The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  But this is an argument about the tensions within a literary character. What possible relevance can it have to the question of pleasure and unpleasure, or love and hate, when it comes to the writer and the reader? What’s love got to do with that? This, too, was a topic that Freud took up, notably in an essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” first delivered as a lecture in the rooms of a Viennese bookseller and publisher and later printed in a literary magazine.44 If a daydreamer were to communicate his fantasies directly, Freud suggests, “he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures”—indeed his fantasies (wrote the analyst in a pretabloid, pre–Jerry Springer age) would “repel us or at least leave us cold.”

  But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure … The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. All the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.45

  This displacement of personal fantasies into an author’s imaginative writing speaks to the popularity of what is sometimes called personal writing—the appeal of memoirs, confessions, inspirational stories, survivor’s tales, and other self-revealing narratives that collectively constitute a genre of literary schadenfreude omnipresent in today’s tabloid journalism. At the same time, Freud’s erotic theory of literary enjoyment, the idea that “the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure” which a writer offers us in the presentation provides a kind of fore-pleasure prior to a “release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychological sources,” proposes yet another kind of answer to the question of literature as love.

  FIVE

  So You Want to Read a Poem

  In the middle years of the twentieth century, the methods of New Criticism (close textual analysis, attention to word choice, verse forms, etc.) were the common pedagogy of college and university English departments, and the standard mode of instruction in grade, middle, and secondary schools. Poems were analyzed as poems, and more often than not, as reflexive objects that had poetry as their not so hidden topic. A good short example of this is Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son”:

  Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

  My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:

  Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

  O, could I lose all father now! For why

  Will man lament the state he should envy?

  To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,

  And, if no other misery, yet age?

  Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie

  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

  For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  The son’s name, like the father’s, was Benjamin, which means, in Hebrew, son of the right hand. But the right hand is, by implication, also Jonson’s writing hand, and the word poetry comes from the Greek word that means making. So the making of the son and the making of the poem are parallel acts, and in this case, the one substitutes for the other. The embedded inscription, “Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” gestures, in a way that is technically called deixis, pointing or indicating, to the fact that the poem itself functions like a funeral monument. (“Here” is the sign, often found on actual monuments.) The enjambed line (“Here doth lie / Ben Jonson”) suggests both a colon and a question (who lies here?), while the use of “his,” in what is now an archaic form (“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” rather than “Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry”), allows for a double meaning: what lies “here” is both the poet’s “best piece of poetry,” or making, and also Ben Jonson, the father and the son. The personal adjectives and personal pronouns in the lines that follow (“for whose sake”; “all his vows”; “what he loves”) continue the willed conflation or confusion of father and son. “On My First Son” becomes the monument; the word “on,” typical of epigrams, essays, and other short pieces in the period, is also a pointer gesturing toward the poem. (This is what rhetoricians call deictis.)

  This kind of analysis will be familiar to any reader of midcentury critical classics like W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon or Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn, the titles of which provide examples of the phenomenon they describe. (Brooks’s title comes from John Donne’s “The Canonization.” Two other “urn” poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” became similar iconic touchstones for close readers of poems about poetry.) I’d like to point out a number of corollaries to this method of reading, which is the one in which I was trained and which I still find deeply satisfying: first, the method validates those works that fit its methodology. Thus, poems about poetry, or poems that could be read as poems about poetry, including most so-called metaphysical verse, gained high status, including the poems of Andrew Marvell, many Romantic lyrics and Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Shakespeare’s sonnets and “Phoenix and Turtle,” and a good deal of modern poetry, from Yeats to Wallace Stevens.

  Conversely, poems that seemed to resist or to deny the validity of this reading method—like, for example, Cavalier lyrics or Byron’s Don Juan—tended at the time to be rated lower on the scale. And poems that were either narrative (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Crabbe’s The Village) or epic (Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad or Rape of the Lock) were either quarried for verbal gems that could be explicated as if they were lyrics, or else subjected to a different regime of criticism, one that treated them like works of fiction (plot, character, etc.) or works of “influence” (Milton echoes and rewrites Spenser, who echoes and rewrites Virgil; Wordsworth and all the Romantics echo and rewrite Milton; Stevens rewrites Wordsworth, etc.).

