The Use and Abuse of Literature (4 page)

To Matthew Arnold, literature was a path to moral improvement and spiritual growth, and a potential gateway for workers, as well as for the educated and the privileged, to accede to social, economic, and cultural power. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” first delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1864, Arnold defined criticism as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” and maintained that “to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try to possess one great literature, at least, besides his own.”
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Arnold’s theory of critical disinterestedness, clearly indebted to Kant (and reinforced later by T. S. Eliot), has been challenged—and sometimes simply dismissed—by later critics concerned with the “situatedness” of literature and criticism and with what Stanley Fish called “interpretive communities.” Arnold’s idea that a critic should, and could, “know the best that is known and thought in the world” presumes both a wide and capacious reading and a somewhat restricted world. And his belief that a generally accepted canon of what he called “touchstones” from classical literature could be used as a measure of the greatness of
modern poets has been often taken, or mistaken, as a naive notion about universal standards of value. Arnold did not hesitate to evaluate authors and works: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are classics. Chaucer and Burns “come short of the high seriousness of the great classics.” Dryden and Pope are classics of prose but not of poetry; it is Thomas Gray who is the “poetical classic” of their period. Not every critic will agree with these views. But Arnold’s method was designedly comparative, aimed at avoiding the personal when it comes to judging the poetry of times so near that a critic’s feelings are likely to be not only personal but “personal with passion.” Thus he thought that “using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone” might “correct” an overly personal assessment, or at least put it in a broader context.
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Arnold was forthright about suggesting the function of
criticism
. But what was the use of
poetry
? Again, he was not reluctant to say what he thought.

It is because of these lofty ideals that Arnold proceeded, in his essay “The Study of Poetry,” to articulate a plan for identifying “the best poetry,” the “really excellent.” His comparative—and, to a certain extent, transnational and transhistorical—project was conceived as a way of getting beyond the historical and the personal toward “the best, the truly classic, in poetry.” This goal may strike some twenty-first-century readers as misguided or impossible, but it is premised on the notion that poetry and literature
count
—that a great deal is at stake.

I think it would be wrong to think of this spirited peroration as utilitarian. Arnold’s “end … of supreme importance” is enjoyment; he thinks of that as coterminous with the instinct of self-preservation, not as the evolutionary by-product of that instinct. If anything is subliminal or instinctual here, it is poetry, which is why he could say that “the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.”
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Matthew Arnold’s essay on “The Function of Criticism” was written in 1864, “The Study of Poetry” in 1880. It’s intriguing to compare the ideas of the earnest though determinedly polemical Arnold to the more deliberately provocative statements of adherents to what became known as “art for art’s sake” in the same years.

These writers—novelists, poets, and critics—were not only temperamentally attracted to in-your-face confrontation; they also felt themselves to be pushing back against a suffocating, and insufferable, tide of utilitarian moralism. Conservative critics insisted that art must be conducive to virtue; liberal critics, that art must “do good,” must be enlisted in the cause of social justice. In response to such apologists, moralists, and crusaders, whatever their political or religious doctrines, “aesthetes,” delighting in the paradox, claimed that the true use of art was to be useless.

The originator of the phrase
l’art pour l’art
(often translated as “art for art’s sake”) in the nineteenth century was the novelist Théophile Gautier. The phrase was used first in English by two figures associated with the Aesthetic Movement, Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The essence of art for art’s sake was captured in J. M. Whistler’s oft-quoted remark that “art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone … and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear,
without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.”
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“Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless,” Gautier asserted in the preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin
(1836), and Oscar Wilde adapted this as “All art is quite useless” in his preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891). In his preface, Gautier wrote feelingly about “moral journalists” and the “fine sermons which have replaced literary criticism in the public prints” and addressed himself directly, and at length, to “utilitarian critics” and the vexed question of “use.”

The “very faithful imitation of the utilitarian style,” as he happily admitted, was Gautier’s own, and he was therefore able to offer, immediately, his scathing reply: “a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous spurt; a drama is not a railways, though all of these things are essentially civilizing, and they advance humanity along the path of progress.”
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And what of beauty, music, and painting? In a strictly utilitarian sense, none of these entities is useful, since “nothing useful is indispensable for life,” and “nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless.” Contrariwise, “everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful room in the house is the lavatory.”
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When Oscar Wilde came to adapt and adopt these sentiments almost half a century later, he focused on the persona of the artist as maker:

