The Use and Abuse of Literature (12 page)

When I began teaching a lecture course on Shakespeare many years ago, I initially thought of the memorization requirement as an old-fashioned practice that was basically a waste of time. How wrong I was. After a year or two, wanting my students to get closer to the text and to feel ownership of it, I restored the requirement that each student memorize twenty consecutive lines of text—any twenty but preferably a single speech—and perform it in the section, or small-group, part of the course. If a student were really reluctant, he or she could recite the lines in office hours, but once it became normalized, students were usually agreeable to, and often eager for, the chance to perform in front of their classmates. Some of the performances were simply stunning and taught me things I had not known about the plays. I remember with particular pleasure a young man who performed Cassius’s speech about Brutus (“Why man, he doth bestride the earth / Like a Colossus”) with an unbelievably strong outburst of bitter feeling toward the end, when Cassius reports having once rescued “the tired Caesar” from drowning. “And this
man
/ Is now become a
god.
” I never read these lines now without hearing that student’s voice behind them, and he was only one of hundreds who did this exercise every year. I tell my students that they will always remember the lines they have memorized—that at their twenty-fifth class reunions, long after they have forgotten what I said about the plays in lecture, they would still be able to call up “their” Shakespeare speech from deep memory and recite it. I’ve asked some reunion classes about this, and they’ve said it is true. The lines had become their lines. They owned a piece of Shakespeare.

Memorization is often conflated with rote learning, in which nothing is really learned but only repeated. Lately, in the press, this kind of memorization has been associated with indoctrination or even with terrorist ideology, as in the account of madrassas (Islamic religious schools) that teach their students to memorize passages from the Koran. Of course, the United States has some texts that are routinely memorized as well, like the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, and “America
the Beautiful.” Rarely do we subject any of these to textual analysis—as we would certainly do with poetry or other memorized passages in a literature class—and it might make for some very lively discussions to compare the merits, for example, of “purple mountain majesties” (which is what Katharine Lee Bates wrote in 1895) to “purple mountain’s majesty,” which is what many people sing.

The tenor of the Pledge of Allegiance as a recitation piece, and a political document and a loyalty oath, was changed when the phrase “under God” was inserted in 1954. From a poetic point of view, the rhythm was altered, as the line comes to a thudding halt: “One nation [heavy pause], under God [heavy pause], indivisible [heavy pause], with liberty and justice for all.” Equally significant and equally forgotten are (1) the fact that the pledge was originally written by a Baptist minister and Christian socialist and was distributed as part of a marketing ploy for a popular children’s magazine,
The Youth’s Companion
, in connection with the sale of flags in the public schools; and (2) the fact that from 1892 to 1942 the recitation of the pledge was accompanied by a stiff salute, the arm outstretched and the palm upward, that looked disconcertingly like the Nazi salute and was therefore changed, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the now familiar hand over the heart.

Or consider the case of “God Bless America.” We seldom if ever acknowledge that this song, which has become an informal but universal favorite, sung now at ballparks (especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) as well as in classrooms, was originally written in 1918 for an army revue called
Yip Yip Yaphank
and was popularized in 1938 by Irving Berlin and the singer Kate Smith as part of the home front resistance to Hitler. There is a tendency to think that it has always been part of the national spirit. We worry so much about performers hitting the high notes in the national anthem, and about their remembering the words, that we don’t ordinarily discuss questions like voice and address (who is speaking when we sing “O say can you see?,” and to whom?) or the fact that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is based on a particular historical event (the defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812).

In other words, memorization can either replace analysis and context
or be combined with them. Without some sense of what the words mean, have meant, and might come to mean (Irving Berlin changed a key phrase in “God Bless America” from “to the right” to “through the night,” to avoid the sense that “right” meant the political right wing, not “impartial justice”), these are formulas, not texts. The same is true of works we consider part of a
literary
canon rather than a
national
(or
religious
) canon.

Here I want to stress a point I’ve made before about literary analysis—that it does not damage but tends to strengthen the status of the texts being analyzed. Their greatness, however we want to define that term, is enhanced rather than undercut by the discussion, interpretation, and examination of historical context. The works of Chaucer do not need to be protected from feminist analysis—just to give one example—any more than the Pledge of Allegiance needs to be protected from its origins in advertising tie-ins and marketing. The more we know, the more we discuss, the more we interpret, the more familiar we become with the language, nuance, history, and meanings (in the plural) of these texts, the better. And this is especially the case, I’d contend, with works that have achieved canonical status. They should be alive to us, which means that they grow and change as the times change and readers change. If they are immobile, marmoreal, and untouchable, venerated rather than read and interpreted, then they are no longer literary and no longer living.