  A sense of boredom—the New Critical reading, while elegant, was at the same time predictable—and limitation led to the resuscitation and reinvigoration of other critical modes, often versions of the same modes so strongly repudiated by the New Critics: historical, contextual, biographical, editorial, and overtly political or overtly religious readings, that depended as much upon context or history as the actual language on the page. No orthodoxy of reading is without its blind spots. New Criticism’s rigorous pointing toward the text needed to be corrected or at least was augmented when the next generation of readers and critics readmitted history to the realm of possible literary evidence. Deconstruction, an extension of rather than a replacement for New Criticism, looked precisely for the blind spots, the apparent discordances, opacities, or unresolvabilities of the literary text, rather than the moments of concord or pleasurable but controllable ambiguity. The deconstructive aporia—not a new or fanciful coinage but an old and honored word from the history of rhetoric (“Aporia, or the Doubtfull, [so] called … because oftentimes we will seem to cast perils, and make doubt of things when by a plaine manner of speech wee might affirme or deny him”1)—was, in fact, the counterpart of the New Critic’s ambiguity, the desirable goal and end point of a literary analysis. Aporia, as perplexing difficulty, has a long history of usage and has only recently—and unhistorically—been reclassified as critical jargon. This blind spot, or aporia, is analogous to Freud’s description of the “navel of the dream,” the place where “it reaches down into the unknown.”2

  Literature produces, and is in turn produced by, modes of critical analysis. Literature reads us as much as we read
literature. As certain kinds of critical or social thinking become popular, the kind of literature they are effective in analyzing become the kind of literature we recognize as good or even great.

  But What Is the Use of Literary Reading?

  It is potentially risky to paraphrase any critic’s words on the subject of paraphrasing. Nonetheless, it’s a risk worth taking, both because Cleanth Brooks’s essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase” poses a deft and cogent argument well worth revisiting, and also because Brooks twice goes out of his way to discuss, in signifying quotation marks, the “uses of poetry.” Poetry, says Brooks—and here he does not wish to distinguish poetry from other imaginative writing, like novels or plays—cannot be reduced to, or summed up in, a statement, proposition, or message. “What the poem ‘says’ ” is not only not equivalent to the poem or its value; it is also ultimately undeterminable because of vital issues of tone, style, and irony. “The paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem.”3 “The ‘prose-sense’ of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung … it does not represent the ‘inner’ structure or the ‘essential’ structure or the ‘real’ structure of the poem.”4 In fact, he suggests, “one may sum up by saying that most of the distempers of criticism come about from yielding to the temptation to take certain remarks which we make about the poem—statements about what it says or about what truth it gives or about what formulations it illustrates—for the essential core of the poem itself.”

  For Brooks, poems are not received truth but “parables”5 about poetry. It is this self-referential element to his formalism that has led some successors to feel that his readings have a certain family similarity, that they all wind up in a similar place, affirming the value of poetry and gesturing toward the iconicity of the poem itself, the “well-wrought urn” of Donne’s “Canonization” that provides Brooks with the title of his essay collection. But Brooks goes out of his way in this essay and elsewhere to insist that he is not interested in a “special ‘use of poetry’—some therapeutic value for the sake of which poetry is to be cultivated.”6 In a short manifesto in The Kenyon Review, originally entitled “My Credo,” he insists that “literature is not a surrogate for religion” and “the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.”7 Formalists, he says, assume an ideal reader because, in taking into account “a lowest common denominator” of possible readings, “we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology.”8 And while Brooks acknowledges that different critics may have different goals, from editing texts to writing book reviews to presenting papers to the Modern Language Association, he is genially dismissive of both “applied” readings and the supposedly less “drab,” “brighter, more amateur, and more ‘human’ criticism” that flourishes “in the classroom presided over by the college lecturer of infectious enthusiasm, in the gossipy Book-of-the-Month-Club bulletins, and in the columns of the Saturday Review of Literature.”9 Brooks doesn’t think these versions do much harm, but nor do they do much good. “The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism; nor does an estimate of its effects. Good literature is more than effective rhetoric applied to true ideas.”10 “Literature is not inimical to ideas. It thrives upon ideas but it does not present ideas patly and neatly.”11 Insofar as literature has “uses,” it is the task of the critic to analyze the ways that ideas perform in literary works, not how works “exemplify” or “produce” them.

  Everything Old Is New Again

  After many years of being old-fashioned, close reading is again fashionable, although, like all revived fashions, it wears its retrospection with a difference. Suddenly—or not so suddenly—students, graduate and undergraduate, are alight with excitement about this category of analysis, for so long relegated to the supposedly naive past, the heyday of I. A. Richards and practical criticism, and of “new” critics like Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and William Empson, to name only a few of the literary luminaries of that era. While they continue to resist some of the basic tenets of New Criticism, like the Intentional Fallacy described by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and the Affective Fallacy proposed by Wimsatt, young scholars and critics, for so long immersed in historicism and context, are again intrigued by the idea of close reading a work of literature. Reading, that is to say, not for what the work says about the time when it was produced, or about the author or the reading public, but about how its language functions.

