The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  In Which Nothing Is Concluded

  Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), a philosophical romance about the pursuit of happiness, ends with a chapter titled “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” The phrase seems apposite for Dr. Johnson’s rather stoical account (the prince, his sister, and their philosopher friend decide that none of their wishes can be obtained, and resolve to return home). But it also strikes me as a fitting way to conclude my much more optimistic narrative.

  We sometimes talk about literature and language in a figural way: for example, as an enfilade—doors opening onto other doors that open onto other doors; a vista that stretches out between rows of trees into the infinite distance—or a mise en abyme, a term from heraldry describing a shield that bears at its heart the image of another shield. Like the enfilade, the mise en abyme is an image not only for self-reflection within a literary work, but also, equally powerfully, for the process of reading, which is never-ending, always opening outward into another scene. The device itself tempts the eye and the mind to move beyond what it can see, to an imagined and imaginable space that is both a plurality of meanings and a future of thought.

  Literary interpretation, like literature, does not seek answers or closure. A multiplicity of persuasive and well-argued “meanings” does not mean the death or loss of meaning, but rather the living presence of the literary work in culture, society, and the individual creative imagination. To say that closure is impossible is to acknowledge the richness and fecundity of both the reading and the writing process.

  The use of literature begins here.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Study of Literary Reading in America (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, June 2004), www.arts.gov; “Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline, According to National Endowment of the Arts Survey,” National Endowment for the Arts, July 8, 2004, www.arts.gov.

  2. Reading at Risk, ix–xii.

  3. Ibid., 18.

  4. Ibid., 2.

  5. Ibid., vii.

  6. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the Poets (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1880), 38.

  7. Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales for Young People (London: Routledge, 1863), 179.

  8. Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1845), 16–17.

  9. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: Dodsley, 1759).

  10. Thomas A. Trollope, What I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 3:131.

  11. Harris Interactive Poll #37, conducted online within the United States between March 11 and March 18, 2008. 2,513 adults, aged eighteen and over, responded. Results released April 7, 2008.

  12. “A letter, a litter. Une lettre, une ordure. On a équivocé dans le cénacle de Joyce sur l’homophonie de ces mots en anglais.” Jaques Lacan, “Le Seminaire sur ‘La lettre volée,’ ” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 25. The actual reference in Joyce is slightly different from Lacan’s recollection: “The letter! The litter!” (Finnegans Wake 93, 123) and “type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward” (FW 615).

  13. Emily Dickinson, letter to Colonel T. W. Higgonson, August 1870, in Martha Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924), 276.

  14. A. E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933), in The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1961), 193.

  15. John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 86–87.

  16. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

  17. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Arnold, Their Influence on English Education (New York: Scribner, 1898), 104.

  18. Adam Phillips, preface to Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvii.

  19. Ibid., 366.

  20. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 33.

  21. Sidney, Defence, 15–16.

  22. Roland Barthes, “Literature Today,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 1985), 155–56.

  23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 513, 514, 517, 519, and passim.

  24. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 33.

  25. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” First delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1864, revised and reprinted in 1865 and again in 1875. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 824.

  26. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Essays English and American, vol. 28, ed. Charles W. Eliot (1880; New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910).

  27. Ibid., 65.

  28. Ibid., 90.

  29. Ibid., 65.

  30. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). This is not only Whistler’s reply to Ruskin’s calling his work “a pot of paint flung in the public’s face” but also his explanation of why he titled the portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. “What can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait?”

  31. Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981), 35–36.

  32. Ibid., 37.

  33. Ibid., 39.

  34. Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 17.

  35. Wilde, Letters to Vincent O’Sullivan and Chris Healy. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1984, 1987), 532–33.

  36. Ibid., 532.

  37. Ibid., 51–52.

  38. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 236.

  39. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 236–37.

  40. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (New York, Norton, 2001), 1239.

  41. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 1985), 47.

  42. Ibid., 49.

  43. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 51–53.

  44. Articles on this topic appeared in every news venue. See, for example, Jack Slater, “How Obama Does the Things He Does: A Professor of Rhetoric Cracks the Candidate’s Code.” Slate, February 14, 2008. Stephanie Holmes, “Obama: Oratory and Originality,” BBC News, November 19, 2008. “Era of Obama Rhetoric Is Over,” editorial, Washington Examiner, June 17, 2010 (online).

  45. Chávez’s plan for book distribution echoes that of many U.S. cities, like “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” or “One Book, One Chicago” programs that became popular in the 1990s and continue today.

  ONE Use and Abuse

  1. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 39.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 31.

  4. Alberti, Leon Battista, The Use and Abuse of Books, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1999), 17.

  5. Ibid., 17–18.

  6. Ibid., 18.

  7. Ibid., 21.

  8. The Malone Society is an extremely earnest and learned scholarly enterprise, named after the eighteenth-century editor of the first variorum edition of Shakespeare. Foun
ded in 1906, the society publishes facsimiles of such little-known Renaissance plays as Hengist, King of Kent, and The Wisest Have Their Fools About Them. When the dance that now ends the annual academic conference was first devised, its originators saw the title as comical, an oxymoron or carnivalization, the equivalent of Shakeapeare’s “hot ice and wondrous strange snow.” The name has naturalized so much that my current graduate students see nothing unusual about it.

