactive, vigorous, and direct. He leads his country politically and morally, restoring order and morale to a nation that has been divided by rebellion and disorder. He is the leader we are all waiting for today.
But unlike the morally reductive characters of political television, such as The West Wing and the shows that trail in its wake, Henry is flawed. Deeply flawed.
After the victory at Harfleur, he threatens to inflict terrible suffering unless the town surrenders. In a long and vicious speech he threatens to “mow… like grass/ Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants”, to reduce the town to ashes. Later on, he twice orders the death of thousands of prisoners, breaking the rules of war. Some critics have asked “Was Henry V a war criminal?”
Some see Henry as a monster, a man consumed by power. Shakespeare, though, was writing this play at the end of a cycle of plays, in which weak leadership had led to decades of problems. Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind.
One reading of this play is that Henry’s virtues have to be backstopped by his vices, otherwise they are simply ineffective. As one of Henry’s soldiers says, “I love the lovely bully.”
Henry V is the ideal king. And he is morally compromised. He knows when vile politics will be effective and when it will not. This allows him to become the most effective ruler of the three kings in this play cycle.
So many of our modern rulers have got this balance wrong, Bush and Obama are both criticised on these grounds. One way that applied history can help us understand the modern issues of war and torture and prisoners is to dramatise the whole balance of issues: public good, personal feelings, private suffering. And to make us consider which king we would prefer: the gentle ineffective one, or the lovely bully who restores peace.
At a time when so many are so polarised that they can admit no nuance to their thoughts, it is through the imaginative paths of literature that we will find new ways of seeing the world.
Indirect application
Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret modern politics with Shakespeare, but we will find again and again that he had named so much of what we see today, and that those names are useful companions in the struggle of thought.
Ferguson himself has given an example of applied literature, describing how the works of Walter Scott provide great insights into the social, economic, and intellectual development of Scotland in the eighteenth century. Scott’s Waverley novels, Ferguson said, demonstrate the huge progress Scotland made from a country of rival clans and warring tribes to a place of enlightenment and civilisation. Scott saw how Scotland went from clans and Calvinists to commerce and liberalism because of his dual-nature.
He’s like a one-man combination of Johnson and Boswell because he’s — at one and the same time — attracted by the romance of the Jacobites and the romance of revolutionaries, too, but he’s also conscious that, really, you’re better off with the sober bourgeois existence that’s on offer in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
That ambivalence, I think, is absolutely central to the culture that I come from. If you ask the question, where does Jekyll and Hyde come from? Why does Robert Louis Stevenson — who’s really the heir of Scott — why does Stevenson constantly explore split personalities or fraternal feuds? Read The Master of Ballantrae. Because it gets at this fundamental tension between the romantic, the Tory, the Catholic on the one side and the rationalist, Whig Protestant on the other side.
You know that there’s something unattractive about the hard-nosed Protestant types. On the other hand, if you entrust your country to romanticism, it’s probably going to revert to Afghanistan.
The true benefit of reading literature is not to enable us to take a side, but to think through all positions, and to realise how multiplex is the world, how implicated we all are in its workings. As Hazlitt said: “the love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man… Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.”
Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it is, not for what we want it to be, believe it ought to be, and not through the lens of our own dispositions and beliefs.
In this way, literature helps us to imagine the world — both as it is now and as it might be in the future.
Well said, although I can’t say I agree on all of it. It’s good to see someone quoting Hazlitt.
Probably the most articulate essay on the power of literature. In one piece, you’ve succeeded in giving literature its surgical and psychological due. A well-named endeavour.