  Here it may be useful to say a word about those famous fallacies, and about the genealogy and lineage of close reading, to try to see how the practice (which I would prefer to call simply reading) has become both so controversial and so out of fashion that it is once again new.

  The intentional fallacy says that the intention of the author has no ultimate control over the meaning of the work. If we were to discover, for example, a letter from William Shakespeare to one of his fellow actors, saying that in Hamlet he intended to express his dismay about the corrupt state of contemporary politics, or the parlous economic situation of actors, or his Christian faith, or his loss of faith in marriage, or his belief in providence, or his worry about political succession—this would have no definitive effect on our readings of Hamlet. It would be another piece of evidence, but it would not trump or sideline other readings of the play, even readings that run counter to whatever the author’s letter asserted. The author, in other words, is entitled to his opinion. But what he intends, even assuming that we could know what that is, is just one point of view among many. (Imagine another letter, written at the same time, to his wife, contradicting the assertions he made in the letter to his fellow actor: the play is about his idealization of love, his loss of Christian faith, his doubts about providence, his confidence in the political system.) The work of literature has a life of its own; it takes on meanings, in the plural, as it is read and performed and discussed.

  Discounting intention does not suggest that all meanings are equally persuasive or valid. When Hamlet says in a letter to the king that he is “set naked on your kingdom” (4.2), he does not mean that he is wearing no clothes but that he has no weapon; when Mercutio and Romeo exchange witticisms about Romeo’s “pump,” they are talking about his shoe style, not about a mechanical device for retrieving water—although as their jesting continues, a wide range of other meanings may attach to this word. So some readings can be “wrong” because of what might be called underreading—not giving enough credit to the historical meanings of modern words. But sometimes even the wrong reading can be right, if defended or presented in a convincing way. Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet makes much erotic sport of the idea of pumping, and even though this seems in part either a resistance to or a failure to understand, the idea of a pump as a kind of shoe (for men as well as for women, in Shakespeare’s time) the scene can be made to work.

  The belief in intention belongs to a historicist moment, or to at least two historicist moments: the one against which the New Critics were actively reacting, and the one that inevitably came to react against them. Both historicisms (the second, called “new historicism,” and the other—rather unfairly—dubbed in a species of back-formation “old historicism”) put strong value in biography, context, “the archive,” and a kind of allegorical reading of historical events. But intention—as we will see in relation to questions of biography and truth—can get in the way of close reading, since it forecloses some interpretive options as inappropriate, untimely, unsuitable, not what the author could have meant.

  The affective fallacy warned against feeling, or feeling too much, or being carried away by the rightness of a feeling. When W. K. Wimsatt wrote about it in the 1940s, it was a response to the excesses of belletrism and impressionistic criticism. The inevitable bounce-back against the too stringent enforcement of such a fallacy led to reader-response criticism, the idea of interpretive communities, and most recently, an explicitly affective criticism that is all about feelings,
whether negative or positive, encompassing the poles of infatuation and disgust. Sometimes, in this era of fact and science, the affective emotions are tied to the hardwiring of the brain, which produces smells, colors, sounds, synesthesia (the blending of the senses), etc. Whatever we may think about affect, I think it is fair to say that it marks a response to the work, rather than a reading of it. However closely affective arguments are tied to language, there is always a hypothetical suture (a word, phrase, or image “makes me feel like” this or that or, less convincingly, “produces the effect of” this or that). As with polling data, there are outliers, responses that don’t seem to fit the prevailing pattern as urged or detected by the critic. But rather than sparking an exciting argument based upon this divergence, such dissent seems to push against the very idea of a community, so that what is occasionally sought is an alternative community that does, or would, or might have, responded in the way that the minority or disaffected reading suggested. In any case, one object of affective criticism (“old” or “new,” impressionistic or scientific) would seem to be an explanation of why the feeling was right for the reader.

  Although they have sometimes been dubbed critical fallacies, intention and affect (the intention of the author, the response of the reader) remain central to the curiosity and desire of many scholars, critics, and ordinary readers of literature. What did the author have in mind, and what led him or her to write? How does what I feel when I read a poem or a passage derive from the language and imagery on the page? Do other readers feel the same, and if not, is one of us right and another, wrong? Indeed, the provocation for calling such ideas fallacious was that they were so widespread. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that such questions were not literary, and that they led the reader instead into regions of historical research and individual psychology. One of the persistent goals of scholarship and criticism has been to try to reframe these desires (to know and to feel) within the language of literary investigation: to pose these questions, exactly, as literary questions.