The Use and Abuse of Literature (6 page)
Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
I have often heard distinguished scholars say things about scholarship [wrote Alberti], that could really make anyone give up the desire to engage in it. Among other points, for there were many and varied arguments, they were open about the fact that they themselves, though at one time they had chosen to study books, would, if they could start over, gladly take up any other kind of life. I was far from believing that they were sincere, these men who had never spent any period of their lives not engaged in the study of texts, and not only did I believe that they spoke quite differently from what they felt, but I actually blamed them a little bit for it. I thought it wrong for learned men to discourage younger students and also wrong for highly intelligent men to continue on a course if they did not really believe in it. I diligently interrogated many men of learning and discovered that in fact almost all were of the same mind, namely estranged from the very study of books to which they had devoted their lives.
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And again:
No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. What we know to be true of all other arts is most especially true of reading and writing; there is no freedom from striving at any age. We see those who dedicate themselves to study poring over books, as the expression goes, from an early age, and left
alone by everybody; we see them worn out and exhausted by anxious worrying—about the rod, the teachers, the struggle to learn—and by their constant assiduous reading. They often look anemic and lethargic for their age. In the next period, youth, when we are told that we can expect to see joy and happiness in boys’ faces, look at their pallor, their melancholy, how in every aspect of their physical bearing, as they come out of their daily imprisonment in schools and libraries, they seem repressed and almost crushed. Poor creatures, how exhausted, how listless, they are, thanks to long hours of wearisome reading, lack of sleep, too much mental effort, too many deep concerns. Anyone with a bit of humanity in him tends to pity their relentless toil or angrily condemn their folly, especially if they have hopes of being eventually rewarded by fortune. And rightly so, for outside of knowledge itself, no success (as measured by fortune’s goods) is going to come their way. They are very mistaken if they waste their labor and ambition on this particular pursuit, while a life led along other lines could, with no more labor and striving, probably raise them to the highest pinnacle of financial and social success.
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As for wealth, public recognition, and pleasure, forget it. “From these prizes,” Alberti explained, “scholars are excluded.” He set out in the remainder of his treatise to “make this perfectly clear” by “show[ing] first how much they get to enjoy themselves, second what fortunes fall in their laps, and finally, what honors are likely to be showered upon them.”
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It is almost irresistible to continue to quote Alberti in this vein. I will provide one more extended (and delectable) example to illustrate both the tone and the odd “contemporaneity” of this little book written over five hundred years ago. Scholars, Alberti said, are criticized if they travel, or even if they take time out for other simple enjoyments:
… who does not see at weddings, concerts, singing groups, or young people’s games how scholars are looked on with scorn and even hatred? Everybody thinks it becoming in a young man to play the lyre, to dance, and generally to practice the pleasing arts, and people consider these appropriate activities for the young. Those who are even moderately skilled in such arts are generally welcomed and are
popular. If they are credited with some such ability, they are invited and asked to join in. But not the young scholars,
they
are pushed away and excluded. If they show their wan faces at such occasions, people consider them either ridiculous or burdensome, and if they try to participate, how they are laughed at and what disparaging remarks they get to hear! Who doesn’t look down on a singing or dancing scholar?
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I wonder if members of the Shakespeare Association of America had this warning in view when they set in place, many years ago, the social event known as the Malone Society Dance.
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Alberti’s treatise is full of such monitory, and minatory, advice. “For serious students all pleasures are a bad idea and harmful.”
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“[T]he odors of food and wine, and those of Venus, cause the senses to empty the mind and fill it with shadows, to spatter the intellect with dirt, to dull the powers of perception and to occupy the seat of memory with doubts and suspicions and with various amatory images that thoroughly perturb the spirit.”
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Furthermore, once one is embarked on this path—let’s call it graduate school—it becomes difficult to change course. “Once having started, you will be afraid to turn to lighter things and abandon serious study without some immense good reason. You will be forced to choose which burden you can bear with less harm to your pride, the frank admission that your mind is not good enough for scholarly work or the implication that your spirit and character are too craven to stand up under the strain.”
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Remember that this is advice to aspiring scholars in the fifteenth century—not today. Alberti is particularly adept in the use of personification, speaking in the voice of the books that might be used or abused: “When you wish to buy some clothes, isn’t it true that your library will say to you: ‘You owe
me
that money, I forbid …’ If you wish to pursue the hunt, or music, or the martial arts or sports, won’t the books say: ‘You are stealing this energy from
us
, we will not bring you fame or reputation!’ ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 …”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”)
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Book learning, in short, “is not the slightest use for gaining wealth, but just the opposite, a great financial drain.”
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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.”
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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.”
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He himself could have gained wealth “had I transferred my activity from books to business.”
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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.
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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.”
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And “Let it be no secret to you … that we are more inclined to have our lovers poor than rich.”
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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.
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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.
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