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:
The Use and Abuse of Africa in Brazil
The Use and Abuse of Arsenic in the Treatment of Skin-Disease
The Use and Abuse of Art
The Use and Abuse of Books
The Use and Abuse of Expert Testimony
The Use and Abuse of Female Sexual Imagery in the Book of Hosea
The Use and Abuse of Force in Making an Arrest
The Use and Abuse of History
The Use and Abuse of Money
The Use and Abuse of Power
The Use and Abuse of the Public Range
The Use and Abuse of Reading
The Use and Abuse of Sea Water
The Use and Abuse of Smoking
The Use and Abuse of Social Science
The Use and Abuse of Spectacles
The Use and Abuse of Statistics
The Use and Abuse of the Sublime
The Use and Abuse of Sunday
The Use and Abuse of Television
The Use and Abuse of Tobacco
The Use and Abuse of Zoological Names by Physicians
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:
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.4
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.5
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.”6
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?7
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.8
Alberti’s treatise is full of such monitory, and minatory, advice. “For serious students all pleasures are a bad idea and harmful.”9 “[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.”10
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.”11 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!’ ”12
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.”13 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.”14 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 …”15
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.”16 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.”17 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.”)18 Book learning, in short, “is not the slightest use for gaining wealth, but just the opposite, a great financial drain.”19
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.”20 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.”21 He himself could have gained wealth “had I transferred my activity from books to business.”22 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.23
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.”24 And “Let it be no secret to you … that we are more inclined to have our lovers poor than rich.”25
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.26
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.27
What is the praxis of literature? Is it creative writing, the production of poems, plays, novels, and fictions, or does its praxis extend to literary criticism—and if so, who are the intended readers? Nietzsche’s scornful reference to the “mixed public” and to “popularization” foreshadows today’s focus on “the public humanities” and on accessibility, from book clubs to PBS specials. Nietzsche divides history into three kinds: monumental history (the study of great men and great works, which “deceives by analogies”28), antiquarian history (the study of facts and “the habitual, which foster[s] the past”), and critical history (the study of oppression, which “judges and condemns”29). We might draw an analogy, however inexact, with three contemporary approaches to literary study: canonicity, historicism, and cultural—or ethical—theory. Each of these raises problems for, and challenges to, the notion of the literary.
Above all, Nietzsche’s essay concludes, the problem with “culture” or “cultivation” is that it can too easily be seen as a mere “decoration of life,” rather than—as in his own vision—“a unanimity of life, thought, appearance, and will.”30 This issue will come up again and again for us vis-à-vis the use of literature for life. Is it essential, intrinsic, internal, and formative (for thinking, for action, for character, for approaching the future as well as the past), or is it ancillary, decorative, an embellishment, a social accomplishment, an extra? Requirement or elective? Body or clothing? Sustenance or delicacy?
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the bitter and eloquent passion of a young man like Alberti (who used the phrase young man constantly in The Use and Abuse of Books, especially in the passages where the books were speaking and offering advice to him) and the blithe and urbane tone of Sir Norman Birkett’s lecture to the National Book League, “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” in 1951, some five hundred years later. Birkett, who succeeded poet John Masefield as the league’s president, was a celebrated jurist—a defense lawyer of note who had been a British judge at the Nuremberg war trials and later became a lord justice of appeal. Reading was a sign of class and culture, and the outreach activities of the league (“The Book Exhibitions, the Lectures, the discussions, the Book Information Bureau, the Reader’s Guides and Book Lists”) were all genially supported by the luminaries who offered these annual lectures, from historians R. H. Taney and G. M. Trevelyan to poet John Masefield and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Birkett addressed the group as an amateur, a “lover of books,” and a member of the legal profession, and his lecture was ornamented with references to and quotations from works he clearly regarded as in the common possession of his hearers: from Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy to the poetry of Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, George Meredith, A. E. Housman, and Walter Scott. Toward the end of his talk, Birkett acknowledged that he had little appreciation for “what is sometimes termed modern poetry,” and proved it by reading aloud the first verse of a poem by e. e. cummings.31 Of “abuse,” he had little to say: one abuse was to spend the limited time one has for reading “on the worthless and the inferior when the best is available—the reader should be selective”; another was “to read too much”—it was better to know a few authors well than many imperfectly; finally, “the wise reader will never make his reading a substitute for living. To do so is to abuse reading and to make it a drug or a narcotic.” The “true use” of reading was “to enrich the actual life of the reader,” “to refine in gladness and to console in sorrow,” and to “stamp the life with high quality and with purpose.”32 To underscore his final points, he quoted, as many have done, a famous passage from Francis Bacon:
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.33
Nowhere in this learned and amiable talk did Birkett mention literary criticism or scholarship, although many of the authors he cited also wrote essays and offered pertinent maxims. “Use and abuse” to him referred to the practice, and the life, of the reader.
