The Use and Abuse of Literature (2 page)

Where, at the end of the nineteenth century, this use of the term was deemed profane and perverse, and thus encased in scare quotes, by the late twentieth century (the citation is from a 1973 crime novel by Dick Francis), the word
literature
no longer needed parsing or protecting and was routinely used to describe flyers, brochures, and other disposable printed stuff.

So the meanings of
literature
as a term have, perhaps paradoxically, moved both “up” and “down” in recent years. On the one hand, it now seems to denote a particular reading, writing, and publishing practice
associated with middle to high culture, with the notion of a literary canon, and with English majors; on the other hand, it has been co-opted—or universalized—so that it means just about anything professional—or research-based—written in words.

In the pages that follow I will attempt not only to argue for but also to invoke and demonstrate the “uses” of reading and of literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion of “pleasure,” but rather as a
way of thinking
. That is why, in my view, it is high time to take back the term
literature
. To do so will mean explaining why reading—not skimming for information or for the plot (or for the sexy, titillating “good parts” of a novel or a political exposé)—is really hard to do; and why the very uselessness of literature is its most profound and valuable attribute. The result of such a radical reorientation of our understanding of what it means to read, and to read literature, and to read in a “literary” way, would be enormous. A better understanding of these questions is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.

The word
literary
does not appear in Samuel Johnson’s
A Dictionary of the English Language
(1755). Though based on the substantive
literature
, which—as we’ve seen—itself originally meant “humane learning,”
literary
evolved, from the eighteenth century to the present, as something between a compliment and an epithet. Like other, similar concepts and terms, this one changed as its context changed. From the qualitative categories of “literary merit,” “literary reputation,” and “literary education” (all eighteenth-century usages) to the social and economic realms of “literary dinner,” “literary lunch,” “literary circle,” “literary agent,” and “literary executor” (all hallmarks of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture), the uses and fortunes of
literary
have fluctuated and either evolved or devolved depending upon one’s view. When fewer persons were literate in the most basic sense, that is, able to read, a person
of literature or literary training was a prized, if undercompensated, member of society (Oliver Goldsmith: “A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched”).
⁹

The nineteenth century made celebrities of some of its writers. Dickens and Wilde toured triumphantly in America, while “Longfellow … largely paid the poet’s penalty of being made the lion of all the drawing rooms.”
¹⁰
(A characteristic modern version of this “lionization” is a handbook called
Sleeping with Literary Lions
—which, despite its title, is not a hookup service but a guide to U.S. bed-and-breakfasts located near literary landmarks.) Today novelists and poets are read and praised, but by a smaller subsection of the population, since they now compete with films, television, the Internet, and other modes of cultural leisure.

“America’s favorite book,” according to a Harris poll that sampled just over 2,500 people, is, unsurprisingly, the Bible. As the proponents of the Butler Act in the famous Scopes trial controversy about evolution learned, not everyone will agree about what the Bible is, but let us put that question aside for a moment. The second favorite for men is
The Lord of the Rings;
the second favorite for women,
Gone with the Wind
. Others in the top ten include J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Stephen King’s
The Stand
, Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
, Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
, Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye.
¹¹

Even with a tiny sample, this is a dispiriting list, suggesting that after high school (where
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
The Catcher in the Rye
remain on required reading lists), what used to be known as “canonical literature” is nowhere in sight.

But what is the use of literature? Does it make us happier, more ethical, more articulate? Better citizens, better companions and lovers? Better businesspersons, better doctors and lawyers? More well-rounded individuals? Does it make us more human? Or simply human? Is what is being sought a kind of literary Rolodex, a personal
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
of apt literary references (“To be or not to be?” “Only connect”; “Do I dare to eat a peach?”)—phrases that can be trotted out
on suitable occasions, at the dinner table, or on the golf course? Such literary taglines or touchstones were once a kind of cultural code of mutual recognition among educated people—but their place has long been taken by references from film, video, TV, rock music, advertising, or other modes of popular culture. Is literature something that everyone should study in the same way that we should study other basic cultural facts about the world we live in, like the history of art or the history of music, studying them all in one fell swoop, in survey courses or general introductions or appreciations?

Why read literature? Why listen to it on audiotapes or at poetry slams or at the theater? Why buy it? And even if you enjoy reading literature, why
study
it?

What do we mean by
literature
today, when the term is used by medical and technical professionals to mean “instructional brochures” and by social scientists to mean “a survey of academic research”? “Please send me the latest literature on your new headache drug” or “your most recent software” or “your latest cell phone.” “Enclosed you will find a review of the literature on gender discrimination in higher education.” Indeed, the relationship between
literature
and
litter
, though not etymologically correct, seems seductively close. (This homology, in fact, occurred to Jacques Lacan, who attributed it to James Joyce.)
¹²
Literature is, all too often, pieces of paper we should consult for expertise but often simply toss in a drawer or in the trash.

To overschematize a little for the sake of argument, let us say that there are two poles in the debate over the “use” or “value” of literature. One pole is utilitarian or instrumental: the idea that literature is good for you because it produces beneficial societal effects: better citizens, for example, or more ethically attuned reasoners. The other pole might be characterized as ecstatic, affective, or mystical: the idea that literature is a pleasurable jolt to the system, a source of powerful feeling that—rather like Judge Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement about pornography—is unmistakable even if undefinable. (For Stewart’s “I know it when I see it,” we could substitute “I know it when I read it / hear it.”) Emily Dickinson’s “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” is perhaps the best-known
expression of this view. It’s worth quoting the longer passage from which this sentence is excerpted, since it makes the point even more vividly:

The poet A. E. Housman offered a similar somatic test:

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:

And

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.