The Use and Abuse of Literature (10 page)

But what does it mean to read the classics or to study them? Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Hutchins-Adler Great Books series—a review that must have been real fun for him to write—takes note of the deliberate absence of a “scholarly apparatus” accompanying a set of books that span the disciplines of literature, philosophy, history, and science, and range from ancient Greece and medieval England to Freud and (inadequately selected works of) Marx. “The Advisory Board,” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote, “recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No ‘introductions’ giving the editors’ views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.”
⁴

Macdonald found this particularly vexing in the case of the six volumes of scientific writing, which posed a problem “so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work,” in his view, “partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science.” Thus, while Milton “does not supersede Homer,” and the historian Edward Gibbon “represents no advance over Thucydides,” scientific writing is “often revised, edited, or even superseded by the work of later scientists.”
⁵
To underscore this point, Macdonald offered some quotations from Hippocrates that were meant to show how out of date he was as a scientist—for instance, “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” But as this example makes clear, such observations are very much of interest today in the history of science and medicine, and as well in the fields
of women’s and gender studies. It has become a critical truism that the works of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are taught more often in literature courses than in the original disciplines (science, economics, philosophy, or philology) in which those writers began their work. This does not make them failures but, rather, successes—“crossover” successes. Hippocrates, likewise, has found new readers, new contexts, and new relevancies, even if physicians do not consult him on the treatment of ulcers and broken bones. These writers have become literary and historical. That does not mean they are useless but that they have found, or made, new uses. The literary is not the category of last resort (or of lost causes) but the category of textual richness and multiplicity of meanings.

Let’s return, though, to the purist claim made by Hutchins and Adler—that the omission of a scholarly or expository apparatus was a plus, morally, ethically, and literarily, for their Great Books series, removing a barrier between reader and writer. Dwight Macdonald quite sensibly suggests that “surely, without distracting the reader from the text,” a scholarly apparatus could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time.
⁶
The word
apparatus
is an unlovely word, conjuring up as it does a kind of mechanical contraption or scaffolding. In fact,
apparatus
comes from the same root as
prepare
, and means a way of getting ready. A scholarly apparatus, however, sounds particularly menacing and constraining, like a harness (or a
HAZMAT
suit).

This idea, that scholarship and criticism somehow got in the way of and impeded the direct interaction between reader and work, is an artifact of the times—the late forties and early to mid-fifties. It is related to the romance of the Great Books as part of a theory of general education, a theory that was, in turn, indebted to concepts of American individualism, self-realization, and the spread of democracy in the post–World War II period. It is, in fact, the forerunner of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the resistance to literary theory, which was widely regarded as a dangerous foreign import.

One of the recurrent flashpoints in the public discussion of the humanities is whether specialization is ruining literary studies, replacing generalists who know and love the canon and the great (and small) works across periods and genres with specialists, intensely localized and professionalized, who know every inch of a particular piece of literary terrain (the American nineteenth-century novel, or seventeenth-century religious poetry, or medieval drama, or Dickens) but who no longer command—or, it is implied, much care about—the larger picture.

Not long ago, that larger picture would have included the classics of ancient Greece and Rome (preferably read and studied in the original languages), Dante and Petrarch, French literature from (at least) Corneille and Racine through the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth century, and many other works from what came to be known, too broadly, as the Western tradition. Time moves on, and—happily—writers keep writing, and so we now have not only a more global sense of world literature but also a constant consciousness of new work, poems and plays and novels and essays, that is published, reviewed, and read every day. No one can read all of this; no one can command it. And certainly no scholar can read the preponderance of scholarly work being produced today. A century ago the world of literary scholarship was smaller, more intimate, clubbier—riven by factions and sometimes astonishingly personal and intemperate in its expression, but at the same time rather self-protective, insulated as well as isolated.

We can’t go back to that time, nor—in the main—should we want to do so. The world of literary studies has become, to a great extent (though not completely), democratized and pluralized, with beneficial effects for scholarship and teaching. But the question remains about that elusive, and to some extent delusory, “larger picture.” The old divisions and categories—period, genre, author, nation—have all been questioned, their borderlines exposed as permeable (when does medieval begin or end? Do terms like
epic
and
pastoral
have modern and postmodern
equivalents? How do we assess collaborative or collective authorship? Does it matter whether Beckett is an Irish author or a French author?). After decades in which master narratives were set aside in favor of the local, the particular, the outsider, and the idea of bricolage, there is an understandable longing on the part of students, and of some teachers and scholars, for a broader arc, a story if not a picture.

The language of specialist and generalist is sometimes deployed as a kind of code, implying that members of the former are technocrats (or even bureaucrats) and careerists, while the latter are genuinely committed to literary study and, as a strong and insistent subtext, to teaching, by which is meant the teaching of undergraduates (and non-majors) rather than graduate students. This divide, too, I think is false, and not only inaccurate but meretricious. It sets up the terms of apparent difference in a way that fails to understand or to value the continuum between teaching and scholarship, intellectual excitement and painstaking research, pleasure and profit, learnedness and learning.

