So much for pleasure. What about wealth? Scholarship is expensive and low-paid. Consider “those forms of ostentation associated with the achievement of the doctorate.” These include big sums “for clothes and university gowns, for a celebratory feast, even for remodeling the house and embellishing it.”13 The very spirit of humanistic learning is inimical to the goal of wealth. “No one who is not degenerate chooses to put elegant learning second to moneymaking. No one who is not deeply corrupted will think of making learning a form of commerce for his own enrichment.”14 Again, let me remind you that he is talking about Italy in the fifteenth century. Alberti’s time seems to have been a heyday for the public intellectual as pundit: “It is very well known that the man who wishes to make money from academic knowledge cannot begin to sell anything until he has proved himself to have some extraordinary level of knowledge. Hence we see them showing off whatever brilliance and learning they possess in speeches, disputations and debates, at schools and [universities] and public occasions.” For if they “get people to think that they are considered learned by the public,” this will, they believe, “lead more readily than actual merit to the earning of money. So they want to be called doctor and see men admire their gold clasp …”15
A life of learning, it seems, is likely to be nasty, brutish, and short. It is not until the advanced age of forty that “these covetous men can possibly earn money,” and how many can be expected to live beyond forty? (The Use and Abuse of Books was written when its author was in his twenties.) “If few among those who lead an easy life do so, surely you will find many fewer quattrogenarian scholars.”16 If this marks a difference between Alberti’s time and ours, so does another of his criteria for worldly success: the ability to gain wealth by marriage. The scholar cannot compete with the athlete or with the “nicely groomed and polished lover.” He should avoid marrying either a poor woman or a young one, since “youth is an age unfavorable to scholars and offers them little security.”17 If a scholar insists on marrying, he should choose “some little elderly widow.” (Here, in case we should mistake his tone, Alberti interjected an aside to the reader: “If I seem to be joking in this discourse about matrimonial matters, just call to mind the wives of learned men you know, consider their ages and dowries, to say nothing of their faithfulness.”)18 Book learning, in short, “is not the slightest use for gaining wealth, but just the opposite, a great financial drain.”19
All this was, for Alberti, a prolegomenon. He wanted to address the honors due to those who “learn from books to understand the noble arts.”20 But he found that the populace always gives the highest honors to gold and wealth. Learning has been “put up for sale as if on the auction block.”21 He himself could have gained wealth “had I transferred my activity from books to business.”22 But the truth about the use, as opposed to the abuse, of books does not finally come from the scholar. Instead, it comes from the books, reanimated and in full voice. The final pages of Alberti’s treatise are ventriloquized, projected into, and through the very entities that stand to suffer either use or abuse. This “is what the books themselves (if they could speak) would demand of you.”
Do you hope for wealth, while you learn from us not to fear poverty? Or have you somehow overlooked the fact that nothing belonging to us is for sale? … Do you want power, honors, glory, and status? … Can you have missed … the fact that virtue is all around you when you are with us, that we love no greed, no arrogance, no passion, no spiritual flightiness …? … With us, you will expend more moderate labor and show a more exacting kind of virtue … Learning and the arts give you this glorious thing: that you are free to aspire to wisdom … If you focus your energies … in the direction of the goals we have described, you will find that study is full of pleasure, a good way to obtain praise, suited to win you glory, and to bear the fruit of posterity and immortality.
Learn from us. With us. Nothing belonging to us is for sale. The animated and personified voice of “the books themselves (if they could speak)” is uncannily anticipatory of another and later discussion of use and abuse, Karl Marx’s evocation of the voice of the commodity in the section of Capital called “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”:
Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other, we are nothing but exchange-values.23
Alberti’s books do not see themselves as commodities—or, to demystify the speaker, Alberti did not envisage his talking books as having an exchange value. “If a man wishes to cultivate his mind,” the books declare, “he will inevitably come to despise, hate, and abhor those filthy things called pleasures and those enemies of virtue known as luxury and riches, as well as all the other plagues that infest our life and our spirit, such as honors, elevated stature, and grandeur.”24 And “Let it be no secret to you … that we are more inclined to have our lovers poor than rich.”25
It’s not easy to say whether this idealistic fantasy about literary studies is due more to the era when Alberti was writing or to the youth of the author. But it is clear that it is a condition contrary to fact.
When Friedrich Nietzsche came to write his own, equally caustic estimation of the pitfalls of historical scholarship, its use and abuse, he, too, would use the device of literary projection onto a (normally) nonspeaking object/subject, in this case “the animal,” distinguished from mankind in that it lives unhistorically, without memory, anticipation, or context.
Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment … The human being might ask the animal: “Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?” The animal wanted to answer, “Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say”—but it had already forgotten this answer and said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder.26
Books, commodities, animals. What do they have in common? Within these respective arguments, each is a counter in a discourse about a discipline in crisis, a discipline at a turning point: literary studies, economics, history. In each case, personification, prosopopoeia, plays the role of aphorism and oracle. Each states the case for the abuse of use.
Nietzsche thinks too much consciousness of history prevents action and engagement in the world. Alberti thinks too much engagement in the world prevents reading and writing. Neither is hostile to fame, but both are keenly aware of the dangers of seeking it.
Marx sees that the commodity articulates false consciousness, erasing or occluding human labor. But there are commonalities in their approaches. Here is Nietzsche on what’s wrong with scholarship:
Believe me: when human beings are forced to work in the factory of scholarship and become useful before they are mature, then in a short time scholarship itself is just as ruined as the slaves who are exploited in this factory from an early age. I regret that it is already necessary to make use of the jargon of slave owners and employers in order to describe such conditions, which in principle should be conceived free of utility and free from the necessities of life.
… just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens … they can only cackle more than ever because they are laying eggs more frequently. To be sure, the eggs have kept getting smaller (although the books have only gotten bigger). The final and natural consequence of this is that universally favored “popularization” (along with “feminization” and “infantization”) of scholarship; that is, the infamous tailoring of the cloak of scholarship to the body of the “mixed public” … Goethe saw in this an abuse, and he demanded that scholarship have an impact on the outside world only by means of an enhanced praxis.27
What is the praxis of literature? Is i
t 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?
The Use and Abuse of Reading
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:
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.33
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.
The Use and Abuse of Criticism
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 Use and Abuse of Literature Page 5