Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (3 page)
After a spurt of enthusiasm among scholars in adjacent fields like history, anthropology, and philosophy—the so-called linguistic turn of the 1970s and 1980s—literature, literary theory, and literary studies have fallen behind in both academic cachet and intellectual influence. More to the point—for the key questions here do not concern scholars so much as they do readers and the general public—literature is often undervalued or misunderstood as something that needs to be applied to the experiences of life. Practical concerns with careers and financial security have dominated the choices made by ambitious and worried young people who want to make sure education fits them for the lives they think they want to lead. Careers in economics, banking, technology, or law do not include literature, except as an add-on or elective. Nor is the typical
English major necessarily the way to encounter literature in an active, inquiring way. Even when literature is read, taught, and studied, it is often interrogated for wisdom or moral lessons. The clumsy formulations I grew up with—what is the moral of the story? what is the hero’s or heroine’s tragic flaw?—still influence and flatten the questions people often ask about literary works, as if there were one answer, and a right answer, at that. The genius of literary study comes in asking questions, not in finding answers.
On the one side, hard science and social science, including technology; on the other side, contemporary visual and musical culture, framed by moving images, file swapping, and the Internet. Between these two poles, one of which implicitly defines literature as a potentially useful social enhancement for success in financial and practical life, the other one of which leaves literature behind in favor of livelier, more supposedly “interactive” cultural forms, literature has been devalued—sometimes for reasons that seem, on the surface, benevolent, and sometimes by those who profess to love it best.
In his essay collection
Promises, Promises
, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips refers with a sense of nostalgia to “what was once called Literature.”
Coming, as they say, from what was then called Literature as a student in the early 1970s, to psychoanalysis in the late 1970s, has made me wonder what I thought psychoanalysis could do for me—or what I wanted psychoanalysis to do for me—that Literature could not. And, of course, what I might have been using Literature for that made psychoanalysis the next best thing—or rather, the other best thing.
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And again,
Anyone who loves what was once called Literature can teach it, write it, and of course, read it. But people who love psychoanalysis can teach it, write it, read it,
and
practise it. Because there is a real sense—a pragmatic sense—in which we can practise what Freud writes, we can wonder, by the same token, what it would be to practise
Henry James or Shakespeare, and what the effect on our reading is when we are finding out how to do something.
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It wouldn’t be unjust to call this set of constraints and wishes a kind of love letter, one that—from the author of a book on monogamy—represents a desire for both surprise and fulfillment. In seeking literature, Phillips found psychoanalysis. But having found psychoanalysis, he still fantasizes about his first love, literature. Phillips wants literature to have something like a use, what he calls a practice. But what if we were to understand literature as its own practice?
Central to this book is the question of how we can understand the importance of “what was once called Literature,” and how we can distinguish it from other distinct, though valuable, human enterprises like morality, politics, and aesthetics. My purpose and my goal are to explain the specificity of literature and literary reading.
Philip Sidney wrote a
Defence of Poesie
in 1595. Percy Shelley wrote a
Defence of Poetry
in 1821. Why, we might ask, does literature have to defend itself?
In part, it’s Plato’s fault. His famous exiling of poets from a well-ordered republic, on the grounds that they offered
doxa
, or opinion, rather than
logos
, or reason/discourse, instantiated an unhappy split between what we now call art and what we now call science. For Plato, the classic Greek poets—Homer and the tragic dramatists—whose work had formed the basis of a Greek education (
paideia
) depicted in their work all manner of deleterious behavior: murder, incest, cruelty, cowardice, treachery, strong passions out of control. Poetry thus weakened moral character and potentially influenced both actor/performer and audience. Since
poetry
in this period meant oral poetry, whether epic or dramatic—not the reading and study of written texts—the possibility of such emotional effects, rather than a rational assessment and
distance, was, he thought, strong. If a schoolchild memorized Homer on the wrath of Achilles, what he learned was wrath, not poetry.
From the perspective of a modern educational system, where poetry is far less central than it was to the ancient Greeks, Plato’s insistence on the dangers of poetry and poets may seem either quaint or excessive. But that is because we have so diminished the importance of literature (and music and art) over the years.
Both in
Republic
, where he describes what he regards as an ideal education for guardians and citizens of Athens, and elsewhere in his dialogues, Plato emphasizes the role of poetry and music on the one hand, and physical training on the other, as the key elements for training the soul and the body. In his own academy, Plato taught a different kind of learning, one based upon dialectics and philosophical reasoning, with the claim that literature should serve a moral and social function and should teach cultural elements like goodness, grace, reason, and respect for law.
This instrumental view of literature (Plato’s poetry includes epic, tragedy, and other modes of imaginative writing), which demands that it do some good in the world, is, I will argue, part of the difficulty that literary study has wrestled with from its beginnings to the present. What is often called “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” the idea (voiced from the side of philosophy since Plato) that literature needs to make us better people, is now partnered with and augmented by a more modern set of questions about why we should read and study literature in a world increasingly global, economic, technological, and visual. Are the blandishments of the rhapsodes and sophists, the interpreters and orators, still dangerous? Still seductive? Does literature threaten society, or does it help to build society’s values and institutions? Or are these the wrong questions and the wrong justifications for literature and its readers?
Sidney’s
Defence of Poesie
famously declared that “the poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.” The truths told by poetry are figurative, not literal.
