The Use and Abuse of Literature (5 page)

Williams’s account of Marxism and literature was itself written from within a historical, social, and national context, as he readily acknowledged. But these categories of national, social, historical, political, ideological, and other motivating frameworks shaped the debate about “use” from other twentieth-century perspectives as well.

For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, then, the debate about the usefulness of literature was focused on social issues: moral instruction, ethical concerns, and societal and political advancement. Whether the governing ideology was liberalism, conservatism, aestheticism, Marxism, or Western democracy, the arguments for use were deployed in the service of a certain vision of a humane society. From the 1990s onward, various forces converged to completely change the nature of the question. Perhaps most significant was the advent of the Internet, with its 24/7 news cycle and its globalized, democratized mode of user participation. Every reader could be a critic, publishing reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Every poem, every quotation, and every misquotation could now be searched instead of researched. Vast quantities of literature were available online, including facsimiles of rare books once only found in libraries, museums, or monasteries.

A shift in attitudes toward the role of undergraduate education was also under way. A student’s college years were seen increasingly as preparation for life, by which was often meant training in fields that led directly to jobs and careers. Words like
assessment, impact
, and
outcome
, all borrowed from the social sciences, became central in discussions of higher education, whether those discussions took place in the public media or in government circles.

Assessment is certainly one of the integral components of criticism, whether it takes the form of a review, a critical article, a book, or a decision whether or not to publish (or reprint). But the rise of this vocabulary and the accompanying bureaucratic—often computerized—processes measuring outcomes and impact of qualitative fields using quantitative methodology has arguably raised the stakes for use in ways that are inappropriate for literature and the arts. This shift has been further compounded by the economic crisis and the insistence on justifying investment and resources in the humanities using the same set of problematic keywords.

The outcome of a work of literature might occasionally be an obscenity trial and the consequent expansion of understanding about free speech, or stream of consciousness, or artistic integrity—or even, in a few rare cases, the fomenting of a revolution. In a more ordinary material sense, perhaps the outcome of a literary work would be publication or production, with or without a suitable monetary reward. But these are not the primary meanings of words like
assessment
and
outcome
when they are deployed in the context of an institutional review. As we have already noted, poems and novels do not have answers that are immutably true; they do not themselves constitute a realm of knowledge production. Instead, they raise questions, they provoke thought, they produce ideas and generate arguments, they give rise to more poems and more novels. The impact of a poem might be answered with Emily Dickinson’s phrase about feeling that the top of her head has been taken off, but this is not a reliably replicable result. And yet scientists and social scientists will often join poets, writers, critics, and general readers in saying that literature and the arts are what they are saving the world
for
.

Concurrent with the national debate about standards and assessment
is the question of rhetoric and its power to sway and to persuade. Traditionally, aspiring politicians were encouraged to study literature, oratory, and rhetoric, in the same way that aspiring generals studied famous battles: to know the history, the terrain, and the moves. From Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the great orators of our time have been inspired by the reading of literature—inspired not only in the cadences and references of their own speeches and books but also by the way “words in their best order” made for logic, tautness of formulation, and powerful, effective figures of speech. But modern eloquence is often met with a sense of distrust, criticized as elite and not representative of the average American. It is symptomatic of the current popular ambivalence about the arts of language that Barack Obama’s rhetoric became a flashpoint for both the left and the right.
⁴⁴
For some listeners, his facility with language was itself suspect, while others, stirred by his words, felt visceral pleasure and deep emotional engagement.

The reemergence in the late twentieth century of politicians and world leaders who are also accomplished and honored writers, like Václav Havel, attests to the possibility of a creative synthesis between writing and politics. In a similar way, the public and political use of a work of classic literature, like the printing and distribution of a million free copies of
Don Quixote
by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’s novel, suggests the pleasures and the dangers of the literary in a world that, like Quixote’s, often seems both out of sync and out of joint.
⁴⁵

The uses of literature themselves grow and change as cultures and technologies grow and change.
How
we read changes, too—witness the development of the e-book, and the electronic reader. Here is another paradox: although literature is properly useless, the experience of reading it produces essential, and irreplaceable, cultural effects.

W. H. Auden famously declared, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
But he did so in the context of a memorial poem for another poet, W. B. Yeats, who was deeply concerned with social and political issues—just like Auden himself.

Revisiting Auden’s great poem evokes the despairing political climate of Europe on the eve of World War II (“Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face”) while it also raises the issue of the impossibility and undesirability of seeking a single message or meaning for poetry.

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature’s most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation—the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered—is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.

