A 2016 distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, comparative literature scholar Peter Brooks is writing and researching a new book on how novels relate to history and societal self-understanding, drawing in particular on Flaubert’s novel, “Sentimental Education.” At the Library of Congress, he has been using the collections of the European Reading Room and the Prints and Photographs Division. In this interview with Dan Turello he discusses the appeal of literature, the significance of French social thought, and the importance of living an “examined life.”
Brooks, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University, joined the Princeton University faculty in 2008 as Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar, in the University Center for Human Values and the Department of Comparative Literature. At Princeton he directs a project on “The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism.” He has published on narrative and narrative theory, on the 19th and 20th century novel, mainly French and English, and, more recently, on the interrelations of law and literature. He is also the author of two novels, The “Emperor’s Body” and “World Elsewhere.”
Peter, what drew you to study literature?
Literature was playing hooky from other subjects, it was pleasure, it was reading for the joy of it. Then I discovered you could do that for a profession—maybe a slightly guilty profession, making your pleasure into paid employment. Something of that guilt later drew me to study the intersection of law and literature: study of the language and rhetoric that exercise power in American society. What I think I have learned is that the discipline of slow, careful reading that you learn as a student and teacher of literature can and should be brought to bear on the reading of texts from all sorts of other domains. To read carefully, to interpret rigorously, constitutes something of a professional ethics.
Why France, why the 19th century?
Many young Americans used to (I think a few still do) pass through a phase of adolescent francophilia. When I gained the ability to read in French, I found a literature of ideas that somehow I had been missing. I read Camus, Malraux, Sartre, then Pascal and Montaigne, Voltaire and Rousseau. It was a continuing dialogue about the human condition that seemed always vital in the French tradition. The writer was supposed to be an intellectual as well as a creator: someone ready to engage in debate.
The 19th century? The great moment of the novel: Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and on to Proust. And then the social history of the period, which still seems to me the crucible of the modern, the moment at which what we are today visibly emerges, including the modern sense of individual identity. We are still the children of Darwin and Marx, as also of Rousseau and Freud. Perhaps because French history in the 19th century turns on a series of revolutions, and a continuing conflict over the meaning of the first French Revolution that began in 1789, the individual’s relation to social change and the warring ideologies that go with it was always more immediate and visibly important than in most other countries. The underlying issue of so much 19th-century French fiction is in essence: to whom does France belong? Who shall inherit this country riven between allegiances to tradition and revolution? There is much at stake in these books.
