On: Why Sir Philip Sidney Would Tell You To “Give a hoot – Read a book” or
The Superiority of Literary Learning According to Sidney [is this owlish advice?]
Andrea
EN 385-50
Sir Philip Sidney begins his essay An Apology For Poetry with a story. By intimating the tale of his pompous equine loving friend, Sidney demonstrates the very principles he later goes on to recommend.
First of all, how is literature valuable? Why would one want to study it? Sidney might say, in order to Purify our Wit! Or, as Marshall W. Gregory writes in his essay Humanism’s Heat, Postmodernism’s Cool, “…reading widely can make people smarter at recognizing a greater variety of human situations and motives and feelings than they would ever be able to recognize based solely on firsthand experience….in one or twenty lifetimes (p10).” In other words, we must expand our horizons, because we are but a tiny speck in an elephantine world, and entropy surrounds us. In order to make sense of our world, we must see it from as many views as possible, literature helps us to do this, as well as make sense of the entire puzzle, and which piece we are in relation the whole. In addition, once we walk in another’s shoes for a proverbial day, we then have the ability to take on these memories as our own, and apply them to our own lives. Sidney’s example of this in the horse story is at the conclusion. He sees the Horseman’s narrow-mindedness, “if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse (p 135),” and assures the reader he is aware his work can be seen as such, and that he has taken all precautions to avoid such a pitfall.
So much for why one might study literature. As a sort of follow up question, one might say, so now I know that Sidney believes literature to be important. What does the study of literature teach? Again, Sidney comes up with an answer. To Enable our Judgment and better our sense of Conceit. Sidney says the study of literature expands our judgment in two important ways. It helps us break from our everyday routine, and learn from others’ experiences and localities that we may never have known existed. These vicarious experiences can be applied to our lives, and apply them to situations in which we might find ourselves, whether we want the outcome of the real to parallel the literary, or to achieve the polar opposite. Also, taking on this second (or third or fourth) view, we take away any personal interest we might have in a situation, and see the consequences in behaving selfishly or narrow-mindedly before irretraceable acts are committed. We can practice applying our judgment to literary situations before we are actually faced with them in real life. Once again, Sidney does this with his horsey story, we can see how narrow minded and illogical the Horseman is, and therefore be more cautious as we embark upon Sidney’s words on the world.
As far as conceit, Sidney bases his view of the imagination loosely upon Plato’s worldview. We have a mental idea of the world, the World we Know, that we have imagined, and the World we Experience, our material world that we, thanks to our imagination, want to improve. One must have imagination to go beyond this world, and we spend our lives in constant pursuit of the ideal world, as perhaps Plato’s dialectics might. Literature helps us develop our imagination, by showing us ways the world can be, providing a runway for the airplane of the imagination upon which we can launch fancy, metaphor, insight, the list goes on and on.
Finally, our last question. How does literature teach? Sidney must first make one thing clear. We cannot learn unless we want to learn. He is open to other ways of learning, but discusses and rejects them. The historian is too factual, and the philosopher too broad and ideological. The poet (writer of literature) is the only writer who combines the three to tell a story. Would one be more likely to remember Sidney’s story of the Horseman, or a dry factual account of history through the ages? The poet is “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges (Sidney, p135).” Without literature, everything is at stake. We need literature to show us how others experience, to see a better world. Without knowledge of a better world we will not improve ourselves, we will remain in the moulds of our forefathers, we will be automatic, and robot like, and above all, lose our self. Without literature, we are without that which makes us human.