My own education was as a generalist, and I am to a certain extent a generalist still, “dabbling,” as the dismissive term has it, in periods and others not “my own.” From time to time I have taught courses on Jane Austen as well as Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, on modern and postmodern drama as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, on detective fiction (from
Oedipus
to Agatha Christie to Crick and Watson’s double helix), on literary and cultural theory, and on ghosts in literature, as well as what used to be called survey courses in English literature, the epic and the novel, and drama from the Greeks to the present day. If we were to try to adapt the terms of Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to the realm of literary study, rather than of literary production, I would be pretty clearly on the side of the fox rather than the hedgehog.
⁷
Or, to put it another way, my interests are transhistorical, eclectic, thematic, and theoretical. I am less interested in thick description and period-based work, more intrigued by following out an idea, an intuition, a hunch, or a series of associations wherever they lead me. But I am deeply committed to research, to evidence, to documentation, to the acknowledgment of prior scholars’ work, and to other things that belong to the apparatus of scholarship.

So for me, the dichotomy between so-called specialists and so-called generalists is a false divide. Since I believe, along with many of the critics I have cited in these pages, that the colloquy is always being held across the centuries between and among writers, whether of fiction, poetry, drama, or any other genre, to specialize will mean to know the intellectual surround (as well as the historical background) of any given author’s work, its precursors and successors, its effects and affects. What I want to emphasize here, though, is the distinct kind of pleasure that comes from connecting one literary work or phrase or character or passage with another—the experience that is sometimes called getting, or catching, or recognizing a literary allusion.

The title of Edward Albee’s play
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1962) is a reference to the theme song of Disney’s
Three Little Pigs
(1933), but it would have no resonance if the name Virginia Woolf didn’t already carry some important connotative power (feminist writer; major twentieth-century novelist; innovative stylist; Bloomsbury icon). Albee apparently said that when he saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror, he thought of it as “a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”
⁸
It’s hard to know whether such a joke would today be the typical product of college wit. Or take a slightly different kind of example, T. S. Eliot’s play
Sweeney Agonistes
, which offers a wry reference to John Milton’s verse tragedy
Samson Agonistes
(1671). The titles of both
Sweeney Agonistes
and Gary Wills’s biography
Nixon Agonistes
(1969) assume at least a fleeting familiarity with Milton’s poem, or at least with its title. As with Albee’s
Virginia Woolf
, the wit lies in the apparent disjunction between the original and the subsequent allusion.

But the practice of allusion seems to have moved from the realm of classic literature to popular culture and politics. The old-style literary allusion required that the reader or hearer identify the reference. Thus, the American poet Amy Lowell could, in 1912, title a poem “Fresh Woods and Pastures New” and assume that her readers would understand
the allusion to the last line of Milton’s “Lycidas.” An exhibition of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape drawings with that title toured in 2000, having originated in a university art gallery.
Slate
used the same phrase appositely as the title of a posted item on the move of a professor from one law school to another; the professor, it turned out, was writing a book on law and Shakespeare, so he was twice embarking on a new venture, field, and vocation.
⁹
But these audiences of readers are comparatively cognoscenti. How many readers would catch a witty reference to “fresh woods and pastures new” today?

Let’s take another example, perhaps a more familiar one to modern readers, the phrase “miles to go before I sleep” from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (The alert reader of this book will see that I got from Milton’s woods to Frost’s woods by a process of association, though it is more conventional to associate Frost’s entry into the woods with that of Dante in his
Inferno.
) In any case, “miles to go before I sleep” has had a lively itinerary, having been used in 1974 as the title of a movie about a lonely senior citizen (played by Martin Balsam) and, with signifying parentheses, as the title of a love song, “Miles to Go (Before I Sleep),” which appears on a 1997 CD by Celine Dion. Arguably, audiences for both works would recognize the allusion to Frost, one of the most frequently taught lyric poets in the high school curriculum.

Some authors—like Laurence Sterne, for example, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—demonstrably use allusion as a major constituent part of their own creative work.
¹⁰
Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
is, in formal and intellectual terms, both a tapestry of allusions and a send-up of, or a challenge to, the very idea of allusion. But if an allusion falls (or is dropped) and no one catches it, does it really allude?

T. S. Eliot famously added learned footnotes to his poem
The Waste Land
when it was published in 1922. References to Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ezekiel, Dickens, etc., are essential to the structure, tone, and content of the poem, but the footnotes are selective, didactic, and (deliberately?) pompous and condescending. In a preliminary note, for example, Eliot cites “Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend:
From Ritual to Romance
(Cambridge)” and “another
work of anthropology … one which has influenced our generation profoundly: I mean
The Golden Bough.
”
¹¹
(No author is cited here; those who don’t know, don’t know.) Eliot proceeds to comment that “Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” The tone is droll, deadpan: there are sheep and goats, insiders and outsiders. And the language is scholarly piling-on: “anyone,” “immediately,” and the tantalizingly vague “certain references.” Again, if you know, you know. These are parody footnotes, allusions to footnotes, allusions to allusions. Yet, like many others of my generation, I wanted to know what the poets knew. Eliot’s poem and its footnotes were my homeschooling. I went in quest of the works of Mr. Frazer,
The White Devil
, and the philosophical writings of F. H. Bradley. I read Dante and Spenser and whatever translations of the Upanishads I could find. I also bought and read Weston’s
From Ritual to Romance
, a slim book that became a must-have on the bookshelves of the time, right next to all those New Directions poetry paperbacks.