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(1841), by claiming that the representation of Nancy is
 TRUE. Later in his career Dickens defends, also in a preface,
the spontaneous combustion of Krook in Bleak House in the
same way. Dickens adduces a whole series of supposed histor-
ical cases of spontaneous combustion  in Verona, in Reims, in
Columbus, Ohio. Recent evidence, quite suprisingly to me, has
confirmed Dickens s belief, though such cases are not truly
 spontaneous. They need some external source of combus-
tion, a fire in a fireplace for example that ignites the victim,
though he or she combusts in the same horribly slow way that
Dickens describes as Krook s fate. The body fat burns like
candle wax. The victim s clothes serve as the wick. Does that
modern scientific corroboration give Krook s spontaneous
combustion in Bleak House greater authority in a present-day
reader s eyes? It would be hard to deny that it does.
In this tradition, to sum up, we should read literature
because it gives socially useful pleasure and because it is seen
to have representatational validity. These assumptions have
had tremendous force in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Europe and America. They are basic presuppositions of most
pedagogy and critical writing even today.
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Why Read Literature?
LITERATURE AS DISGUISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Some supernatural grounding authority, the solid reality of
the extra-verbal social world as ground, the sheer bad or good
power of  fictions to generate behavior-changing credence
in those who submit themselves to them  all these sources of
literature s authority have had force throughout the Western
tradition. They have had force, often, in the same societies
or in the same writers and readers at once, in living con-
tradictions that are often not even noticed. The role of
literature in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and
American cultures has been no more than a special case of this
incoherent mix.
A fourth ground of literature s authority will complete my
repertoire of the stories we have told ourselves to explain why
we should read (or not read) literature. Not only are these
stories incoherent among themselves. They are also unable
to contain, to explain, or to reduce to order the immense
abundance of incommensurable universes that make up that
part of the universal library to which we give the name
 literature. The invention of something called  the Western
tradition is itself part of literature. It is one of the most
beguiling and enchanting of fictive universes. Another way to
put this is to say that the concept of  the Western tradition is
ideological, rather than being, as Dickens said of Nancy,
 TRUE.
Roland Barthes had to exert some effort to kill off the
author, in  The Death of the Author (La mort de l auteur
[1968]), because it is so strong a part of our tradition to
believe that what gives the literary work its authority is the
author who stands behind it. The author validates the work,
gives it a solid ground. An immense amount of recent
research, especially on English and continental Renaissance
102
On
Literature
literature, has persuaded many people that selfhood is  con-
structed. Selfhood is a matter of  self-fashioning. It is not
innate, inborn, or God-given. Selfhood, according to such a
view, is a product of surrounding ideological and cultural
forces, including of course those embodied in what we would
now call  literary works. Montaigne s essays, for example,
are, among other things, a reflection on the variability and
diversity from time to time of the self. The self, the  moi, is
 ondoyant et divers, wavering and diverse. A good many
people from Shakespeare s day to the present have neverthe-
less gone on believing that selfhood is God-given, fixed, uni-
tary, and permanent from birth. Confidence in that is an
important a part of our religious and legal traditions, whether
Christian, Judaic, or Muslim. How could the law hold some-
one morally or legally responsible for an act if he or she is not
the same person from moment to moment? To believe the self
is wavering and diverse provides a marvelous cop out from
moral responsibility. It allows you to say,  That was a differ-
ent me who promised to do that. You can t blame me for not
doing it.
In both cases, however, whether selfhood is seen as con-
structed or as innate, the notion that the author is the author-
izing source and guarantee of a work has in different ways
had wide allegiance in the West. This might be defined by
saying that the author tends to be held responsible for what
he or she has written. He or she is held responsible, for
example, by censoring authorities, by the reading public, or
by scholars and teachers. The latter support that stance by
writing or giving courses on  Shakespeare, or  Dickens, or
 Emily Dickinson, meaning the works that they are pre-
sumed on good authority to have written. An enormous
industry of biographical scholarship and popular writing,
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Why Read Literature?
from Samuel Johnson s Lives of the Poets down to the latest
 authoritative biography of some canonical or non-
canonical writer, reinforces the assumption that you can
blame the author for what he or she has written. It follows
that you can understand the work by knowing about its
author.
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