A look at a twentieth-century public lecture on literary studies, one that would seem to be at the most genteel edge of discourse, far away from troublemaking, will provide us some evidence about the permeable borderline between use and abuse.
The author of this 1974 lecture, entitled “The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism,” was the eminent Shakespeare editor and literary critic Harold F. Brooks, and the occasion his appointment to a personal chair of English literature at Birkbeck College, London. The title of his talk suggests an urbane approach to pleasures and dangers, well suited to a celebratory event. Birkbeck, an institution committed to offering parttime undergraduate instruction for working people, was far away from the “theory revolutions” then under way at places like Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Paris VIII. (Today’s Birkbeck is another story, the theory revolution having come home to roost there, with the establishment of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities under the International Directorship of Slavoj Žižek.)
Brooks began with what he clearly regarded as some matter-of-fact statements about the role of criticism:
Having cataloged these useful “uses,” Brooks moved on to enumerate some “pitfalls for the critic and his reader.”40 It becomes clear that there are more potential abuses than uses, and that the abuses are more appealing than the uses, for the same reason that Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost is a more interesting figure than his God, or Falstaff (to some people) a more engaging character than Hotspur or Prince Hal.
These included
and finally,
For Harold Brooks, the “intellectual interpretation of imaginative literature is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end; and that end is the heightened and more finely tuned response to the work of art in its wholeness.”50 He was willing to acknowledge the possibility of both conscious and unconscious meanings—perhaps surprisingly, the first footnote (of only three) in this published lecture comes on the penultimate page and points the reader to Jung on phantasy and symbol—but he warned against “educating the intellect alone,” rather than “the education of feeling, and of the sensibilities of the complete human being, which is the education offered by works of art.”51
I find little to fault in this polished and gracious account, except to say again that it would be possible to reclassify the abuses as uses, and the uses as abuses, and to emerge with an equally viable and persuasive argument. In fact, the history of literary analysis from 1974 to the present may be seen to have followed all of these diverse “abusive” paths, from the sociology of literature and various avatars of historicism to a renewed interest in the passions, emotions, and positive and negative affect. The tendency to list and rank authors and works—as I will have occasion to discuss later—is a marketing device (for critics and for publishers) and a nostalgia for a literary canon. Skepticism, a resistance to closure (the happy ending), what Brooks called a “half-baked” interpretation “attending to only part of the text” but what might be as readily seen as a “strong reading,” a reading “from the margins,” or an argument for cognitive dissonance within the work—are among the most recognizable and fruitful critical activities of the past decades.
The interpretation of literature is itself always in dialogue with its own past. The elements of philology, close reading, myth, allegory, image and symbol, history, biography, context, and reception (or, to employ another familiar formulation, emphasis upon the author, the text, or the reader) follow upon one another cyclically. The sequence is not always the same: an interest in history can be provoked by an overemphasis on textual reading that seems to ignore context, but close textual reading can also lead to an interest in philology and the multiple, sometimes irreconcilable, roots and meanings of words. What is certain, if the past is any indication, is this: that no one way of reading or interpreting literature is the best. There are many good, or strong, ways of reading a literary text, and the more satisfying one mode of reading may be, the more likely it is to provoke a different kind of interpretation or approach from the next generation of readers. There is no way of solving a novel or poem or other piece of imaginative writing that will be definitive. We could say, borrowing a precept from physics, that every reading produces an equal and opposite rereading. (By equal and opposite I don’t necessarily mean “just as good” or “completely the reverse” but, rather, a decided push in another direction. Perhaps it would be clearer to say that every way of reading produces an equal and opposite way of rereading, although individual readings are often flash points for such energized disavowals.)
