There’s no accounting for taste. We might say that whatever we find tedious, banal, sloppy, ill formed, or opaque isn’t literature. Or we could say that literature has to pass some kind of test, like the test of age, or having once been in someone’s canon, or winning a literary prize. Or we could say that it has to be fictive (or creative or imaginative) in order to be called literature. I don’t share any of these views, although I acknowledge their appropriateness in various situations. Instead I think it’s productive to look at the boundaries and limits of literature. If we do this, we see a fairly constant centripetal movement from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical, and even classic status.
What once wasn’t literature (Renaissance stage plays; novels; high-quality pornographic writing) is now at the heart of the canon, as are works previously defined as “women’s literature” or “Afro-American literature.” Does the term literature in the sense of “worthy of rereading, worthy of study” have any agreed-upon meaning today? Who judges this? Who should?
The word literature now seems to have two distinct regions of meaning: one belonging to so-called high culture and print culture, and the other to handouts, throwaways, documents on flimsy paper and in tiny print, among them those providing medical and statistical legalese aiming to shield drug companies from potential lawsuits. (“I’ll see what’s in the literature on that subject …”).
Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other.
We might want to make the (slightly overreaching but nonetheless interesting) claim that this boundary status is part of what enhances the status of the work/text as literature. Here, our authority, if we need one, is again Immanuel Kant, this time on the topic of genius: specifically, his dictum that genius gives the rule to art. The genius—according to Kant—doesn’t follow rules. Indeed, he (for Kant, the masculine pronoun would have been taken for granted) doesn’t often make or ordain rules unless he is, for example, Aristotle. To the contrary: rules are made in imitation of, or in consequence of, the rule-breaking performances of artists (including writers). Innovation—breaking the rules—produces rules for the next generation: Sophocles’ third actor, Petrarch’s love sonnet, Dante’s poetry in the vernacular, and Wordsworth’s decision to write an epic poem about the growth of a poet’s mind—all these innovations changed the course of literature. Brilliant success is often adjacent to failure, as pathos is to bathos. What this means when we come to ask the question “What isn’t literature?” is that, all too likely, today’s answer will not suit the circumstances of tomorrow—or perhaps of yesterday.
Let me offer two contrasting examples: the graphic novel and the well-made play.
The graphic novel is a descendant of the much maligned comic book, a genre so ubiquitous and so reviled in the 1940s and ’50s that the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on the subject, and an alarmed industry moved toward self-censorship by adopting a Comics Code banning words like terror and zombie and decreeing that all criminals must be punished. (Unlike, we might note, all criminals in literature …) The catalyst, or we might say the reagent, for these hearings was a book called Seduction of the Innocent (1954) by the German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham, who had previously published the essay “The Psychopathology of Comic Books” in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, complained of hidden sexual themes, perversion, violence, and morbidity in the comic books of the era, and urged that comics be prohibited to children under the age of fifteen.
“What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?”1 Some of Wertham’s most derided observations, like the gay themes he detected in Batman & Robin, and the dominatrix image of Wonder Woman, are now, minus the moral disapproval, commonplaces of critical interpretation. I was interested by his strong reaction to the publication of Macbeth in comic book form—a mode that is now familiar but at the time provoked Wertham’s disapproval and also, as he notes, that of a distinguished American drama critic:
Another important feature of a crime comic book [Wertham wrote] is the first page of the first story, which often gives the child the clue to the thrill of violence that is to be its chief attraction. This is a psychological fact that all sorts of children have pointed out to me. Macbeth in comic book form is an example. On the first page the statement is made: “Amazing as the tale may seem, the author gathered it from true accounts”—the typical crime comic book formula, of course. The first balloon has the words spoken by a young woman (Lady Macbeth): “Smear the sleeping servants with BLOOD!”
To the child who looks at the first page “to see what’s in it,” this gives the strongest suggestion. And it gives the whole comic book the appeal of a crime comic book. As for the content of this Macbeth, John Mason Brown, the well-known critic, expressed it in the Saturday Review of Literature: “To rob a supreme dramatist of the form at which he excelled is mayhem plus murder in the first degree … although the tale is murderous and gory, it never rises beyond cheap horror … What is left is not a tragedy. It is trashcan stuff.”2
“Trashcan stuff” is very like what the detractors of Renaissance drama had to say about the literary merit of the entire genre in Shakespeare’s time, and of course Macbeth as a play is violent, bloody, and based on true accounts. That has long been part of its appeal to audiences—in addition to, or sometimes despite, Shakespeare’s language. But it’s the novelization aspect, the transformation of the play into another form and other words, that the drama critic finds most offensive.
Such translations of the plays into a form that might appeal to children have been popular at least since Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales from Shakespeare, although the Lambs stay much closer to Shakespeare’s language: in their tale of Macbeth, we read that “she took his dagger, with purpose to stain the cheeks of the grooms with blood, to make it seem their guilt,” and that “the proofs against the grooms (the dagger being produced against them and their faces smeared with blood) were sufficiently strong.”3) For Wertham, a psychiatrist who served as an expert witness in numerous medico-legal cases, the chief issue is the danger he thought sex and sensationalism posed for children—or, as the title of his book declared, the seduction of the innocent. In the classic comic version of Macbeth, described by its publisher as “a dark tragedy of jealousy, intrigue and violence adapted for easy and enjoyable reading,” he found that “Shakespeare and the child are corrupted at the same time.”4
Graphic novels, which trace their forebears not only to comic books and comic strips but also to the medieval woodcut, have been published in the U.S. and in Europe since the 1930s. The term graphic novel has been in use at least since the 1960s and became popular with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978), in which the word graphic was intended to distinguish it not only from what we might call, in a back-formation, the verbal novel, but also from other kinds of graphic illustration, like—of course—comic books. These works were thus both graphic novels and graphic novels, depending upon what the selected comparison (or contrast) group might be. “The American graphic novel considers itself a literary genre,” wrote one scholar of the field, “a novel, not made by words, but by images, balloons, and captions,” so that “in ‘graphic novel,’ the important word is ‘novel,’ not graphic.”5 By contrast, he suggested, in the French-speaking parts of Europe, the emphasis is put much more on the word graphic, and the genre as a whole is regarded as a new kind of storytelling where a visual logic motivates both the plot and the narration. But as the form itself has internationalized, these distinctions may be seen to be breaking down.
Some authors of highly regarded graphic novels, like Art Spiegelman, the creator of Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, also teach and write about the history of comics—or, as Spiegelman prefers to call them, comix. Maus, published in two volumes (Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II: My Father Bleeds History) won Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and was the topic of an exhibition. Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers, was published in 2004.
That Maus is a work of literature, whatever literature is thought to be today, is inarguable (though this will doubtless lead someone to argue it). Charles McGrath, in his account of the graphic-novel phenomenon, notes that the genre really took off in the 1990s. Books like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Daniel Clowes’s David Boring have, says McGrath, achieved cult status on many campuses. “These are the graphic novels—the equivalent of ‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world—and they are beginning to be taken seriously by the critical establishment. Jimmy Corrigan even won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book, a prize that in other years has gone to authors like Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Gourevitch.”6 Such novels are, he thinks, especially suited for portraying “blankness and anomie,” “spookiness and paranoia,” and “cartoonish” exaggeration and caricature. “How good are graphic novels, really?” McGrath asks. “Are these truly what our great-grandchildren will be reading, instead of books without pictures? Hard to say.” But the genre has gained enormous respect and corresponding review attention.