What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters on an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If then a man can arrive at that child’s age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written.
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In this, he thought, the poet differed from the philosopher and the historian, who argued their cases by precept and example rather than by story and figure. “The philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomaches; the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher.”
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Almost four centuries later, the issue of whether poetry (by which Sidney meant all imaginative literature) should affirm its truths in the world was still very much on the agenda.
In 1961 the French literary review
Tel Quel
asked critic and literary theorist Roland Barthes to answer a questionnaire about literature. The questions and responses were published by Barthes under the title “Literature Today.” Here is an extract from his salient commentary in those more political, and yet somehow more innocent, years: “it is not literature that is going to free the world,” Barthes wrote, “Yet, in this ‘reduced’ state in which history places us today, there are several ways of creating literature: there is a choice, and consequently the writer has if not a morality at least a responsibility.”
We can make literature into an
assertive
value—either in repletion, by reconciling it with society’s conservative values, or in tension, by making it the instrument of a struggle for liberation; conversely, we can grant literature an essentially
interrogative
value; … the writer can then at one and the same time profoundly commit his work to the world, to the world’s questions, yet suspend the commitment precisely where doctrines, political parties, groups, and cultures prompt him to an answer …
This interrogation is not:
what is the meaning of the world?
nor even perhaps:
does the world have a meaning?
but only:
here is the
world: is there meaning in it?
Literature is then truth, but the truth of literature is at once its very importance to answer the world’s questions and its power to ask real questions, total questions, whose answer is not somehow presupposed in the very form of the question: an enterprise which no philosophy, perhaps, has brought off and which would then belong, truly, to literature.
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Notice that Barthes stresses the role of questions, rather than answers. This is a point that needs to be emphasized in trying to explain the specificity of literature in comparison with other modes of writing, thinking, and research.
So what is the use of a discussion about the use of literature? Inevitably, it will depend on the context. Do we mean by this question the social utility of literature in the practical world? Or the cultural value of qualities sometimes called
aesthetic
or
philosophical
, as they seem to be derived from reading literary works? Are we trying to assess why a college student should major in literature, or even in the humanities, rather than in something more pragmatic, more lucrative, more amenable to the generation of data, or more directly applicable to the improvement of society? Or are we asking whether there is still, or was ever, anything persuasive in the poet Shelley’s statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Is literature useful because it is beautiful or moving (both of these are claims that have been made by some commentators and dismissed by others as impressionistic and unprovable)? Is it useful because it puts commonly shared ideas into words.
Is a discussion of literature either a blind or a category mistake when what is really under critique is the role of literary criticism, especially literary theory, in the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s? It is conventional, though perhaps neither inevitable nor exhaustive, to divide the realms of literary study into literary criticism, literary theory, and literary history, broad rubrics under which a variety of approaches, from
post-structuralism to biography, could be subsumed. But for some readers, and some thinkers, this will miss the point, because even so broad a division omits the actual composition of literary works. What is the use of writing literature? And what is the difference between creative writing and literature? Or even, for that matter, between critical writing (what used to be called intellectual prose) and literature? If Bacon’s
Essays
and Johnson’s
Rambler
and Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria
and Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
are literature, what about the book reviews and essays and feature articles in today’s newspapers and magazines? Do they need to stand the test of time?
What is at stake, anyhow, in classifying something as
literature
, or as
literary
, at a time when that adjective seems itself somewhat contestatory, re-posing the very problem it would seem to resolve: is the
literary
a marker of quality, of intent, of genre, of context, or of readership and reception? What about post-facto designations of works as literary, although they were very differently received when they first appeared? Examples in this realm would include Renaissance drama, early ballads, popular novels of the nineteenth century, and the graphic novel (aka comic book) of the twentieth. Or might we decide that most, if not all, discussions of use are
inevitably
post facto? Is the need to explore the use of literature a manifest indication of the increasingly minor place that literature—and literary study—occupies in a visual, aural, musical, and technological era?
It was Immanuel Kant who set the philosophical terms for the modern discussion of the use of art. In his
Critique of Judgment
(1790), Kant said, in a phrase that would be cited and echoed many times, that the beautiful object exhibited “purposiveness without purpose.” In other words, a work of art (whether it was a painting, a garden, or a poem) was created on purpose but not
for
a particular purpose. The artwork was (in a positive sense) useless, and the apprehension of beauty was a disinterested activity, one not motivated by a desire to achieve an effect or result. “All interest,” Kant wrote, “ruins a judgment of taste and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if, instead of making the purposiveness precede
the feeling of pleasure as the interest of reason does, that interest bases the purposiveness on the feeling of pleasure.”
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Later critics have debated Kant’s central point. The literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued that, far from being “useless” in Kant’s sense, the work of art has a function—an economic “use value.”
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Some vestiges of the extreme position Smith describes here can be seen, for example, in the periodic surfacing of complaints about commercial art and advertising, “found” art, and a sentimental branch of amateurism that regards book contracts and lecture fees as suspect while exalting the idea of literary prizes (from the Booker Prize to the Tony Awards) as disinterested rewards for excellence. For writers and literary critics in the years that followed Kant’s
Critique
, though, the question of use was posed not so much in terms of the literary object itself but, rather, in relation to what literature could do, and should do, in the world.