  9. Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books, 22.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid., 23.

  12. Ibid., 24.

  13. Ibid., 28–29.

  14. Ibid., 31.

  15. Ibid., 31.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 41.

  18. Ibid., 42.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 44.

  21. Ibid., 50.

  22. Ibid., 51.

  23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 87.

  24. Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books, 53.

  25. Ibid., 52.

  26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Utility and Liability of History,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87.

  27. Ibid., 136–37.

  28. Ibid., 100.

  29. Ibid., 102.

  30. Ibid., 167.

  31. e. e. cummings, “Poem, or Beauty Hurts, Mr. Vinal,” Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace). Cited in Norman Birkett, The Use and Abuse of Reading (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 29.

  32. Birkett, The Use and Abuse of Reading, 30–31.

  33. Bacon, “Of Studies,” in The Essays of Francis Bacon, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 155.

  34. Harold F. Brooks, The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Birkbeck College 26th June 1974 (London: Ruddock, 1974), 3.

  35. Ibid., 4.

  36. Ibid., 5.

  37. Ibid., 7.

  38. Ibid., 8.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., 9.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid., 10.

  43. Ibid., 11.

  44. Ibid., 16.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid., 18.

  47. Ibid., 20.

  48. Ibid., 21.

  49. Ibid., 25.

  50. Ibid., 24.

  51. Ibid., 25.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix.

  54. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 452, 448–49.

  55. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: 1983), 30.

  56. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), x.

  57. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 65.

  58. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69.

  59. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 231.

  60. Ibid., 231–36.

  61. Ibid., 232–33, quoting Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 212.

  62. Literary critic Steven Mullaney offered in his contribution to this volume a view of the place of literary study that conveyed a sharp difference from where it might have been presumed to be in the 1970s and 1980s: “The literary is thus conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture—a reflection of ideas and ideologies produced elsewhere—but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects.” Steven Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Study,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 163.

  63. McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 1.

  64. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), xi.

  TWO The Pleasures of the Canon

  1. The Great Ideas: The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education 5, “Spreading the Gospel,” University of Chicago Library Exhibition Catalogue.

  2. For this example and much more in this vein, see Dwight Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” The New Yorker, November 29, 1952. The Complete Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press) were edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and included translations by Grene and Lattimore, as well as Robert Fitzgerald, William Arrowsmith, John Frederick Nims, and others.

  3. Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”

  4. Robert M. Hutchins, preface to The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), xxv.

  5. Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”

  6. Ibid.

  7. Berlin took a saying from the Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) and applied it to intellectual and cultural life, dividing writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who view the world through a single defining idea (Plato, Lucretius, Dane, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences (Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce). Iaisah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

  8. Edward Albee, in William Flanagan, “The Art of Theater No. 4: Edward Albee,” The Paris Review 39 (Fall 1966).

  9. Kenji Oshino, “Fresh Woods and Pastures New,” in “Convictions,” Slate, March 16, 2008.

  10. As one critic wrote about Tristram Shandy, “themes, ideas, or systems from all sorts of places are bodily taken over and absorbed into the Sternean purposes of the work. It happens to Hamlet and Don Quixote, suggestively at first and then overwhelmingly: it happens to Rabelais, Swift, and Fielding; to the Church Fathers; and to learning so arcane that the standard edition of Tristram Shandy is overwhelmed by footnote descriptions of ‘sources.’ Such allusiveness makes fun of itself, and we are continually made aware of becoming the pedant who sees all, recognizes all, systematizes all.” J. Paul Hunter, “Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption,” Novel 4 (1971), 132–46.

  11. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1934), 50.

  12. William Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), f. 566; John Aubrey, Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1718–19), 1:190. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 3:423–24.

  13. Cf. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), etc.

  14. Oxford English Dictionary: canon 2.3, “A standard of judgment or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination.”

  THREE What Isn’t Literature

  1. Fredric Wertham, Seduction o
f the Innocent (New York and Toronto: Rinehart and Company, 1954), 15.

  2. Ibid., 22.

  3. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807; London: Dent, 1961), 141.

  4. Wertham, Seduction, 143.

  5. Jan Baetens, ed., The Graphic Novel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 8.

  6. Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” The New York Times, July 11, 2004.

  7. “All-TIME 100 Novels,” selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, www.time.com/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html.

  8. George Gene Gustines, “A Superhero in a Prism, Antiheroes in Deep Focus,” The New York Times, July 31, 2009.

  9. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 121.

  10. See, for example, Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Thomas Docherty, Criticism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

  11. Letters of Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 219.

  12. The Ephemera Journal 12 (April 2008).

  13. “[The] notion that writing endows the oral with materiality is another facet of the collector’s interest in establishing the ephemerality of the oral, and interest that puts the oral in urgent need of rescue. In other words, the writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context and lost presence that literary culture … imbues with a sense of nostalgia and even regret.” Susan Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 104.