In a pun that comics and graphic novel writers were quick to exploit, the word gutter, a technical term for the space between the panels of a comic strip (as well as for the blank space between two facing pages in a printed book), came to emblematize both the supposed low origins of the genre and its defining formal characteristic. The graphic novel is a growth stock in both the publishing and the academic worlds, the topic of much discussion and of several critical anthologies. The trade paperback version of the collected Watchmen comics written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons was marketed as a graphic novel and appeared on Time magazine’s “All-TIME 100 Novels list” of the “best English-language novels from 1923 to the present,” together with works like All the King’s Men, To the Lighthouse, Midnight’s Children, The Catcher in the Rye, and Gravity’s Rainbow.7 Increasingly, book awards are being added or expanded to recognize the growth in number and in quality of collaborative graphic fiction. Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman included a stand-alone issue, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1991. The Watchmen was awarded a special Hugo Award in 1988 by the World Science Fiction Society, and a new Hugo category, called Best Graphic Story, was added in 2009 to accommodate and honor the increasing number of graphic works in science fiction or fantasy form.
An enthusiastic front-page review in the weekend arts section of The New York Times (A SUPERHERO IN A PRISM, ANTIHEROES IN DEEP FOCUS) spoke glowingly of three new graphic novels that “display the ambition behind an evolving format,” and was accompanied by extensive illustrations.8 Wertham had considered the popularity of the comic book a sign of the loss of interest in reading. He quoted a publisher who, asked about the spread of the comic style to regular publications, answered, “We are retooling for illiteracy,” then said flatly, “Comic books are death on reading.”9 He was speaking of children’s reading habits. But in a more visual age, and with extraordinary graphics, the comic book has come of age.
As for the term well-made play, who uses it today as a term of praise? Yet in the nineteenth century, the well-made play was an extraordinarily successful mode of tight construction, developed by the French dramatists Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, influencing even those who professed to scorn it. In Scribe’s typical formula, a plot complication—like letters or documents coming suddenly to light or to hand—brings about a reversal of fortune, sometimes revealing a major character to be a fraud or impostor, which in turn leads to a denouement in which there is at least a semblance of return to order. Dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as “sardoodleism” or “sardoodledom,” a contrived plot structure with stereotyped characters, the well-made play (pièce bien faite) nonetheless had its effect upon Shaw’s plays, as well as those of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and other dramatists. (Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a deliberate send-up of the genre that profits both from following and from exploding its by then familiar conventions.) Many of these responses to the well-made play are enrolled in the canons of literature, but the genre, though dutifully taught in courses on the history of the drama, has pretty much disappeared from view. By contrast, this genre’s near historical neighbor, melodrama, has enjoyed a recent revival, spurred by film studies but extending back into studies of the Victorian stage and emerging side by side with the sensation novel as an area of intense interest for scholars, audiences, and readers. Sweeney Todd, The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret—none of these was literature when first written, published, or performed. All are now regularly taught in college and university courses, and feature centrally in well-regarded scholarly books.
While melodramatic retains its negative force as an adjective, courses in Hollywood melodrama, American melodrama, melodrama and modernity, melodrama and race, etc., attract both students and teachers. (One indicative text would be Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an instant best seller when it was published in 1852, having first appeared in serial form in an abolitionist magazine.)
Recent years have witnessed the migration of things that once weren’t considered literature into the privileged fold, ranging from essays (Montaigne, Bacon, Addison and Steele, Barthes, Sontag) to what was once called intellectual prose (philosophy, politics, economics, via—for example—Francis Bacon again, or John Milton, or Edmund Burke) to the graphic novel (scion of the humble comic book). This period has seen the emigration of things that once were literature into the discard pile, which has been the fate of not only the well-made play, but also of the long didactic poem. These entities are still arguably literature, or at least literary, if we use those terms in the broadest sense. But they are out of favor at present: a circumstance almost guaranteeing that at some time or another, each will make a triumphant return.
Some genres that have become central to a contemporary understanding of literature, like the novel, were down-market upstarts until fairly recently in modern Western history. The word novel began to appear consistently in the 1680s, replacing or competing with romance; both terms are used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as what had once been trivial became literature, an instrument of national pride, identification, and cultural advocacy. The study of literature, together with that of the sciences, gained an important place in public culture, and fictions of the self, the individual, and the bildungsroman or novel of personal development, became an influential, as well as a well-regarded, mode of literary writing. This kind of prose fiction differed from the old ideal of the national epic in verse, though—as many critics have noted—it shared some of its goals and techniques. Much more could be said on this topic, about which there exists an extensive and informative body of critical history.10
But the point here is straightforward: with the novel, as with the drama, the lyric poem, the satire—indeed, just about every genre we think of as foundational to the notion of literature—we are dealing with a form that has evolved over time, that had some antecedents that were distinctly low, popular, and unrespectable, and in short, became literature, for reasons variously aesthetic, political, situational, and cultural. The establishment of a literary canon requires both the forgetting and the selective remembering of these sometimes low origins.
It’s not a surprise that texts first regarded as extra-literary should be brought, after the fact, into the canonical fold. Ben Jonson scandalized some of his contemporaries by publishing his plays in folio form in 1612. The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in folio eleven years later was a similar act of confidence, or bravery, on the part of his friends. Playbooks were not works, a term of honor reserved for sermons, didactic writings, and other serious endeavors. And the large folio format was reserved for writings of enduring importance, the opposite of stage plays. Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of Oxford’s Bodleian library, instructed his librarian not to include any plays, which he called “riffe raffes” and “baggage bookes.”11 Such things could create a scandal. In any case, plays were comparable, he thought, to items like almanacs and proclamations, useful written objects that, once used, could be thrown away.
The technical term for throwaways of this kind is ephemera, from a word meaning “lasting only a day.” In general, the word refers to items like posters, greeting cards, seed packets, advertising mailers, air transport labels, printed handouts, and probably everything we now call second-class mail. Perhaps inevitably, ephemera have now become collectibles, highly valued by museums, galleries, auction houses, and libraries. What was once discarded is now purchased, donated, preserved, cataloged, and exhibited. The Ephemera Society of America, formed in 1980, encourages “interest in ephemera and the history identified with it” and publishes The Ephemera Journal; a recent issue contained articles on “an important collection of paper ephemera with Shakespearean themes” at the Folger Shakespeare Library; a collection of antiquarian playing cards from the Netherlands that had second lives as “promissory notes, clothing reinforcement, and even heart-wrenching notes from destitute mothers forced to abandon their infants”; and nineteenth-century scrapbooks.12 There are ephemera collections at the British Library and the National Library of Australia, and an Ephemera Society in New Zealand, as well as archives of video and audio ephemera. Bearing in mind Thomas Bodley’s strictures on the ephemerality of playbooks, it is intriguing to note that one especially significant archive today is the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera—located at the Bodleian library, Oxford.
Ephemera also includes specimens of oral art, like ballads, which need to be collected lest they disappear. As the critic Susan Stewart suggests, the justification for the act of collection is the anxiety about disappearance, loss, or contamination, the waning of a supposed authenticity which, paradoxically, will itself be lost when the artifact, having become a work of literature, is removed from the context of performance and placed in the context of art.13 What this changed status for ephemera means is that items gathered under this rubric are not—if they ever were—ephemeral.
A ballad is a simple song or narrative that tells a story in verse. The category encompasses everything from medieval minstrelsy to printed broadside ballads celebrating or attacking individuals, events, and institutions.
Two familiar examples from Shakespeare will show something of the low or popular status of the ballad in the English Renaissance, and its complicated relationship with true reporting. In The Winter’s Tale, the rogue Autolycus presents himself as a peddler selling ballads, several of which, from their description (here offered by a clueless country servant who comically misstates the case), are of the sort that a modern newspaper might call unsuitable for family fare.
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes: no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids, so without bawdry (which is strange); with such delicate burdens of dildoes and fadings, jump her and thump her.
