The Use and Abuse of Literature (7 page)

What is the praxis of literature? Is it creative writing, the production of poems, plays, novels, and fictions, or does its praxis extend to literary criticism—and if so, who are the intended readers? Nietzsche’s scornful reference to the “mixed public” and to “popularization” foreshadows today’s focus on “the public humanities” and on accessibility, from book clubs to PBS specials. Nietzsche divides history into three kinds: monumental history (the study of great men and great works, which “deceives by analogies”
²⁸
), antiquarian history (the study of facts and “the habitual, which foster[s] the past”), and critical history (the study of oppression, which “judges and condemns”
²⁹
). We might draw an analogy, however inexact, with three contemporary approaches to literary study: canonicity, historicism, and cultural—or ethical—theory. Each of these raises problems for, and challenges to, the notion of the literary.

Above all, Nietzsche’s essay concludes, the problem with “culture” or “cultivation” is that it can too easily be seen as a mere “decoration of life,” rather than—as in his own vision—“a unanimity of life, thought, appearance, and will.”
³⁰
This issue will come up again and again for us vis-à-vis the use of literature for life. Is it essential, intrinsic, internal, and formative (for thinking, for action, for character, for approaching the future as well as the past), or is it ancillary, decorative, an embellishment, a social accomplishment, an extra? Requirement or elective? Body or clothing? Sustenance or delicacy?

There could hardly be a greater contrast between the bitter and eloquent passion of a young man like Alberti (who used the phrase
young man
constantly in
The Use and Abuse of Books
, especially in the passages where the books were speaking and offering advice to him) and the blithe and urbane tone of Sir Norman Birkett’s lecture to the National Book League, “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” in 1951, some five hundred years later. Birkett, who succeeded poet John Masefield as the league’s president, was a celebrated jurist—a defense lawyer of note who had been a British judge at the Nuremberg war trials and later became a lord justice of appeal. Reading was a sign of class and culture, and the outreach activities of the league (“The Book Exhibitions, the Lectures, the discussions, the Book Information Bureau, the Reader’s Guides and Book Lists”) were all genially supported by the luminaries who offered these annual lectures, from historians R. H. Taney and G. M. Trevelyan to poet John Masefield and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Birkett addressed the group as an amateur, a “lover of books,” and a member of the legal profession, and his lecture was ornamented with references to and quotations from works he clearly regarded as in the common possession of his hearers: from
Gulliver’s Travels
and
Tristram Shandy
to the poetry of Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, George Meredith, A. E. Housman, and Walter Scott. Toward the end of his talk, Birkett acknowledged that he had little appreciation for “what is sometimes termed modern
poetry,” and proved it by reading aloud the first verse of a poem by e. e. cummings.
³¹
Of “abuse,” he had little to say: one abuse was to spend the limited time one has for reading “on the worthless and the inferior when the best is available—the reader should be selective”; another was “to read too much”—it was better to know a few authors well than many imperfectly; finally, “the wise reader will never make his reading a substitute for living. To do so is to abuse reading and to make it a drug or a narcotic.” The “true use” of reading was “to enrich the actual life of the reader,” “to refine in gladness and to console in sorrow,” and to “stamp the life with high quality and with purpose.”
³²
To underscore his final points, he quoted, as many have done, a famous passage from Francis Bacon:

Nowhere in this learned and amiable talk did Birkett mention literary criticism or scholarship, although many of the authors he cited also wrote essays and offered pertinent maxims. “Use and abuse” to him referred to the practice, and the life, of the reader.

A look at a twentieth-century public lecture on literary studies, one that would seem to be at the most genteel edge of discourse, far away from troublemaking, will provide us some evidence about the permeable borderline between use and abuse.

The author of this 1974 lecture, entitled “The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism,” was the eminent Shakespeare editor and literary critic Harold F. Brooks, and the occasion his appointment to a personal chair of English literature at Birkbeck College, London. The title of his talk suggests an urbane approach to pleasures and dangers, well suited to a
celebratory event. Birkbeck, an institution committed to offering parttime undergraduate instruction for working people, was far away from the “theory revolutions” then under way at places like Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Paris VIII. (Today’s Birkbeck is another story, the theory revolution having come home to roost there, with the establishment of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities under the International Directorship of Slavoj Žižek.)

Brooks began with what he clearly regarded as some matter-of-fact statements about the role of criticism:

• “Literary criticism is meant to help us, either in writing literature; or in reading it with more enjoyment and discrimination; or in understanding, through the literature, the civilization it belongs to.”
  ³⁴
  
• A good critic would help to provide a “known and sound text”
  ³⁵
  and “notes” to keep us from misunderstanding the words and context, especially if the work were of an earlier historical period.
  ³⁶
  
• The critic could also help the reader by “undermin[ing] your prejudices,” developing a “fresh approach which we can then follow up ourselves”
  ³⁷
  and “reassur[ing] us” if we are repelled by novelties or obscurities.
  ³⁸
  
• Above all, “one of the greatest services a critic can perform” is “to enable us to recognize [a work’s] coherence,” since “a work of art needs to be seen in its unity.”
  ³⁹
  

Having cataloged these useful “uses,” Brooks moved on to enumerate some “pitfalls for the critic and his reader.”
⁴⁰
It becomes clear that there are more potential abuses than uses, and that the abuses are more appealing than the uses, for the same reason that Milton’s Satan in
Paradise Lost
is a more interesting figure than his God, or Falstaff (to some people) a more engaging character than Hotspur or Prince Hal.

These included

• “the half-baked interpretation formed by attending to only part of the evidence in a text”;
  ⁴¹
  
• “hurrying on to say how good or bad a work is, before taking enough trouble to understand it”;
  ⁴²
  
• “being too keen on ranking works of authors in order of merit”;
  ⁴³
  
• running down one author in order to exalt another; expecting from one author or work what we admire in another;
  
• “the treatment of literature as no more than the raw material of sociology”;
  ⁴⁴
  
• a skepticism that makes the critical “unable to believe that a great author … can have depicted a noble character or given a story a happy ending, without, as the fashionable phrase goes, ‘undercutting it’ ”;
  ⁴⁵
  
• the Musical Fallacy, which claims that literature “works by direct appeals to the ear and to the mind’s eye, rather than to logic and the reasoned progression of ideas,” and that literature is an “impure art” because ideas get in the way of sensation and affect;
  ⁴⁶
  
• the Lyrical Fallacy, which holds, following Poe, “that a long poem is a contradiction in terms”;
  
• the Anti-Historical Fallacy, whose adherents “take as their standard simply what the uninstructed modern reader can see in a work”;
  ⁴⁷
  
• its twin, the Historical Fallacy, “where the critic’s interpretation is governed by what he thinks an average audience of the author’s day could have seen in the work”;
  ⁴⁸
  

and finally,

• the abuse performed of the critic who takes the critical enterprise too seriously. “The final abuse of criticism … is to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself.”
  ⁴⁹
  

For Harold Brooks, the “intellectual interpretation of imaginative literature is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end; and that end is the heightened and more finely tuned response to the work of art in its wholeness.”
⁵⁰
He was willing to acknowledge the possibility of both conscious and unconscious meanings—perhaps surprisingly, the first footnote (of only three) in this published lecture comes on the penultimate page and points the reader to Jung on phantasy and symbol—but he warned against “educating the intellect alone,” rather than “the education of
feeling, and of the sensibilities of the complete human being, which is the education offered by works of art.”
⁵¹

I find little to fault in this polished and gracious account, except to say again that it would be possible to reclassify the abuses as uses, and the uses as abuses, and to emerge with an equally viable and persuasive argument. In fact, the history of literary analysis from 1974 to the present may be seen to have followed all of these diverse “abusive” paths, from the sociology of literature and various avatars of historicism to a renewed interest in the passions, emotions, and positive and negative affect. The tendency to list and rank authors and works—as I will have occasion to discuss later—is a marketing device (for critics and for publishers) and a nostalgia for a literary canon. Skepticism, a resistance to closure (the happy ending), what Brooks called a “half-baked” interpretation “attending to only part of the text” but what might be as readily seen as a “strong reading,” a reading “from the margins,” or an argument for cognitive dissonance within the work—are among the most recognizable and fruitful critical activities of the past decades.

The interpretation of literature is itself always in dialogue with its own past. The elements of philology, close reading, myth, allegory, image and symbol, history, biography, context, and reception (or, to employ another familiar formulation, emphasis upon the
author
, the
text
, or the
reader
) follow upon one another cyclically. The sequence is not always the same: an interest in history can be provoked by an overemphasis on textual reading that seems to ignore context, but close textual reading can also lead to an interest in philology and the multiple, sometimes irreconcilable, roots and meanings of words. What is certain, if the past is any indication, is this: that no one way of reading or interpreting literature is the best. There are many good, or strong, ways of reading a literary text, and the more satisfying one mode of reading may be, the more likely it is to provoke a different kind of interpretation or approach from the next generation of readers. There is no way of solving a novel or poem or other piece of imaginative writing that will be definitive. We could say,
borrowing a precept from physics, that every reading produces an equal and opposite rereading. (By
equal and opposite
I don’t necessarily mean “just as good” or “completely the reverse” but, rather, a decided push in another direction. Perhaps it would be clearer to say that every
way
of reading produces an equal and opposite
way
of rereading, although individual readings are often flash points for such energized disavowals.)

Sometimes things in the world affect the nature and fortunes of literary analysis. The much ballyhooed disappearance of the printed book, supposed to be imminent with the arrival of the Internet and the e-book, has clearly helped generate an enormous interest in book history and the social—and technical—history of reading. Likewise, the current focus on human affect, the emotions and the passions, is in part a response to the discourse of cyborgs, cloning, genomics, and human/machine and human/animal boundaries. I think the interest in ethics by scholars in the immediate post-deconstruction days owed something to the insistence by opponents of deconstruction that it looked at nothing outside the text (despite Derrida’s long-standing engagement with philosophy and politics). Certainly when, after his death and the discovery of his wartime writings, Paul de Man was accused of being a Nazi collaborator, ethical issues rose to the fore, as some critics suggested that the whole of deconstruction was a cover-up for collaboration during World War II. These are contributory causes, not explicit prompts or reasons, and few if any participants in such lively areas of thinking and research are likely to explain their interest as a result of any kind of cultural anxiety or psychological compensation rather than an intrinsic attraction to the field.

Nonetheless, looked at over time, social, political, and scientific events can be seen to nudge literary studies in various directions. Like every other intellectual activity or event, literary studies have an unconscious as well as a conscious. (Fredric Jameson’s phrase “the political unconscious,” like Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style in American politics,” has become a standard expression in cultural analysis, and the critical unconscious seems close to a pleonasm, since so much of what is most powerful in literary analysis begins with a hunch and goes on to seek evidence and proof. Without evidence and proof, there is no argument; but
without intuition and risk, there is no challenge to verities and truisms, and thus no advance in thought.