Re-cognition is cognition. You never go anywhere for the first time—you have always somehow imagined or “experienced” it before, in dreams, in images, in novels, in travel documentaries, in fantasy.
Hamlet
is often described in just this way—as a web of quotations, a play that cannot be read for the first time because it has so permeated cultures around the world. The indubitable and indisputable pleasures of the canon are pleasures of rereading, and pleasures of recognition, and pleasures of shape-shifting, as “literary allusions” and “literary influence” and “swerving
from strong predecessors” and “the burden of the past” have all made—as, again, is often said—the Western tradition into a single gigantic work of literature.
¹³

The invocation of the phrase “Western tradition” raises a few central questions. First, is there a literary canon anymore? Was there ever? With fewer and fewer readers commanding the classical languages, and fewer studying French and German (instead of, for example, Spanish, the language of much of the Western Hemisphere, or various languages deemed politically or commercially important, like Mandarin, Japanese, or Arabic), has the idea of a literary canon lost its meaning or its cachet? The moves toward what was called “opening up the canon” (to women, to ethnic writers, to the token text from India or China) now look like a medial step—as doomsayers warned—toward discarding the notion altogether, since an inclusive canon cannot also be exclusive.
¹⁴

It’s been remarked that any Web search under
canon
produces dozens of sites about photographical and digital products before you reach the first timid citation for literature. But perhaps this hieroglyphic is itself a lesson. The canon has changed. It has intersected, precisely, with the photographic, the reduplicative, the digital, the electronic. If you are looking for a copy of a poem—say, one of those I have discussed above—you can find it, often in many iterations, on the Web.

Yet ultimately this may be one reason to cherish the canon, or
a
canon, especially if we think of it as something like an interconnected reading list, rather than only as a list of Great Books. Mortimer Adler’s rather grandiose phrase “The Great Conversation,” used to advertise and publish his Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Ideas series, may seem to belong to a different era, but perhaps for that very reason the concept of a literary canon conversation across the continents and centuries
is
more important than ever.

There’s no accounting for taste. We might say that whatever we find tedious, banal, sloppy, ill formed, or opaque isn’t literature. Or we could say that literature has to pass some kind of test, like the test of age, or having once been in someone’s canon, or winning a literary prize. Or we could say that it has to be fictive (or creative or imaginative) in order to be called literature. I don’t share any of these views, although I acknowledge their appropriateness in various situations. Instead I think it’s productive to look at the boundaries and limits of literature. If we do this, we see a fairly constant centripetal movement from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical, and even classic status.

What once wasn’t literature (Renaissance stage plays; novels; high-quality pornographic writing) is now at the heart of the canon, as are works previously defined as “women’s literature” or “Afro-American literature.” Does the term
literature
in the sense of “worthy of rereading, worthy of study” have any agreed-upon meaning today? Who judges this? Who should?

The word
literature
now seems to have two distinct regions of meaning: one belonging to so-called high culture and print culture, and the other to handouts, throwaways, documents on flimsy paper and in tiny print, among them those providing medical and statistical legalese aiming to shield drug companies from potential lawsuits. (“I’ll see what’s in the literature on that subject …”).

Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call
the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other.

We might want to make the (slightly overreaching but nonetheless interesting) claim that this boundary status is part of what enhances the status of the work/text as literature. Here, our authority, if we need one, is again Immanuel Kant, this time on the topic of genius: specifically, his dictum that genius gives the rule to art. The genius—according to Kant—doesn’t follow rules. Indeed, he (for Kant, the masculine pronoun would have been taken for granted) doesn’t often make or ordain rules unless he is, for example, Aristotle. To the contrary: rules are made in imitation of, or in consequence of, the rule-breaking performances of artists (including writers). Innovation—breaking the rules—produces rules for the next generation: Sophocles’ third actor, Petrarch’s love sonnet, Dante’s poetry in the vernacular, and Wordsworth’s decision to write an epic poem about the growth of a poet’s mind—all these innovations changed the course of literature. Brilliant success is often adjacent to failure, as pathos is to bathos. What this means when we come to ask the question “What isn’t literature?” is that, all too likely, today’s answer will not suit the circumstances of tomorrow—or perhaps of yesterday.

Let me offer two contrasting examples: the graphic novel and the well-made play.

The graphic novel is a descendant of the much maligned comic book, a genre so ubiquitous and so reviled in the 1940s and ’50s that the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on the subject, and an alarmed industry moved toward self-censorship by adopting a Comics Code banning words like
terror
and
zombie
and decreeing that all criminals must be punished. (Unlike, we might note, all criminals in literature …) The catalyst, or we might say the reagent, for
these hearings was a book called
Seduction of the Innocent
(1954) by the German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham, who had previously published the essay “The Psychopathology of Comic Books” in the
American Journal of Psychotherapy
, complained of hidden sexual themes, perversion, violence, and morbidity in the comic books of the era, and urged that comics be prohibited to children under the age of fifteen.

“What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?”
¹
Some of Wertham’s most derided observations, like the gay themes he detected in
Batman & Robin
, and the dominatrix image of Wonder Woman, are now, minus the moral disapproval, commonplaces of critical interpretation. I was interested by his strong reaction to the publication of
Macbeth
in comic book form—a mode that is now familiar but at the time provoked Wertham’s disapproval and also, as he notes, that of a distinguished American drama critic: