If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?13
The poet A. E. Housman offered a similar somatic test:
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”14
For Housman, a noted classical scholar who prized the intellect, poetry was nonetheless “more physical than intellectual.” Other symptoms he reported included “a shiver down the spine,” “a constriction in the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes,” and a sensation in the pit of the stomach that he likened to a phrase from Keats, when “everything … goes through me like a spear.” Although these symptoms may sound painful, Housman clearly associates them with a singular kind of pleasure.
So, once again: “feels good” or “is good for you.” Both of these desiderata, we might think, are covered by Horace’s Ars Poetica, with its celebrated advice that poetry should be “dulce et utile,” its aims to delight and to instruct.
A latter-day “Ars Poetica”—one too often dismissed these days—is the popular poem by Archibald MacLeish, with its two famous and quotable pronouncements:
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
And
A poem should not mean
But be.
These precepts, so perfectly attuned to close reading and New Critical thinking, also embody a sentiment elegantly summarized by Keats when he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket.”15 Yet some of the best literature, whether poetry or prose, has been polemical, political, and/or religious (not always in an orthodox way; think of Blake, whose Jerusalem hymn is, ironically, sung in churches all over Britain). Some of the novels of Dickens (the Brontës, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Cervantes, Flaubert) have had palpable designs for political, social, or moral change, as have the great epics, from those by Homer and Virgil to those by Milton and Joyce. This palpable design of epic is the glorification of nationalism and empire; Wordsworth’s personal epic, The Prelude, acknowledges the boldness of using such a public genre for chronicling “the growth of a poet’s mind.” But MacLeish’s poem is a poem about poems. Paradoxically, this witty, sensuous verse about what poetry should not do—it should not “mean,” it should not be taken as true—has been read both as a truism and as an explanation of a poem’s proper “meaning.”
Before we leave the questions of whether and how literature can be good for you, we should perhaps note that in the matter of whether works of fiction should model—or inculcate—virtue and morality, “good for you” and “bad for you” have the same status. Both are judgmental and moral. These effects may be claimed or discerned by preachers or censors or even by the courts. But they are incidental and accidental by-products of literature, not literary qualities. In The Art of Fiction, Henry James queried the whole category of the morality of the novel: “Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair … The only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is … that it be interesting.”16
There have always been schools of thought about literature and its value, or lack of value, from Plato’s suspicions of poetry to Aristotle’s codification of its terms and rules. (The fact that Plato’s chosen form was the dialogue, and Aristotle’s, the category, sorts oddly with their views, since Plato is arguably writing “literature,” just as Aristotle is writing “criticism.”) Horace’s Ars Poetica claimed literature as an art or craft—just what Plato said it was not—and proposed genial, workmanlike procedures for the aspiring poet. Pope and others followed in this tradition, establishing what are sometimes thought of as classical rules, only to be disrupted by the return of admiration for the mad or inspired poet, a taste often associated with Romanticism. There were vatic, inspired, and mad poets before the Romantic period, and classical poets during it; like all pairs of opposites, these are as much alike as they are different. It is the claim of their difference, the insistence on the overthrow of the imprisoning past at the same time that the past is inevitably repeated, that produces the dialectical push and pull of literary history—and often generates some of the best kinds of literary criticism. But it is hard to imagine today the claims for the importance of literature that were still being debated in the middle of the twentieth century. What happened to the primacy of literature, once regarded as the indispensable lingua franca for educated men and women?
Matthew Arnold considered a knowledge of literature to be beneficial not only to the critical thinking and moral health of the individual but also to a program of social advancement. In his work as an inspector of schools, he saw English education as a way of “civilizing the next generation of the lower classes, who, as things are going, will have most of the political power of the country in their hands.”17 It’s important to note from today’s vantage point that Arnold—who was named professor of poetry at Oxford during the period when he also served as a government schools inspector—understood literature to be a key aspect of social improvement, both for the individual and for the general culture. In his view, poetry and criticism were not merely pleasant diversions but, rather, undertakings as serious and valuable as moneymaking or scientific advancement. The way to secure the future of England—then a Victorian powerhouse of industry and empire—and the future of the laboring classes, was through literary education, a kind of education heretofore regarded as the privilege of the privileged.
Today that sense has pretty much disappeared, replaced by expertise in science and in information technology, on the one hand, and by visual literacy on the other. By visual, what is now meant is moving images (films, videos, television, MTV, advertising) as well as paintings and photographs. Quotable quotes are far more likely to be cited from films, television, or advertisements than from literature. “Just do it.” “Go ahead, make my day.” “I’ll be back.” Even politicians, who once studiously quoted poets and philosophers, now choose slogans and citations from popular culture. “Mission accomplished.” “Bring ’em on.” So the idea that knowledge of and easy familiarity with literature is either a social accomplishment or a cultural or professional asset must seem quaint. Yet the wordplay involved in coining terms for modern popular culture—especially in visual rebuses like INXS, Ludacris, or Xzibit—is not completely dissimilar to the kind of visual cleverness in, for example, the hieroglyphic poems of George Herbert in the seventeenth century.
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.18
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.19
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.
On the Importance of Unanswerable Questions
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.20
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.”21
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.22
Notice that Barthes s
tresses 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.
The Use of “Use”
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.
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 2