Sometimes things in the world affect the nature and fortunes of literary analysis. The much ballyhooed disappearance of the printed book, supposed to be imminent with the arrival of the Internet and the e-book, has clearly helped generate an enormous interest in book history and the social—and technical—history of reading. Likewise, the current focus on human affect, the emotions and the passions, is in part a response to the discourse of cyborgs, cloning, genomics, and human/machine and human/animal boundaries. I think the interest in ethics by scholars in the immediate post-deconstruction days owed something to the insistence by opponents of deconstruction that it looked at nothing outside the text (despite Derrida’s long-standing engagement with philosophy and politics). Certainly when, after his death and the discovery of his wartime writings, Paul de Man was accused of being a Nazi collaborator, ethical issues rose to the fore, as some critics suggested that the whole of deconstruction was a cover-up for collaboration during World War II. These are contributory causes, not explicit prompts or reasons, and few if any participants in such lively areas of thinking and research are likely to explain their interest as a result of any kind of cultural anxiety or psychological compensation rather than an intrinsic attraction to the field.
Nonetheless, looked at over time, social, political, and scientific events can be seen to nudge literary studies in various directions. Like every other intellectual activity or event, literary studies have an unconscious as well as a conscious. (Fredric Jameson’s phrase “the political unconscious,” like Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style in American politics,” has become a standard expression in cultural analysis, and the critical unconscious seems close to a pleonasm, since so much of what is most powerful in literary analysis begins with a hunch and goes on to seek evidence and proof. Without evidence and proof, there is no argument; but without intuition and risk, there is no challenge to verities and truisms, and thus no advance in thought.
Plainly, though, the use of literary criticism is not the same as the use of literature. As Harold Brooks’s opening remarks suggest, he views literary criticism as a helping discipline, one that will assist the “complete human being” in encountering and understanding literary works. Whether the purpose of such an understanding is completed and fulfilled by this encounter (“the education of feeling, and of the sensibilities”), or whether it requires and expects a further application “in understanding, through the literature, the civilization it belongs to,” has itself been the matter of considerable debate. As for the transgression Brooks calls “the final abuse of criticism,” which he describes somewhat tendentiously as “to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself”52—this creates a dichotomy between analysis and experience that is worth unpacking. A truly unmediated experience of art would stand apart from all the helping mechanisms Brooks enumerates, from explanatory footnotes to kindly reassurance. “My toddler can paint (write, play, act) better than that” or “I don’t know much about art (poetry, novels, movies), but I know what I like” is, arguably, the experience or, rather, an experience of “art itself.” In fact, what is the “itself,” the self-identity, of literature?
The literary critic, in this model, is an intermediary, a translator, a guide. Like other members of “helping professions” (medicine, social work, therapy, counseling, clinical psychology), the critic enables, intercedes, advises, nurtures, ministers, sometimes even corrects. But this is not the role, or the only role, that literary and cultural critics, scholars and theorists play either in today’s academy or in today’s journals, magazines, blogs, or electronic media. Since the time of Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Samuel Johnson, extending through Samuel Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, to the present day, strong critics have been read and considered “primary” as well as “secondary” authors. Any serious inquiry into the use of literature must take into consideration the idea that criticism and interpretation are not inevitably helping or parasitic behaviors, but part of the life of the work of art.
——
The fortunes of literary studies have gone up and down during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same volatility as the stock market. And like the stock market, the market in literary studies can be charted with confidence only with the benefit of hindsight.
English studies held the comfortable middle ground of the humanities in U.S. and Anglophile/Anglophone universities through the middle part of the twentieth century. The combined heritage of belletrism and the “little magazines” imparted a certain gloss of creativity and artiness to the practice of reading and writing about poems, novels, plays, and what was then often described as “intellectual prose”—works like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, or Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Practices like textual explication, often cognate with or imported from the study of other European languages and literatures—were partnered with literary history, thematic criticism, and the study of images, tropes, and what was called literary influence (the indebtedness and echoes of one literary work to another) whether such influence was deemed serene or “anxious.” Intertextuality, a term borrowed from the French, offered an adjustment to the question of influence by seeing it as a two-way street, and by emphasizing the agency of the text over that of the controlling author. Texts could converse with one another whether or not the author was consciously speaking or listening. The conscious/unconscious borderline was a natural topic for scholars steeped in the heritage of romanticism, whether or not they acknowledged the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the development of twentieth-century art and culture.
An infusion of exciting and provocative theoretical writing, again largely continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the UK, made “literary studies”—or, more properly then, “literary theory”—the star, and in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices like semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and literature itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernity, the work of European writers like Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault shifted attention to issues of text and agency.