Wilde’s art, and his artfully crafted aesthetic persona, did, of course, achieve the material rewards sardonically noted by Gautier, and at the end of his life, after the reversal of fortune brought about by his trial and conviction, the writing and publication of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
might fairly be considered spiritual, whether or not it was useful (the poem, when published, sold extremely well). “Catastrophes in life bring about catastrophes in Art,” Wilde told one friend, and to another he described
The Ballad
as “the cry of Marsyas and not the song of Apollo. I have probed the depths of most of the experiences in life, and I have come to the conclusion that we are meant to suffer. There are moments when it takes you like a tiger, by the throat, and it was only when I was in the depths of suffering that I wrote my poem.”
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As Richard Ellmann noted,
The Ballad
had for Wilde an explicit and specific use: “The length of the poem was necessary, he said, to shake confidence in the penal system; he knew that it must fall between poetry and propaganda, but he was prepared to face some artistic imperfection for the sake of changing what was intolerable.”
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As a young man at Oxford, Wilde had been the student of John Ruskin
and Walter Pater, and he was impressed by both the moral view of art held by Ruskin and by the aestheticism and conscious “decadence” of Pater. Pater became Wilde’s tutor and made editorial suggestions about
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Ruskin took him—and other students—on a road-building expedition and gave credence to Wilde’s view that art had a role to play in the improvement of society. Ellmann, tracing the beginnings of Wilde’s career, saw Ruskin and Pater as “heralds beckoning him in opposite directions” and noted quietly that “he outgrew them both.”
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We might note here that all of these writers—Arnold, Gautier, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde—were both artists and critics. Arnold wrote poetry (“Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gypsy,” “Empedocles on Etna”), Ruskin and Pater, works of elegant essayistic prose (Ruskin’s
The Stones of Venice
, Pater’s
The Renaissance
). When they offered strongly held views about the use of poetry, literature, or criticism, they gestured at once toward the activities of reading, writing, and study. The question of use (or uselessness) here does not translate into the question of whether or not there was value in
being an artist
—though this was clearly on the mind of each—but rather on the value of
literature
. Even the word
value
, though, carries a certain connotation of use, whether measured by merit, social utility, instrumentality, or evaluation.

Another kind of use was on the minds of Marxist writers and critics. Karl Marx himself had been an exceptionally literary economist, often demonstrating his theoretical arguments by means of extended references to works from Shakespeare’s plays to
Robinson Crusoe
. Despite some early attempts to remand literature to the category of superstructure rather than base, influential and foundational moves were made by critics like Lukács and the members of the Frankfurt School, as well as by writers like Bertolt Brecht, to bring to the forefront instances of both use and abuse.

Some genres, such as realist fiction and drama, were more readily seen as agents of social change than others, such as lyric poetry or pastoral (even though these had been effective instruments of cultural critique
in the past). But works of art were the products of social labor. Thus, Theodor Adorno contended, “That artworks are offered for sale at the market—just as pots and statuettes once were—is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production.”
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As for the idea of art for art’s sake, Adorno saw it as an unwitting strategy for “the neutralization of art”: “What is ideological in the principle of
l’art pour l’art
does not have its locus in the energetic antithesis of art to the empirical world but rather in the abstractness and facile character of this antithesis.”
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Whatever the conscious claims of art (or literature) with respect to purposelessness, its unconscious function was always a motivation, always a kind of use. Here it might also be of interest to recall what Adorno and Max Horkheimer had to say about use and uselessness in their essay “The Culture Industry” in
Dialectic of Enlightenment
.

Uselessness itself becomes a commodity, and a sign of leisure, culture, and social standing.

Raymond Williams, who deftly traced the history of
literature
as a term, noted that even as it changed from the old sense of “literacy” toward our modern understanding of the word, literature was “a reading rather than a writing” and “a category of use and condition rather than of production.”
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Williams suggested that the emergence of
literature
in a modern sense was a class-based event that established “the reading public” as a bourgeois accomplishment. It was at about this time that the general term in older use,
poetry
or
poesy
, was supplemented or replaced
by
literature
. Criticism and the development of a concept of taste and discrimination became linked to “the use or (conspicuous) consumption of works, rather than on their production.”
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Subsequent categories of value, like
imaginative literature
(distinguished from intellectual prose, discursive or factual writing) were also responses to “a new social order: that of capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism.” Distinctions began to be made within categories as well as between them: not all writing was classed as literature, and (“ironically,” Williams thought) where the idea of literature had developed simultaneously with the dissemination of printed books as a mark of the new reading class, now popular writing and “mass culture” were to be distinguished from “literature.” Ideas of “national literature” and of a literary “tradition” were part of this new “recognition of ‘literature’ as a specializing social and historical category.”
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