The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.193–197
The ballads include one about a usurer’s wife who gave birth to twenty moneybags, and another about a woman who was turned into a cold fish because she would not sleep with her lover. The latter one sung by the fish, its veracity attested to by “historical” detail: it “appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids” (276–279). One eager consumer is a shepherdess, who declares that she “love[s] a ballad in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true” (261–262). Her confident assertion might well serve as a warning to readers of all eras with respect to the automatic credibility of the media, whether printed or electronic. If art is in print, does it mean it is true?
Shakespeare’s other unquestioning believer in the truth-telling capacity of ballads is Bottom the weaver, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Having experienced with remarkable aplomb and lack of anxiety a physical transformation into an ass, an erotic relationship with the fairy queen, and a subsequent return to fully human form, Bottom decides that the best way to report the events he thinks he has dreamed is to transform them into a ballad. “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream; it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (MND, 4.1.212–16). The ballad both contains the marvelous events and defuses them: art here makes the unbelievable believable, converting danger into pleasure.
Ballads began to be collected and published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among these early collectors were Samuel Pepys and Robert Harley, the First Earl of Oxford, and Mortimer, whose “Harleian Collection” is a main part of the British Library. Bishop Thomas Percy’s collected Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge to publish their Lyrical Ballads (1798), which entered the world as what we would now call literature. Sir Walter Scott, similarly intrigued by Percy’s Reliques, set about collecting the ballads he would publish in 1802 in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. But the popular appeal of Percy’s collection also motivated studies of folklore and folk tales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and in Germany as well as in Scotland, the ballad craze contributed to the growth of what is sometimes called romantic nationalism. It was not until the Harvard professor Francis James Child produced his collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads, however, that the study of these ballads became scholarly, in the sense of collecting variants, classifying and numbering them, and (no small factor) establishing them within the vernacular literature tradition taught at a major university. During the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, it became de rigueur to point toward the authenticity of song lyrics by citing Child’s filing system for ballads. Thus, Time magazine, in an article about folksinger Joan Baez, noted that “Folkupmanship absolutely requires that a ballad be referred to as Child 12, Child 200, or Child 209 rather than Lord Randal, Gypsie Laddie, or Geordie.”14
So “what isn’t literature?” may depend upon who is asking, and who is answering, and for what ends: institutional, social, aesthetic, and so on. As Susan Stewart observed, “the literary tradition, in rescuing a ‘folk’ tradition, can just as surely kill it off.” For example, “in order to imagine folklore, the literary community of the eighteenth century had to invent a folk, singing and dancing ‘below the level’ of ‘conscious literary art.’ ” Stewart adds, equally perceptively, that this development has hardly ceased. “The advent of modern literary scholarship, with its task of genealogy—the establishment of paternity and lines of influence—and its role in the legislation of originality and authenticity, depended upon the articulation of a ‘folk’ literature that ‘literature’ was not.”15 Meantime, the saga of the ballad continues. While one branch of this field has reconverged with the public and with performance, through folk singers, blues ballads, and the ballad traditions of America, Australia, and other geographical areas, another branch has taken on a new energy within academic work, with the founding of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The archive aims to make these fragile objects, often printed on cheap, degradable paper, accessible to scholars worldwide, by transcribing the black-letter font into more easily readable Roman type, and providing online audio recordings, visual facsimiles, and essays that place the ballads in a historical context. Whether any of these uses are “literary” will depend, still, on whether the ballads are being interpreted as signs of the times or as works of art.
Books banned as indecent, obscene, or pornographic are often remanded, at least by those who ban them, to the category of something other than literature. This has been the case with some of the most critically admired works of the twentieth century, including Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. From the point of view of critics, these were never, arguably, “not literature,” but the customs and postal authorities of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and other nations that have at one time or another outlawed them saw the matter differently. Here again, the question of use (and of abuse) enters the equation, since one of the criteria for a ruling of obscenity has been that a work has “no redeeming social value.” In this case, it is probably unnecessary to add that abuse (whether self-abuse, child abuse, or some other kind) is sometimes suggested as the intended use, or outcome, of the reading or even the simple possession of the banned book.
Ruling in the case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey memorably declared that the book nowhere exhibited “the leer of the sensualist.”16 Defending the frequency with which sex seemed to be on the minds of Joyce’s characters, he observed drily, “it must be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”17 And on the question of whether reading the book led to “sexually impure and lustful thoughts,” or provoked “sex impulses,” Woolsey gave it as his opinion that although the effect of Ulysses was “undoubtedly somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac,” and that its “net effect” on some readers to whom he himself had given the book was “that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”18
Even to quote these phrases indicates how far we have come in accepting the aphrodisiac (and the emetic) as a commonplace effect of reading modern literature—and also how far we have come since the time when such felicitous phrases, generated on behalf of a book the judge had read and admired, would give evidence of an admirable literary style. By contrast, when the U.S. Court of Appeals reviewed Judge Woolsey’s decision, they decided in advance, since they wanted to avoid publicity, that the opinion should, if possible, contain “not a single quotable line.”19 In a foreword to the Random House edition of Ulysses, Morris Ernst, the cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that Judge Woolsey had “written an opinion which raises him to the level of former Supreme Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a master of juridical prose.” But we might also want to add that he had mastered the art of the literary review and of literary criticism.
In writing “Ulysses” [Judge Woolsey’s opinion declared], Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre … Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the unconscious … What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema screen … Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique is absurd.20
Woolsey found Ulysses “an amazing tour de force,” describing it as “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns.” Joyce, he thought, was “a real artist.”21 The question of law on which the judge was asked to rule was whether the book was written with pornographic “intent”—“that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.” This he emphatically denied. Ulysses was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.”22 It was not obscene under the law.
By comparison, we might note that one of the judges in an earlier 1920 New York court case about the publication of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses refused to allow passages to be read aloud in the courtroom because there were women present—including, as it happened, some of the editors of the book.23
The standard in the Ulysses case in the U.S. in 1933 was whether or not the work was written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity. In the U.K. in 1960, the decision about Lady Chatterley’s Lover rested, according to the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, on whether the work in question had literary merit. A group of recognized literary experts—Helen Gardner, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams—were called to testify. The chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the members of the jury whether it was the kind of book “you would even wish your wife or servants to read.”
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?24
This class breakdown doubtless contributed to the ridicule of the prosecution as out of touch with the times, although the mention of “your wife or servants” seems particularly and ironically germane to the plot of the novel. In any case, what was chiefly deplored was the danger such a novel posed to the moral character of readers. The defense, in general, preferred to move the debate away from the dangers of reading and toward either a standard of literary merit that presumably stood apart from and above the social, or a broad and impassioned articulation of the importance of freedom of expression. The jurors in the case returned a verdict of not guilty—and the 1961 Penguin edition of the novel was dedicated to them.
In both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley the index of the literary was determinative. Judge and jurors attempted to decide whether the works had literary quality and were written with literary intent. Probably the most cited piece of literature to come out of the trials was Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” with its well-known opening stanza:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Similar issues had been raised in connection with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which was banned in the United Kingdom and in France before its eventual publication. In an interview with the London Times, the novelist Graham Greene had called Lolita one of the best novels of 1955. The editor of the Sunday Express immediately denounced it as “sheer unrestrained pornography” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Were these books literature, or were they “filth”? This was the question bandied in the court of public opinion and argued in the courts of law. From a present-day perspective, it would be possible to regard the contretemps as quaint, signs of a very different time. (Morris Ernst indeed compared the lifting of the ban on Ulysses to the end of Prohibition.)25
For these novels, literary was a qualitative honorific, borne out by subsequent critical judgment, and the binary alternative set up by the law as the opposite of obscene. Judge Woolsey’s decision, as we saw, was itself an extended and effective piece of literary criticism. All three books are now regularly taught, and highly praised, in college courses. But what about works with a less certain or less acclaimed literary status?
Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) inspired support from writers and scholars despite doubts about its lasting merit as a work of literature. When The Well was condemned by the editor of the Sunday Express as “A Book That Should Be Suppressed” (“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”26), Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest and lined up other signatories, including T. S. Eliot, G. B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain, and Ethel Smyth. But as Virginia Woolf reported, Radclyffe Hall insisted that the letter should praise the book’s “artistic merit—even genius,”27 and the letter was never sent. Woolf herself, who privately regarded The Well as a “meritorious dull book,”28 signed a briefer letter with Forster and appeared as a witness in court, where she was relieved, she wrote, that “we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art.” The chief magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, ruled that the question of obscenity was one that he alone would determine, and he refused to permit testimony about literary merit. His decision—that the book was obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community—was upheld on appeal, and the book was not legally available in the U.K. until twenty years later.29
In the United States, Morris Ernst headed the defense when The Well was accused of obscenity. A number of prominent authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, submitted statements in support of the book, and although a magistrate refused to consider the question of literary merit, the New York Court of Special Sessions decided that the book addressed a “delicate social problem” and was not written in a way that could be described as obscene.30
But if The Well of Loneliness was not obscene, did that make it literature? It has been much reprinted and has sold well; it is often taught in courses on sexuality, lesbian and gay theory, and feminism. Few critics have spoken up in admiration of its style, which is often regarded as overwrought and sentimental. The use of obscene works had been roundly decried: such works, it was said, provoked lustful thoughts, and lustful actions, and were “intended” by the authors to produce such thoughts and actions. What should we say about the use a work like The Well, which inspired identification, solidarity, strong and varied emotional responses, and political and social debate? The publicity that the trials brought to the book increased its visibility and its sales, to the pleasure of some and the dismay of others. Its celebrity, and its subsequent place in a historical canon of lesbian and gay writing, came about as a result of a kind of publicity we might want to call extra-literary, or nonliterary. But the publicity was inextricably tied to a debate about whether it was a literary treatment or some other kind of writing.
Moreover, the view that The Well addressed a “delicate social problem” comes close to the notion of “redeeming social value,” which was laid down in the 1957 case of Roth v. United States (354 U.S., 476) as the limit standard for obscenity: “[a] book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.” The conditions attached were two: the book had to be considered in its entirety rather than by particular parts; and it had to be judged according to contemporary community standards, the anticipated response of the average person. In a later case, Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184, 191, 194), Justice Brennan altered the phrase to “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Whether there is a significant difference between “value” and “importance,” legally speaking, is not unambiguously clear.31 But what is clear is that when jurists and literary scholars go head to head in a courtroom—even, or especially, a Supreme Court room—a great deal depends upon the literary standards of the judge.
Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, dissenting in the decision on John Cleland’s eighteenth-century Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (usually known as Fanny Hill), found literary scholars’ testimony about “the book’s alleged social value” unconvincing, to say the least. He offered, with “regret,” a summary of the book’s plot, beginning, “Memoirs is nothing more than a series of minutely and vividly described sexual episodes.” To the first expert witness’s testimony that the book “is a work of art” and “asks for and receives a literary response,” he countered with a flat statement of denial: “If a book of art is one that asks for and receives a literary response, Memoirs is no work of art. The sole response evoked by the book is sensual.” Whether reviews spoke in favor of the novelist’s writing style (“literary grace”), the history of the novel as a form, or the heroine’s “enthusiasm for an activity that is, after all, only human,” Clark dismissed their arguments as worthless: “The short answer to such ‘expertise’ is that none of these so-called attributes have any value to society. On the contrary, they accentuate the prurient appeal.”32 Despite the facts that Clark’s opinion was a dissent and that Fanny Hill went on to have a successful commercial career (including films and a spinoff novel by Erica Jong), his views underscore the problem of calibrating “value to society” in terms of “literary merit”—especially when “literary experts” are rejected as lacking any substantive grounds for their expertise.
This was precisely the issue addressed by Justices Harlan and Douglas in their opinions in Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the case that addressed the status of Cleland’s novel. Justice Harlan wrote, “To establish social value in the present case, a number of acknowledged experts in the field of literature testified that Fanny Hill held a respectable place in serious writing, and unless such largely uncontradicted testimony is accepted as decisive it is very hard to see that the ‘utterly without redeeming social value’ test has any meaning at all.” Justice Douglas wrote, “If there is to be censorship, the wisdom of experts on such matters as literary merit and historical significance must be evaluated.”33
The idea that a work of literature should have an identifiable “social value” to “redeem” it from the charge of obscenity ran counter to much thought about what art was and was not. Such an idea spoke, and speaks, to the continually problematic question of use. If use in this case was synonymous with “having social value,” what kept the claim from being merely tautologous, or a matter of taste, whether lay or expert? The defense against the charge of obscenity was, to a certain extent, a defense against the idea that the author’s intent had been to create a bad object, something that could be used (or misused, or abused) to generate lustful thoughts and even lustful actions. What was the proper, nonabusive, nonmisusing use of a novel? Was reading a sufficient use? Was it a social value? None of these novels has been at the forefront of social change or social improvement, except if we include—as maybe we should—a change in cultural taste or cultural norms. But this idea, that risky (and risqué) writing should push the envelope of community standards, was not the social value that the Justices had in mind. The notion of redemption, with its religious ring, further complicates the matter: is the sinner in this picture the work, or the author, or the reader?
As is often the case with sin, these putative acts of bad behavior on the part of works of literature seem to have required, or inspired, their foes to wallow in them in order to make their sinful nature clear. Thus, for example, in 1930 U.S. Senator Reed Smoot of Utah undertook a public reading of blue passages from “foreign literature” that brought crowds of spectators to the Senate galleries. Smoot had piled up a stack of works by non-American authors, works he thought should not be permitted to pass through customs. They included Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, Balzac’s Droll Tales, the poems of Robert Burns, the memoirs of Casanova—and perhaps inevitably, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Smoot decried the books as “lower than the beasts” and averred that he would rather have a child of his “use opium than read these books.” He was succeeded at the podium by Senator Bronson Murray Cutting, who represented New Mexico but had been born in New York and educated at Harvard. Cutting suggested that such liberties were often taken by works of literature: “the first page of King Lear is grossly indecent; the love-making of Hamlet and Ophelia is coarse and obscene; in Romeo and Juliet the remarks of Mercutio and the Nurse are extremely improper,” and so on. “There may,” he said, “be people whose downfall and degeneration in life have been due to reading Boccaccio, but I do not know who they are.” Moreover, Cutting accused Smoot of having drawn attention to Lady Chatterley’s Lover by his attacks, suggesting that Smoot had thereby made the book a “classic.” This thrust brought Smoot back to his feet. “I resent the statement the Senator has just made that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is my favorite book!” he said. “I have not read it. It was so disgusting, so dirty and vile, that the reading of one page was enough for me … I’ve not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!” In support of Smoot’s position on censorship, Senator Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina rose to say that his priority was “the womanhood of America” and that “the virtue of one little 16-year-old girl is worth more to America than every book that ever came into it from any other country.”34
This culture clash would seem completely trivial and forgettable, except that its upshot was to take the question of literary censorship away from the customs agents and leave the decisions, instead, to the U.S. District Courts. Senator Smoot was the co-sponsor of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, to which the decision about the importation of foreign books was an amendment, so the obscenity trial of Joyce’s Ulysses three years later came under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court and thus, as we’ve seen, to the sophisticated and humane assessment by Judge John M. Woolsey, who had (unlike Senator Smoot) read the book in question “in its entirety” from cover to cover.
It’s easy to think of these blocking figures who rail against the danger of reading as quaint survivors of an earlier, less enlightened age. On the one hand, that age is very much with us in the persistent attempts, for example, to ban The Catcher in the Rye (offensive language), The Bluest Eye (sexually explicit content), or the Harry Potter books (witchcraft) from classrooms and libraries;35 on the other hand, they are in some ways right: reading is dangerous, which is why it is important. If literary works (as well as scientific treatises—ask Galileo) did not shake up the world we think we live in, they would indeed be trivial, inconsequential, “entertaining.” It is precisely because a book can enrich the mind, challenge, disturb, and change one’s thinking, that it may after all—whatever its specific content—possess that curiously elusive quality called “redeeming social value.”
Some forms that, as forms, remain typically outside of literature nonetheless generate examples that have become recognized literary works. Take the example of the diary. Certainly the published diaries of writers like Virginia Woolf have enjoyed and merited publication and study, but what I have in mind is something more like Samuel Pepys’s Diary, a daily record kept for almost ten years by an English naval administrator, member of Parliament, and fellow of the Royal Society that chronicled his activities, personal, professional, political, and sexual, from 1660 to 1669. In the course of this period, Pepys recorded such epochal events as the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1665, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67, while also meticulously transcribing descriptions of plays, concerts, meals, and sexual encounters with women other than his wife, often in the same day’s account. The diary was written in a shorthand code. After his death, it was decoded with great labor by a scholar who was unaware that the key to the shorthand had been filed quite nearby, in Pepys’s library. Other transcriptions and editions followed, and the Diary (by turns perceptive, scurrilous, indiscreet, and wise) became a canonical work.
Robert Louis Stevenson called it “a work of art” and observed with admiration that “his is the true prose of poetry—prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive … you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare’s [or] a homily of Bunyan’s.” Stevenson’s praise was affectionate, not hyperbolic: “There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one,” he wrote, saying that Pepys was comparable to the poet Shelley in “quality” but not in “degree”—“in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly.”36 Virginia Woolf, who knew the Diary well enough to mention it regularly in her essays, considered Pepys to have a rare gift: “in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps.”37 For Woolf, there was no question but that Pepys’s Diary was literature. Is it still literature today? Certainly it has been read over the years with literary attention.
At the other end of this spectrum, consider the vicissitudes of the work we have come to know as The Diary of Anne Frank. Pepys was a grown man of the world who went many places and saw many things. Frank was a young girl confined to a hiding place on the upper floors of an Amsterdam house because of the Nazi persecution of Jews. Pepys discontinued his diary after almost ten years when it became physically uncomfortable to write and politically uncomfortable to record. Frank’s diary, begun on her thirteenth birthday, came to an abrupt end a little more than two years later, when her family was betrayed, discovered, captured, and sent to a concentration camp.
After Anne Frank’s death in Bergen-Belsen, the diary was given to her father by a family friend. Hoping for publication, Anne had already revised her diary, with one version containing real names and the other pseudonyms. Otto Frank restored the names of family members to the edited account, cut some sections that were critical of Anne’s mother or revealing about the daughter’s adolescent sexual feelings, and the diary was then published in Germany and France in 1950, in the United Kingdom two years later, and—under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl—in the United States in 1952. A play based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and a 1959 film, The Diary of Anne Frank, was both a critical and a commercial success. The diary began to be regularly taught in schools and colleges, even as some scholars began to criticize the softening and romanticizing of Anne’s character in these popular adaptations. Humanitarians and writers like Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, and Václav Havel (himself a playwright) commended it for its example and inspiration.
But the transformation of Anne Frank’s Diary into a ubiquitous work of art was not a seamless development. In a front-page panegyric in The New York Times Book Review in 1952, on the occasion of the diary’s first publication in the U.S., Meyer Levin called Anne a “born writer” and the book a “classic” that “becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls.”38 The diary immediately skyrocketed from its five-thousand-copy first printing into a nationwide best seller. But Levin never told the Times that he had a personal and financial interest in the book: he had asked Otto Frank if he could write a play based on the diary. When his version was rejected in favor of the one written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who had worked on the screenplay of It’s a Wonderful Life), Levin criticized the choice as a way of removing Jews and Jewishness from the Anne Frank story in the service of making it a “universal” tale of heroism and the human spirit, and he sued Otto Frank, accusing him and others of depriving Levin of his opportunity for fame and fortune. Levin’s suit failed, and his own reputation suffered, yet some of his incidental observations about the mythologizing of Anne Frank have been sustained.
The play and the film showcased Anne’s observation “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” making this uplifting sentiment the last line of the play, although it was written before she was arrested and taken to the camps. The diary actually goes on to discuss “the suffering of millions” for several pages. The result, as many critics have noted, was the production of individual pathos and heroism rather than the story of a terrible, unthinkable event. In Germany at the end of the 1950s, Theodor Adorno reported “the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, said: ‘Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.’ ”39 Allowing that it was “good as a first step toward understanding,” Adorno added, “the individual case, which should stand for, and raise awareness about, the terrifying totality, by its very individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot.”
Hannah Arendt commented in 1962 that the romanticization of Anne Frank was a form of “cheap sentimentality at the expense of great catastrophe,” and the historian Lawrence Langer observed, on the occasion of the publication of a “definitive” critical edition of the diary in 1986, that the young author’s “journey via Westerbork and Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died miserably of typhus and malnutrition, would have led her to regret writing the single sentimental line by which she is most remembered, even by admirers who have never read the diary.” Cynthia Ozick, writing in The New Yorker a decade later, was so critical of the “funny, hopeful, happy” Anne created by the stage play—and by the elimination of almost all Jewish references in favor of “universal” ones—that she suggested it might have been better for the diary to have been burned. Among other things, she noted, the “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced … infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” diary gave aid and comfort to the Germans by softening the story and avoiding any reference to the Holocaust—a view that had been earlier expressed by Bruno Bettelheim in the pages of Harper’s.40 In the classroom, according to recent pedagogical studies, this has been somewhat borne out, as eighth-graders have tended to read the diary as “hopeful,” even a tale of adolescent romance, resisting the unwelcome information about the family’s fate and Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen. At least one student said that piece of knowledge had contributed to “ruining” the story.41
This complicated, imbricated, and passionate set of histories surrounding the diary of Anne Frank poses an especially interesting problem for the overarching question about what is, or isn’t, literature. Many of those most perturbed by the softening of the story and the omission of specific mentions of Jewish identity and the Holocaust are writing from the perspective of historical accuracy and responsibility. Meyer Levin felt personally aggrieved, not only as an author but as a Jew; Bettelheim deplored the effect the altered diary had on readers, especially children, who were led to think that Anne survived the war. Ozick felt strongly that sentimental versions erased both death and Jewishness.
Audiences and readers, whether they are self-exculpating midcentury Germans, as in Adorno’s anecdote, or twenty-first-century schoolchildren, respond to the dramatic, streamlined, “universalized” arc of a narrative culled from the work of the young girl Levin called a born writer—a story shaped (or “distorted”) for the times, the book market, and the magnified focus of stage and screen. Those who praise the text do so on grounds they often call explicitly “literary”42—as Meyer Levin did in that first review in The New York Times. And Ozick’s litany of things the diary had become were all, starting with “bowdlerized,” descriptions of editorial, aesthetic, and commercial interventions.43
Whether Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl or any of its spinoffs (the Broadway play, the Hollywood film) is literature may not be quite the right question.44 When considered in a literary context, it has generated a certain set of responses: the diary is sometimes dismissed or critiqued as naive or sentimental, sometimes lauded as universal and profound. Viewed as cultural history or as historical record, the “same” diary has produced both anger and sorrow, together with a desire, personal and professional, to correct the record, or at least to tell the rest of the story—the part deemed missing from the text as it has been read (or underread) for literary purposes. The frame, the context, will determine how the text is read, assessed, regarded, appropriated, and understood.
What is to be said, then, about the diary of a young girl, preserved against the odds while its author and her family perished? Without the translations into play and film, would the diary, however edited, have attained legendary status? If the process of universalization had not involved, as so many critics complained, the eclipse or erasure of both the specifically Jewish and the catastrophically genocidal frames of the story, would there still have been resistance to the process of making Anne Frank into a timeless and universal heroine?
Words like timeless and universal are always problematic because they seem to belong to the world of religion rather than the world of literary interpretation and analysis. Such terms indicate a stoppage of time rather than the inevitable changes that come with time’s passage. In the case of the diary of Anne Frank, we have a striking example of what happens when reading something as literature in the context of recent and tragic history underscores the tension between literature and history. If it is history, can it be changed in the service of (someone’s idea of) art? Does treating the diary as literature inevitably create a climate that is conducive to underreading, to stereotyping of a heroic kind that is in its own way as destructive as the negative stereotypes generated by social prejudice and ignorance?
If so, I think it is because we have forgotten the power of literary reading. When what isn’t literature becomes literature, its power is not diminished but augmented. There is no guarantee that reading such a text as literature will produce a historically faithful or politically agreeable assessment. We might place the text in the context of genres other than tragedy or children’s literature, the two most familiar categories through which the Diary has been read. Other literary options abound, from the historical (the fact that the diary is a mode with its own conventions, one similar to the early epistolary novel) to, for example, the saint’s life, the locked-room mystery, the noir thriller, the captivity narrative. Anne’s diary is also available for Freudian readings, feminist readings, or readings about the paradoxical functions of language.
Anne Frank was a reader, and she wanted to be a published author. Many of her admirers felt, with Meyer Levin, that she was a born writer, and her diary has been prized by writers for being literary. She describes at great length the act of writing (another good genre for this text, which is all about scenes of instruction). If we give the text the credit for being literary, we cannot at the same time so diminish it to the point that we assume it has only one meaning. We need to allow the activity of becoming literature to go where it goes, to understand that literary patterns sometimes write through their authors even as authors think themselves to be controlling the scene.
I understand the desire of some critics to keep the diary as part of the historical record of the period, and I see the way in which Anne’s literary celebrity—from the time of the publication of the diary in the United States but especially since the success of the play called The Diary of Anne Frank—undercut or usurped the place of more difficult, complex, painful, and necessary information about the Holocaust. In such contexts, human suffering is the topic, and human inhumanity a vital theme. But when a text, in this case the diary, is part of a literary investigation, such issues of morality, ethics, and lessons about life are not the whole story. The power of the literary is always divorced from the typical, however much it may be appropriated to support the idea of the type. Once more, it is how the story means, rather than what it means, that is the literary question. Anne Frank produced her diary in two versions, one with pseudonyms and other literary devices, the other supposedly without them, which is to say that the devices lay beneath the surface, at the level of the text’s unconscious. Even without the intervention of her father, who omitted some things and changed others—and the subsequent textual history that produced a critical edition—this mode of literary production opens the diary to the possibility of a sophisticated reading and analysis that is entirely respectful of the text while also reading it against the grain. The protests against such readings would presumably come from the side of the supposed supporters of the literary, not from the side of historians and philosophers. For what multiple literary readings of the diary will surely produce is not a single story but many. Some of these readings will speak of the indomitability of the human spirit, and some, inevitably, will not.
Another way of investigating the question of what is or isn’t literature might be to look not only at the history of taste but also at the way authors and texts are lost and found. This is not as symmetrical a process as the phrase implies. The publication of Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, described as “Selected and edited, with an Essay,” occasioned one of the most influential reviews of the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets,” which first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921. Reviews in the TLS, we might note, were unsigned until 1974, when critical anonymity, once the rule rather than the exception, began to seem outdated. “The Metaphysical Poets” explained, contextualized, and offered strong readings of poems by such poets as John Donne, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Abraham Cowley (not to mention the modern French poets to whom Eliot compared them). At the same time, it also began to articulate various critical terms, like “unified experience,” “dissociation of sensibility,” and the value of difficulty, that would influence both the writing and the teaching of poetry (and literature) for much of the ensuing century. “[I]t appears likely,” the review announced calmly, “that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”45
The poems of John Donne had been in and out of print since their initial publication in the 1630s, but it was hardly the case that his works were deemed essential to the emerging curriculum of English departments in the early years of their development. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were the Renaissance poets everyone read. For centuries Donne had been regarded as “knotty” (full of intellectual difficulties; difficult to explain or unravel), a word still used to describe his verse. (It’s arguable that some also considered them naughty, especially when they were the work of a poet who went on to be an Anglican preacher.) Some nineteenth-century poets, notably Coleridge and Browning, read Donne and admired him. Browning’s dramatic monologues are strongly indebted to Donne for their abrupt, direct address to the reader and their use of colloquial speech rhythms. But for the most part Donne was an interesting sidebar rather than a central figure for poets and readers of this period. The taste for knotty, witty, intellectual poetry in English had waned. Then came the one-two punch of Grierson’s edition and Eliot’s review, and within a few years, Donne’s poems were the featured centerpieces of some of the most striking and influential works of literary criticism by the teacher-scholars who came to be known as New Critics.
One indication of the midcentury canonization of Donne is the proliferation of titles of works of fiction and memoir taken from his works. Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (both allusions to the same work, Donne’s “Meditation XVI”), John Gunther’s memoir of his son’s early death from cancer, Death Be Not Proud—all of these have become classics in their genres. Like Shakespeare, and unlike Spenser and Dryden, Donne crossed over into the allusive mainstream with not even a pair of quotation marks needed to distinguish his seventeenth-century phrases from the lingua franca of modern culture.
I’ve instanced the fluctuating critical fortunes of Donne’s poetry as one example of lost and found. Another, equally canonical, might be the forgetting and the subsequent remembering or re-creating of Chaucer’s metrics and scansion. For many years, poets, critics, and readers misunderstood the verse of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and other major poems by this foundational English author. Signally, readers like Dryden failed to understand that the “final e” was sounded (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”), until the scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt (1720–86) identified what one literary history of the period called “the strange delusion of nearly three centuries.”46 Thus Dryden could write, famously (and erroneously):
equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practiced in Chaucer’s age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men.47
This passage from the preface to Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern, suggesting that the history of literature is a “progress narrative,” starting with the primitive past and progressing to a more sophisticated or grown-up present (that category in motion called modernity), will ultimately be proved a fable. Not that Dryden thought Chaucer wasn’t literature—quite the contrary, he was “the father of English poetry,” to be regarded in the same honorific light “as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil.” Nonetheless, Dryden undertook to translate Chaucer, turning his tales “into modern English,” despite the objections of some that Chaucer was “dry, old-fashioned wit” not worth the effort, and the complaints of others that much of the beauty of the text would be lost. To the latter, he replied roundly that “not only their beauty, but their being is lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case. I grant that something must be lost in all transfusion, that is, in all translations; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise be lost, or, at least, be maimed, when it is scarce intelligible, and that but to a few. How few are there who can read Chaucer so as to understand him perfectly? And if imperfectly, then with less profit, and no pleasure.”48 Dryden accused the purists, who argued that one should read Chaucer in the original or not at all, of being like misers who hoard up their treasures rather than spending or sharing them. He was pleased, though, to note that “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” was at the same time translating Chaucer into modern French (though he speculated that she must be using an old Provençal translation, “for how she should come to understand old English, I know not”). Still, the moment seemed fated: “that, after certain periods of time, the fame and memory of great Wits should be renewed.”49
The example of Donne is one kind of rediscovery of a lost or neglected text, and the example of Chaucer’s metrics, another. But what happens when the text supposedly lost from one era and found in another is discovered to be a new creation? One striking example took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when a teenage boy living in Bristol, England, produced (on parchment or vellum), circulated, and published poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century priest—poems that, even after the imposture was detected, attracted the attention and admiration of several major Romantic poets.
The young poet was Thomas Chatterton, whose tragic early death—he poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen, despairing of success in London, starving, and unwilling to return in defeat to Bristol—was surely part of his romantic appeal. Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems, attributed to the fifteenth-century personage Thomas Rowley, were much superior, critics have agreed, to the modern poems written in his own voice and name. He had access to a number of old pieces of parchment and to a mysterious chest of documents in the Bristol church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and in his early teens, he set about, imaginatively and industriously, creating for himself a history and a lexicon for Rowley’s ancient writings. Interestingly, his Rowley dictionary was based to a significant extent on the glossary to the same edition of Chaucer (edited by Thomas Speght in 1598) that had led John Dryden to conclude that Chaucer’s metrics were irregular and deficient. Another of Chatterton’s sources, apparently, was the old spelling in Percy’s Reliques, a repository of early ballads from England and Scotland and which was published in 1765, just as Chatterton began to work on his Rowley project.
Chatterton committed suicide in 1770. Debates about the authenticity of the Rowley poems continued throughout the next decade, with almost all scholars and editors of the period attributing them to Chatterton. Horace Walpole jokingly called the poems Chatterton’s “trouvaille” in a conversation at the Royal Academy in 1771—though Oliver Goldsmith maintained that the poems were genuine and that Rowley was their author.50 Dr. Samuel Johnson, also present at this gathering, was “a stout unbeliever in Rowley, as he had been in Ossian,”51 the supposed author of a cycle of early Gaelic poems that the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have discovered in the Highlands of Scotland in the same years, and translated into English.
In 1776 Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell, traveled to Bristol; Boswell’s lively account of his learned friend’s investigations is worth quoting in some detail:
I was entertained with seeing him enquire upon the spot, into the authenticity of “Rowley’s Poetry,” as I had seen him enquire upon the spot into the authenticity of “Ossian’s Poetry.” George Catcot, the pewterer, who was as zealous for Rowley as Dr. Hugh Blair was for Ossian, (I trust my Reverend friend will excuse the comparison,) attended us at our inn, and with a triumphant air of lively simplicity called out, “I’ll make Dr. Johnson a convert.” Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton’s fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr. Johnson’s face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret, the surgeon, and saw some of the originals as they were called, which were executed very artificially; but from a careful inspection of them, and a consideration of the circumstances with which they were attended, we were quite satisfied of the imposture, which, indeed, has been clearly demonstrated by several able criticks.
Honest Catcot seemed to pay no attention whatever to any objections, but insisted, as an end of all controversy, that we should go with him to the tower of the church of St. Mary, Redcliff, and view with our own eyes the ancient chest in which the manuscripts were found. To this, Dr. Johnson good-naturedly agreed; and though troubled with a shortness of breathing, laboured up a long flight of steps, till we came to the place where the wondrous chest stood. “There, (said Catcot, with a bouncing confident credulity,) there is the very chest itself.” After this ocular demonstration, there was no more to be said. He brought to my recollection a Scotch Highlander, a man of learning too, and who had seen the world, attesting, and at the same time giving his reasons for the authenticity of Fingal:—“I have heard all that poem when I was young.”—“Have you, Sir? Pray what have you heard?”—“I have heard Ossian, Oscar, and every one of them.”
Johnson said of Chatterton, “This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.”52
Notice that the “ocular demonstration” of the supposed provenance of the poems is viewed, by both Boswell and Johnson, with the scorn it deserves. The chest is no more evidence of the authenticity of the documents than is the floor jabbed repeatedly by the tourists of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Henry James’s short story (“ ‘And is this really’—when they jam their umbrellas into the floor—‘the very spot where He was born?’ ”53). What was required was textual evidence of authenticity, one way or another, which was shortly to be provided, as it happened, by the same Thomas Tyrwhitt who had edited Chaucer and corrected earlier impressions about the pronunciation of his verse. In 1777 Tyrwhitt produced an edition of Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and others, in the fifteenth century. In the third edition, published a year later, he added—and issued as a separate publication—an Appendix: containing some observations upon the language of the poems attributed to Rowley; tending to prove that they were written, not by any ancient author, but entirely by Thomas Chatterton.
At the same time, though, we might note that Johnson, whatever his incredulity about Rowley, was quite willing to praise Chatterton, the poet Wordsworth would later call “the marvelous boy”54 to whom Keats would dedicate his “Endymion,” whose modern poems were so unsuccessful, became a sensation, beloved of the early Romantics, and a herald of the new medievalism that would interest Lamb, Hazlitt, Rossetti, and William Morris. Undoubtedly, his tragic death had something to do with it—Wordsworth describes him as “The sleepless soul that perished in his pride”—but Keats’s friend Benjamin Bailey stressed the fact that Keats was taken with Chatterton’s poetry:
Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the “Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella”:
“Come with acorn cup & thorn,
Drain my hertys blood away;
Life & all its goods I scorn,
Dance by night or feast by day.”
The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; & in none more than in numerous passages of his Endymion.55
The issue of the authorship and authenticity of the Rowley poems continued to be debated in some circles at least until W. W. Skeat’s edition in 1871, a hundred and one years after Chatterton’s death. But we should note that by that time, the context was a volume called The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, with an essay on the Rowley poems. The “trouvaille” about which Walpole had jested, the “found” poems and “found” poet of the fifteenth century, were now proudly repackaged as the works of Chatterton. Somewhat ironically, we may think, Skeat’s introduction noted that the spelling in the longest and most important of the Rowley poems had been modernized, an improvement he thought long overdue, “so as to render them at last, after the lapse of a century, accessible for the first time to the general public.”56 The inventive orthography that had distinguished these poems as “authentically” of the fifteenth century, painstakingly gleaned by Chatterton from a Chaucer glossary, from the ballads collected by Bishop Percy, and from the words marked obsolete in two etymological dictionaries, was now, by an editorial decision about accessibility to the general public, made to disappear.
As for the fictional Ossian (the same Celtic hero Yeats would write of as Oisin), James Macpherson had claimed that he translated authentic documents written by a third-century Irish bard. No manuscripts were ever produced or found, and Dr. Johnson, never a fan of Scots or Scotland, famously (and accurately) accused Macpherson of “imposture.”57 Chatterton died a spectacular death and become a celebrity; Macpherson lived almost till the end of the eighteenth century, traveled briefly to Florida, worked for Lord North’s government, wrote history, and ended as a member of Parliament, buried in Westminster Abbey a short distance from his detractor, Dr. Johnson. But The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal, purportedly translated and edited by Macpherson, would continue to appear from 1765 through the end of the following century, usually reprinted with an essay by Hugh Blair, a celebrated professor of rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, defending the authenticity of the works.58
Ossian’s other admirers included Walter Scott, the young J. W. von Goethe (who translated sections of it for The Sorrows of Young Werther), Johann Gottfried von Herder, and the emperor Napoleon (who read the works in Italian translation). The enthusiastic Napoleon forthwith commissioned Ingres to paint a canvas called The Dream of Ossian, and many other painters found inspiration in the topic in the early years of the nineteenth century, producing representations of Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp, and Ossian Receiving Napoleonic Officers. Not only had Ossian become literature, his work produced other literature; indeed, it produced or generated national literatures. Lost or found? Imposture though Ossian might be, this “found” poet had a huge effect on the spread of European romantic nationalism. The fame and influence of his poetry extended from Scotland to France, Germany, and Hungary. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde owes his first two names to the heroes of Ossianic poems—and in his own compelling fiction about forgery and poetry, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” he cites both Chatterton and Macpherson.
When it comes to literature, these two ideas are not always symmetrical. Where Donne was “lost” for a while because he was seldom reprinted and even more seldom read, and Chaucer was “lost” because his language and metrics were not understood, both were “found”—restored to the canon and the literary tradition—through the work of subsequent editors and critics.
Does intention matter? Does inadvertence?
In what would prove to be an amusing and instructive pedagogical improvisation, the critic Stanley Fish once invited his students of a 1971 summer course in seventeenth-century religious poetry to interpret a poem they found on the blackboard when they entered the class. The poem was a list of names left over from Fish’s previous class in the same room—a class in contemporary theories of linguistics and literary criticism. Predictably, the students leaped imaginatively to their task, finding religious allegories, symbols, doctrines, and holy puns, as well as an underlying structure that disclosed both a Hebrew and a Christian subtext. “As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing,” Fish wrote, “they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess.” For Fish, this was not a discouraging but an intriguing event, as was the explanation he offered: “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems: they make them.”59 In subsequent books and articles, he would go on to develop his reader-response theory of “interpretive communities”—a theory that Fish, who began his career as a Miltonist, demonstrated most signally through a reading, not of ephemera on a blackboard, but of the Variorum Commentary on the works of John Milton.60
Fish’s pedagogical stunt did not make the names on the blackboard literature. What it did do—and what an early experiment by I. A. Richards also did, although Richards used published poems rather than found text—was to demonstrate that there are literary ways of reading. (Richards’s book chronicling the process, Practical Criticism, was subtitled A Study of Literary Judgment.)61 Not all of these ways are successful or pertinent. But let us imagine for a moment that Fish’s students, in that long-ago classroom at the University of Buffalo, had had recourse to instant Internet searches or had determined that their task was to historicize the set of words (all proper names) on the board, or to seek out the ethical, moral, or political connections among them. They would have avoided the excessive critical ingenuity that Fish both admits and admires, and that he does not call misplaced, though others might. They might even have correctly identified the individuals listed, although each was represented only by a surname, so there was plenty of room for error. And they might have constructed a narrative about the connections between Jacobs-Rosenbaum, the coauthors of linguistic textbooks, and Levin and Thorne, who were each then working on a possible relationship between transformational grammar and literary texts. By dint of investigation, the students might have discovered that Fish himself was teaching a linguistics course during the previous period. This would have been, no doubt, a more accurate and demystifying explanation of the names. But it would have had nothing to do with literature. Or with what appears, from the evidence presented in Fish’s essay, to have been an admiringly rigorous training in seventeenth-century poetics.
One final way we might track the “what is / what isn’t literature” question is via the use of as in the title of a college course or a program in reading. Take, for instance, the familiar and apparently innocent phrase “the Bible as literature.” What is the implication of that little word as? Well, for one thing, it implies that there is another way of reading (the Bible as revealed truth; the Bible as moral philosophy). For the Bible, this is arguably a loaded question. Which Bible? Which translation? The Hebrew Bible plus the New Testament?
Many significant works of English and American poetry and prose allude to verses or persons mentioned in the Bible, so it makes sense that the English Bible or some other way of describing the Bible as literature should be offered as a course at schools and colleges. But the same can be said of Greek and Roman mythology, which, if taught, is not usually tagged with as literature. “The Bible as literature” is both an inclusion and an exclusion, an acknowledgment of literary influence and literary style, and a bracketing of the question of belief. None of which is completely satisfying, either to believers or to nonbelievers. Reading the Bible as literature, teachers of such courses explain, may involve using reading strategies drawn from such diverse interpretive practices as formalism, post-structuralism, cultural hermeneutics, etc. As one instructor wrote in a memo for prospective students, “Studying the Bible as Literature does not mean that we insist the text (Old Testament) is a series of fables or that it is patently false. Similarly, this way of reading the Bible does not insist that the Old Testament is a document that is historically true in the scientific, strict sense of the phrase. Rather, we are seeking a literary understanding of ‘truth.’ ”62
Perhaps predictably, Allan Bloom singled out “the Bible as literature” in The Closing of the American Mind as an indication of “the impotence of the humanities,” suggesting that to “to include [the Bible] in the humanities is already a blasphemy, a denial of its own claims,” and that teaching the Bible as literature rather than “as Revelation” makes it possible for it to be read as a secular document, “as we read, for example, Pride and Prejudice.” For Bloom, the professors who taught classic texts, among which he includes the Bible, were not interested in the “truth” of those texts.63 Presumably, the idea of “a literary understanding of ‘truth’ ” would have struck him as fallacious.
The phrase as literature has also been used in other contexts, like, for example, “film as literature,” once a legitimating move that explained or justified why courses on film were included in the curricula of literature departments. When methods of film analysis moved away from this paradigm and closer to visual, historical, and philosophical analysis—and as film studies established itself as a humanities discipline in its own right—as literature tended to drop away, sometimes replaced by the more anodyne and, which often denoted a comparison between specific works of literature and specific films or film genres. On the other hand, “Freud as literature” or “Marx as literature” or “Darwin as literature” suggests that a body of work associated with another discipline or subject area will be read according to protocols designed for, and effective in analyzing, literary works. In the case of Marx and Freud, at least, it sometimes comes with an unspoken subtext, implying that as literature is a fallback or secondary framework, and that the analysis of these writers has come under the aegis of literary scholars because they are no longer influential in the fields of psychology or economics.
In his classic essay on the “author-function,” Michel Foucault described Freud and Marx as belonging to a class he called “initiators of discursive practices”:
The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirely from that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never more than the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital; they both established the endless possibility of discourse.64
Foucault is quick to anticipate objections to his placement of such authors in a more influential position than that of novelists: “The author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some ‘importance’ in the literary world, his influence can have significant ramifications.”
But his main point is to try to distinguish between a writing practice that spawns imitators and one that generates productive thought and resistance. “Marx and Freud, as ‘initiators of discursive practices,’ not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated.”65 These writers have begun a conversation that would have not been possible without them. Thus, the twentieth century saw the popularization of adjectives like Freudian and Marxist. Given the blurring that often comes with cultural transmission, such terms were almost guaranteed to be caricatured and misunderstood. Nonetheless, their prominence in popular media is a telling indication of the role these writers have played in literary criticism and interpretation, as well as in the way modern thinkers think. “There are,” Foucault says provocatively, “no ‘false’ statements in the work of these initiators,” because the issue is not false or true or right or wrong but what he called the possibility of discourse. This drives unsympathetic critics crazy. For some, the flat claim that “Freud was wrong” or that “Marx was wrong” becomes an article of faith and one that definitively halts any possibility of discourse. But Foucault’s contention is that such initiators teach a new way of thinking, not a set of prescribed (or proscribed) thoughts. “A person can be the author of much more than a book—of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate.”66
So are Marx and Freud literary authors? Are Capital and Civilization and Its Discontents works of literature? I’d say yes, and not only because these authors write so well, though it is important to me that they do. The moves that they make in setting up an argument, in offering detours and counterexamples, in not being afraid to contradict and reverse themselves, are literary in the most complimentary sense of that elastic term. The literary critic Peter Brooks wrote an essay called “Freud’s Masterplot,” about the argument and stylistic development of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that became a centerpiece for Brooks’s book about narrative fiction, Reading for the Plot.67 Freud, Marx, Darwin, and other major intellectual and cultural theorists provided a range of plots and languages for creative writers and critics who came after them.
What isn’t literature? It might make sense to adapt the saying about New England weather and suggest that if something isn’t literature now, we just need to wait five minutes—or five years, or fifty, or even five hundred. The process takes time (often centuries or decades) to change Thomas Bodley’s “riffe-raffe” into the masterpieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, or the actionable obscenity of Lolita or Ulysses into the most honored of twentieth-century novels. Becoming literature, as we saw in the case of the ballad, isn’t always an unreflectively positive transition—there are perceived losses as well as gains with the change in status. For literature is a status rather than a quality. To say that a text or a body of work is literature means that it is regarded, studied, read, and analyzed in a literary way.