A phrase like the linguistic turn (later transformed into the cultural turn) signaled a high-water mark for the prestige of this particular mode of literariness in the late twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell note in their introduction to Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), the publication of two key works in 1973—Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays—established the importance of techniques derived from literary studies for the disciplines of history and cultural anthropology. White’s book used terms like trope and emplotment to argue for a deep structure of thought that organized historical research at the linguistic level, working with categories derived from the literary scholars Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye. Geertz’s idea of a “thick description” of cultures presented symbols, artifacts, social arrangements, and rituals as texts that could be read as a consistent story or interpretation—a word itself grounded in literary study. The powerful influence of Geertz has naturalized the phrase interpretation of cultures so that it no longer offers any hint of the jostling of disciplines.
White introduced his study with a strong claim about the relationship of history to language that established the first as dependent upon the second: “In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” Histories, he maintained, “contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.”53 His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye’s structuralist account of genre, with chapters on topics like “Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance,” “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy,” “Toqueville: Historical Realism as Tragedy,” and “Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire.”
“The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts,” wrote Geertz in his celebrated essay on the Balinese cockfight.
Such an extension of the notion of a text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not of course, all that novel. The interpretation naturae tradition of the middle ages, which, culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the Nietzschean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power (or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream with the plain one of the latent, all offer precedents, if not equally recommendable ones. But the idea remains theoretically undeveloped; and the more profound corollary, so far as anthropology is concerned, that cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials, has yet to be systematically exploited.54
“A deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic”; “An extension of the notion of the text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal.” Both Hayden White and Clifford Geertz found the models of linguistic and literary analysis instrumental and clarifying as they grappled with fresh ways of understanding the methodologies of their own disciplines. Indeed, as such passages from their work make evident, these scholars would come to argue that history and anthropology were modes of reading and writing. “As in more familiar exercises in close reading,” Geertz wrote in his concluding paragraph to the cockfight essay, “one can start anywhere in a culture’s repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” Later, he would sum this up in the phrase “the text analogy,” which, when linked with “interpretive theory,” allows for new reconfigurations of social thought.55
The idea of a master discourse has fallen into disuse and even into disrepute, but if there is any discourse that holds the mastery in these excerpts from two groundbreaking works of cultural theory, it is literary studies.
How quickly we forget.
In the years that followed these brilliant appropriations from literary studies, the appropriators were themselves reappropriated by literary critics and established in the rhetorical position of mastery. New historicists Steven Mullaney and Stephen Greenblatt invoke Geertz’s methodology: “Employing a kind of ‘thick description’ in Clifford Geertz’s sense of the phrase,” Mullaney writes, “I examine diverse sources and events, cultural as well as literary, in an effort to situate the popular stage within the larger symbolic economy of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”56 Greenblatt cites a passage from Geertz comparing Elizabethan and Majapahit royal progresses at a key turning point in his own essay on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.57 J. Hillis Miller, a specialist in the British nineteenth-century novel, lists Hayden White as an important figure in the development of modern theories of narrative. “The inclusion of Hayden White,” he writes, “is testimony to the fact that in recent years history writing as well as fictional narratives have been addressed by narrative theorists.”58
Authority in literary critical—and literary theoretical—writings increasingly began to derive from such voices. Not only White and Geertz but the anthropologist Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural historian Robert Darnton, and others were cited in argument and epigraph, and a new vocabulary became the common medium of exchange: “Culture, practice, relativism, truth, discourse, narrative, microhistory, and various other terms,” note Hunt and Bonnell, were in general use across many of the social-science disciplines. But these same terms became words to conjure with in literary studies as well, together with others that originated in social-scientific or scientific disciplines: genealogy, archaeology, agency, paradigm.
Not long after their eager engagement with the linguistic turn, historians and others drew back, returning to an emphasis on empirical data, sometimes in conjunction with theoretical arguments and sometimes to trump them. In a book pointedly called Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob noted the difficulties of aligning postmodern theory with historical practice:
If postmodern cultural anthropology is any guide, the concern with developing causal explanations and social theories would be replaced in a postmodernist history with a focus on self-reflexivity and on problems of literary construction: how does the historian as author construct his or her text, how is the illusion of authenticity produced, what creates a sense of truthfulness to the facts and a warranty of closeness to past reality (or the “truth-effect” as it is sometimes called)? The implication is that the historian does not in fact capture the past in faithful fashion but rather, like the novelist, gives the appearance of doing so.59
The authors were at pains to say that they did not reject all the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, noting that the text analogy and various cultural and linguistic approaches had helped to disengage historians from some other models, like Marxism and other economic and social determinisms, while also “puncturing the shield of science behind which reductionism often hid.” But linguistic determinism also presents a problem, they argued. And since postmodernism “throws into question the modern narrative form,” key methodologies for history writing, including historiography, narrative, and storytelling, were all subject to critique. Yet historians have to tell stories, they claimed, in order to make sense of the past, as well as to reach toward practical political solutions for the future. So these authors, themselves historians, suggested that there was a point when members of the historical profession, however initially energized by the likes of Derrida and Foucault, had to part company with them, to rejoin the referent and leave the play of the signifier, or to leave the text and rejoin the world. In fact, they wrote in 1994, “a similar kind of crisis that foreshadows a turning away from the postmodern view can be seen in almost every field of knowledge or learning today.”60
A few key observations might be made about the foregoing: first, that it ties “the linguistic turn” (quickly broadened, to accommodate anthropology, into “the cultural turn”) to postmodern theory, thus eliding the linguistic, the literary, the cultural-anthropological, and the philosophical. Second, that it ultimately sets aside postmodernism as antifoundationalist and thus is likely to pose questions rather than seek solutions. (“In place of plot and character, history and individuality, perhaps even meaning itself, the most thoroughgoing postmodernists would offer an ‘interminable pattern without meaning,’ a form of writing closer to modern music and certain postmodern novels.”)61 Third, that it generalizes a crisis—supplementary to the fabled “crisis in the humanities”—which led, or would lead, or was then currently leading, participants “in almost every field of knowledge or learning” to turn away from the postmodern view, and thus from the temporary hegemony of humanistic and literary critical studies.
The return of the empirical after the heady attractions of the ungrounded “theoretical” had its effects upon literary scholars as well as upon historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.62 Inevitably, perhaps, chroniclers began to contemplate “the historic turn.” The editor of the volume The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences noted that there had been a proliferation of historical emphases across the disciplines: “the ‘new historicism’ in literary and legal theory, a revived interest in ‘history in philosophy,’ a historically oriented ‘new institutionalism’ and other historical approaches in political science and economics, ‘ethno-history’ in anthropology.”63
As the century drew to a close, the question of literary study’s place in the intellectual and academic hierarchy was an unsettled matter. Suddenly, the word material was everywhere (to be contrasted, presumably, with its antonym formal, but also with the complicatedly intellectual and highly verbal playing fields of theory). Material culture and the material book were phrases to conjure with, as book series on “art and material culture,” “design and material culture,” “American material culture and folklore,” “gender and material culture” proliferated. The Body as Material Culture, Children on Material Culture, Chimpanzee Material Culture, and Cognition and Material Culture crowded the bookshops—and these titles are only the briefest of selections from the B’s and C’s. Literary critics, once to be styled by preference literary theorists, were now increasingly scholars of material culture.
Furthermore, the rise of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches to social and cultural practice caught the eye, and the disapproving glance, of many former, retired, or disgruntled academics, some transformed into journalists or government officials, who unilaterally declared a culture war. Wielding the three most effective weapons for such a battle, intolerant anti-intellectualism, jingoistic super-patriotism, and nostalgia for a past that never was, these self-appointed guardians ridiculed what they did not demonize and demonized what they did not ridicule. Deconstruction, a reading practice developed directly out of the New Criticism, was parodied as a plot of the left. When deconstructive critic Paul de Man was discovered to have had a complicated past involving possible collaboration with the Germans during World War II, deconstruction also became a fascist plot. Race-class-and-gender, or race-class-gender-and-sexuality, were deemed unworthy “political” objects of humanistic attention, and attention to colonialism (even for a discipline like English studies, which emerged as a university subject at the height of the British empire) was likewise dismissed as irrelevant political meddling by scholars who would be better off restricting their activities to the library, the archive, the museum, and the (undergraduate) classroom. What was most disturbing about these attacks was their mean-spiritedness and the shoddiness of the “research” that produced them, often consisting of sitting in on a single class by a given professor, or listing and belittling the titles of courses or conference papers, many never read in their entirety by those who mocked them. But there is no doubt that this strategy was effective, and doubly so, since those targeted began to retaliate, providing precisely the kind of partisan evidence their critics had wished into being.
Few who lived through this period would welcome a resumption of such hostilities, which now seem both fevered and distant. But I mention these developments for a reason: to point out that the scholars singled out for particular opprobrium in these books of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, almost all of them, professors of literary studies. Roger Kimball’s grumpy but highly successful diatribe, Tenured Radicals, begins in the spirit of a manifesto: “It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis.”64 He then proceeds, in the second paragraph of his book, to name some of the principal culprits, all of them professors of literature: “Princeton University’s Elaine Showalter” (gender), “University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Baker” (race), and “Duke University’s Fredric Jameson” (Marxist politics). Other humanistic disciplines also sustained periodic swipes, especially those that led to a concern with politics (as in the work of University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty) or popular culture (Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell). But the academics these critics loved to hate were more often than not trained as literary critics.
As I’ve noted, this strategy was successful. Not only did the country take notice that the sky was falling, so, too, did the critics and scholars mentioned, and even those scholars watching the debates from the sidelines (not the margins, which were now at the center) began to feel the pressure. Once a suspicion is planted, it is very difficult to uproot it; tenured radicals, spiffy phrase that it was, had changed the way the academy regarded itself. Like the insinuations of Iago (“It speaks against her with the other proofs” [Othello, 3.3.44]), these proofs of nothing multiplied to produce a firm conviction that something had gone wrong. Partially as a result, the place of literary studies in the pantheon of the humanities came under tacit and explicit critique. Younger—and older—scholars of literature shifted their interests, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, away from the play of language, the ambivalent ambiguities of the signifier, and the modes of counterintuitive argument that had marked the most brilliant literary work of the 1970s and 1980s (and, indeed, the 1940s and the 1950s), toward less controversial terrain and more supposedly objective (and even scientific) methodologies like history, the sociology of knowledge, and cognitive theory. Literary study was in the process of disowning itself.
Genteelly, professionally, persuasively, and without an apparent consciousness of what might be lost in the process, departments of literature and literary study have shifted their emphasis. This return to history is in fact a return, not a leap or an evasion. Trends in intellectual work tend to be cyclical, with attention shifting from text to context, from author or artist to historical-cultural surround, from theory to practice and from micro- to macro-analysis (in literary study, close reading versus meta-narratives). A great deal of the most recent work in literary studies is deeply informative, much of it represents what used to be called “a contribution to knowledge,” and almost all of it is professionally honed if not glossy. If little is provocative, perhaps that is to be expected after a couple of decades of high-profile contestation. There are many ways of doing inventive scholarship. Painstaking literary-historical work (like the kind of literary work that admires and imitates the scientism of cognitive theory) can at its best also be imaginatively interesting.
Nevertheless some literary historians and historicist critics within departments of literary study are in danger of forgetting or devaluing the history of their own craft and practice, which is based not only on the contextual understanding of literary works but also on the words on the page. Counterintuitive interpretation, reading that understands the adjacency of literature, fantasy, and dream, the subliminal association of words through patterns of sound or tics of meaning, the serendipity of images and ideas, the sometimes unintended echoes of other writers, the powerful formal scaffolding of rhetoric or of genre—all these are as richly transgressive as any political interpreter might desire, and as elusively evocative as any archive-trained researcher could wish to unearth or detect.
A passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” has always seemed to me to describe with particular eloquence what we do as critics when we study how writing works:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. (137–153)
The specific contribution of literary studies to intellectual life inheres in the way it differs from other disciplines—in its methodology and in its aim—rather than from the way it resembles them. What literary scholars can offer to the readers of all texts (not just those explicitly certified as literature) is a way of asking literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why. It is not that literary studies is uninterested in the what and the why—in recent years, such questions have preoccupied scholars whose models are drawn from adjacent disciplines like history and social science. But literariness, which lies at the heart of literary studies, is a matter of style, form, genre, and verbal interplay, as well as of social and political context—not only the realm of reference and context but also intrinsic structural elements like grammar, rhetoric, and syntax; tropes and figures; assonance and echo. A manifesto for literary studies will claim for it an unapologetic freestanding power to change the world by reading what is manifest, and what is latent, within and through the language of the text.
The best way for literary scholars to reinstate the study of literature, language, and culture as a key player among the academic humanities is to do what we do best, to engage in big public questions of intellectual importance and to address them by using the tools of our trade, which include not only material culture but also theory, interpretation, linguistic analysis, and a close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action. The future importance of literary studies—and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world—will come from taking risks, not from playing it safe.