In his
Defence of Poesie
, Sir Philip Sidney responded to the claim that Plato had banished poets from his ideal republic by asserting that Plato banished “the abuse, not the thing.”
¹
The poets he sought to discredit were those who “filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence,” and Plato “therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.” But, Sidney observed, the poets did not create those wrong opinions; they merely gave them expression. Plato disapproved not of poetry but of the abuse of poetic gifts. “So as Plato, banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banishing it, but giving due honour unto it, shall be our patron and not our adversary.”

Yet it was the power of poetry, not the “depraved … opinions,” which was apparently seductive. (Sidney made sure to remind his readers that the ancient poets “had not the light of Christ.”)
²
It is because poetry is powerful that its abuse has any effect. Thus, the arguments against poetry that Sidney set out to refute (it lies; it wastes time; it is “the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilential desires”; Plato “banished” poets) are, it is not surprising to see, identical to its main attractions. I do not mean this cynically, nor in a negative light. If “lies”=fiction; “wastes time”=leisure and entertainment; “pestilential desires”=allure and seductiveness; and “banishment”=transgression and risk, we have at hand all the ingredients for a contemporary best seller.

The phrase
use and abuse
has a chiming resonance that authors and publishers have found difficult to resist. Among the many dozens of works that employ these words in their titles, we might consider:

This is, needless to say, only a partial selection. One of the earliest texts to bear the title was Erasmus’s treatise from 1525,
Lingua, The Use and Abuse of the Tongue
. One of the most recent is Margaret MacMillan’s
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History
(2009).

The parent title here is Nietzsche’s
Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben
(1874), variously translated as
The Use and Abuse of History for Life; On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; On the Utility and Liability of History for Life;
and many other elegant—and less than elegant—variations. It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s title is indebted to that of Leon Battista Alberti, whose
De commodis litterarum atque incommodis
(1428)—translated as
The Use and Abuse of Books
or
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters
—might have been called to Nietzsche’s attention by his friend and fellow scholar Jacob Burckhardt. If that is the case, then the trail loops back to
literature as a first-order troublemaker rather than depending upon the model case of history.

My purpose is to give some sense of the powerful rhetorical logic of
use and abuse
as the way of framing an argument—and, not completely coincidentally, to indicate some ways in which the pro/con tension depends upon the conjunction
and
as its fulcrum.

In fact, as we have already begun to see,
use
and
abuse
are versions of the same. The point may be clearest in titles that seem to be about addiction (tobacco, smoking, alcohol), but it is of more intellectual and theoretical interest when the element used or abused is an idea, a concept, or a way of thinking, like an academic discipline. No use without abuse; no abuse without use. The phrase as a container, and as a logic, sets the stage for the kind of debate and dialectic that will ensue.

Let’s look briefly at three symptomatic works that employ
use and abuse
in their titles and that speak directly to literature as an experience in the world, and to reading and criticism as a profession. As you’ll see, my three examples are rather disparate: the first is a treatise by an Italian Renaissance humanist, the second a lecture by a twentieth-century judge best known for his role in the Nuremberg trials, and the third an account of the uses and abuses of literary criticism by a British literary critic. The latter two are thus versions of the celebratory oration or the after-dinner speech, urbane, self-deprecating, learned, and droll, while the first is a passionate—and dispassionate—account of the low regard in which literary scholars are held, their low pay, sickly complexions, and general social disfavor.

As we have already noted, Alberti’s
De commodis litterarum atque incommodis
(ca.1428–mid-1430s) is a probable source for Nietzsche’s later essay on history, and the title of the modern English translation,
The Use and Abuse of Books
, is a manifest homage to the current fame of Nietzsche’s work. By
books
or
letters
, Alberti meant the study of literature and an education based on reading and writing, according to the humanist program.

In fifteenth-century Italy, to study books meant also to copy them, laboriously. Before the advent of printing, copying, memorization, and quotation were essential tools of the scholar. The tone of
De commodis
—aptly described by Anthony Grafton as “mordant”
³
—is a familiar mix of irony, self-abnegation, pride, and cautious optimism, easy (like that of Machiavelli) to mistake as merely ironic or merely satirical. The humanist scholar of this period was a striver, required to balance long and arduous study—often without dictionaries or other tools—with the necessities of patronage and diplomacy, and without a clear path to wealth or even to financial independence.

Bearing this historical context in mind, I invite the modern reader to do something distinctly unscholarly: that is, to consider some passages from the text as if they were written today, for a contemporary audience: