At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the National Endowment for the Arts reported a disturbing drop in the number of Americans who read “literary” works. Drawing upon responses to the 2002 Census survey, which had asked more than seventeen thousand adults whether they had read any novels, short stories, poetry, or plays in their leisure time, the NEA noted that 45 percent said they had read some fiction, 12 percent had read some poetry, and only 4 percent had read a play. These findings, published in Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, showed an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, and especially among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. The chairman of the NEA termed the results an indication of a “national crisis,” one that reflected “a general collapse in advanced literacy,” and a loss that “impoverishes both cultural and civic life.”1
Among the report’s “10 key findings” were that under half of the adult American population now reads literature; that although women read more than men (“Only slightly more than one-third of adult American males now read literature”), reading rates were declining for both men and women; that reading among persons at every level of education, including college graduates and postgraduates, had declined over the past twenty years; and that “literary reading strongly correlates other forms of active civic participation,” including volunteer and charity work, cultural involvement with museums and the performing arts, and attendance at sporting events. It was less surprising to find that competition with other modes of information, like the Internet, video games, and portable digital devices, had a negative effect upon the number of adults who regularly read.2 Race and ethnicity seemed not to be crucial factors: the rates of decline included whites, African Americans, and Hispanics. “Listening” to literature counted as a kind of reading for this survey, although watching films did not: women are more likely to listen to novels or poetry than men, whites more likely to listen to book readings, African Americans most likely to listen to poetry readings. Here the report suggests that “in part” the reason may be “the popularity of dub and slam poetry readings in the U.S.”3
The idea that fiction/nonfiction should be the determining category for “literary/nonliterary” is spelled out in a brief section called “Literature vs. Books,” in which “literature” is explicitly defined as including “popular genres such as mysteries, as well as contemporary and classic literary fiction. No distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works.”4 So a work of “literature” for the purposes of respondents to this survey could be a Harlequin romance or a Sidney Sheldon novel but not Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, or David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman. I can understand why the survey wanted to make some kind of distinction, and I agree with the democratic decision not to judge works on their putative “quality” (which, in any case, a longer historical view would show is likely to change over time). But the decision to exclude “nonfiction,” or what an older tradition once dubbed “intellectual prose,” does seem to undercut a little the message that “anyone who loves literature or values the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern.”5
There was a time when the word literature meant an acquaintance with “letters” or books—the confident possession, that is, of humane learning and literary culture. “He had probably more than common literature,” wrote Dr. Johnson about the poet John Milton. “His literature was unquestionably great. He read all the languages which are considered either as learned or polite”6 Although Milton wrote great literature, that is not what Johnson’s sentence says. It says that he had literature, which is to say learning, a familiarity with and understanding of words and texts. The nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth uses literature in a similar way, describing “A woman of considerable information and literature.”7 This sense of the word is now generally obsolete, and would, as is the fate of such obsolescences, undoubtedly be regarded as an error if used in the same way today. For example, if I were to write that J. M. Coetzee “had great literature,” any copy editor would immediately “correct” my phrase to say that Coetzee wrote great literature. The new meaning, the only meaning current in departments and programs of literature, is this:
Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect. (Oxford English Dictionary 3a.)
It’s worth noting that the first instance of this use of the term given in the historical dictionary of the English language is comparatively recent—1812—hundreds of years after Chaucer and Shakespeare (and, of course, thousands of years after the Greek and Latin “classics”). Thus, over the centuries in England, the U.S., and indeed in France, “literature” has changed from a personal attribute or characteristic (something one has) to an institution and a product (something one writes or knows).
Concurrent with this development was the emergence of a personage called a “man of letters,” whose profession was the production of literary work, whether or not he—or, latterly, she—actually earned a living by writing. Here is Sir Walter Scott, one of the most financially successful of nineteenth-century novelists: “I determined that literature should be my staff, but not my crutch, and that the profits of my literary labour … should not … become necessary to my ordinary expenses.”8 For Scott, literature was a product of “labour” and produced “profits” of a pecuniary as well as of a more rarefied kind. Despite his disclaimer, he speaks here as a professional man.
At the same time that a specifically high-cultural sense of literature was coming into currency, what we might call the general case of literature as meaning any body of writing on a given subject (“the scientific literature”) was developing, again concurrent with the establishment of academic and technical disciplines, each of which was supported and buttressed by specialist publications that came to be called a “literature.” And below that, if we might speak for a moment in terms of cultural hierarchy, was the most general case of all, the equation of literature with all printed matter. It’s instructive to see the sequence of examples offered by the OED for what it still calls a colloquial usage:
| 1895 | “In canvassing, in posters, and in the distribution of what, by a profane perversion of language, is called ‘literature.’ ” |
| 1900 | “A more judicious distribution of posters, and what is termed ‘literature.’ ” |
| 1938 | “It is some literature from the Travel Bureau.” |
| 1962 | “Full details and literature from: Yugoslav National Tourist Office.” |
| 1973 | “I talked my throat dry, gave away sheaves of persuasive literature.” |
Where, at the end of the nineteenth century, this use of the term was deemed profane and perverse, and thus encased in scare quotes, by the late twentieth century (the citation is from a 1973 crime novel by Dick Francis), the word literature no longer needed parsing or protecting and was routinely used to describe flyers, brochures, and other disposable printed stuff.
So the meanings of literature as a term have, perhaps paradoxically, moved both “up” and “down” in recent years. On the one hand, it now seems to denote a particular reading, writing, and publishing practice associated with middle to high culture, with the notion of a literary canon, and with English majors; on the other hand, it has been co-opted—or universalized—so that it means just about anything professional—or research-based—written in words.
In the pages that follow I will attempt not only to argue for but also to invoke and demonstrate the “uses” of reading and of literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion of “pleasure,” but rather as a way of thinking. That is why, in my view, it is high time to take back the term literature. To do so will mean explaining why reading—not skimming for information or for the plot (or for the sexy, titillating “good parts” of a novel or a political exposé)—is really hard to do; and why the very uselessness of literature is its most profound and valuable attribute. The result of such a radical reorientation of our understanding of what it means to read, and to read literature, and to read in a “literary” way, would be enormous. A better understanding of these questions is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.
The word literary does not appear in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Though based on the substantive literature, which—as we’ve seen—itself originally meant “humane learning,” literary evolved, from the eighteenth century to the present, as something between a compliment and an epithet. Like other, similar concepts and terms, this one changed as its context changed. From the qualitative categories of “literary merit,” “literary reputation,” and “literary education” (all eighteenth-century usages) to the social and economic realms of “literary dinner,” “literary lunch,” “literary circle,” “literary agent,” and “literary executor” (all hallmarks of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture), the uses and fortunes of literary have fluctuated and either evolved or devolved depending upon one’s view. When fewer persons were literate in the most basic sense, that is, able to read, a person of literature or literary training was a prized, if undercompensated, member of society (Oliver Goldsmith: “A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched”).9
The nineteenth century made celebrities of some of its writers. Dickens and Wilde toured triumphantly in America, while “Longfellow … largely paid the poet’s penalty of being made the lion of all the drawing rooms.”10 (A characteristic modern version of this “lionization” is a handbook called Sleeping with Literary Lions—which, despite its title, is not a hookup service but a guide to U.S. bed-and-breakfasts located near literary landmarks.) Today novelists and poets are read and praised, but by a smaller subsection of the population, since they now compete with films, television, the Internet, and other modes of cultural leisure.
“America’s favorite book,” according to a Harris poll that sampled just over 2,500 people, is, unsurprisingly, the Bible. As the proponents of the Butler Act in the famous Scopes trial controversy about evolution learned, not everyone will agree about what the Bible is, but let us put that question aside for a moment. The second favorite for men is The Lord of the Rings; the second favorite for women, Gone with the Wind. Others in the top ten include J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Stephen King’s The Stand, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.11
Even with a tiny sample, this is a dispiriting list, suggesting that after high school (where To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye remain on required reading lists), what used to be known as “canonical literature” is nowhere in sight.
But what is the use of literature? Does it make us happier, more ethical, more articulate? Better citizens, better companions and lovers? Better businesspersons, better doctors and lawyers? More well-rounded individuals? Does it make us more human? Or simply human? Is what is being sought a kind of literary Rolodex, a personal Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations of apt literary references (“To be or not to be?” “Only connect”; “Do I dare to eat a peach?”)—phrases that can be trotted out on suitable occasions, at the dinner table, or on the golf course? Such literary taglines or touchstones were once a kind of cultural code of mutual recognition among educated people—but their place has long been taken by references from film, video, TV, rock music, advertising, or other modes of popular culture. Is literature something that everyone should study in the same way that we should study other basic cultural facts about the world we live in, like the history of art or the history of music, studying them all in one fell swoop, in survey courses or general introductions or appreciations?
Why read literature? Why listen to it on audiotapes or at poetry slams or at the theater? Why buy it? And even if you enjoy reading literature, why study it?
What do we mean by literature today, when the term is used by medical and technical professionals to mean “instructional brochures” and by social scientists to mean “a survey of academic research”? “Please send me the latest literature on your new headache drug” or “your most recent software” or “your latest cell phone.” “Enclosed you will find a review of the literature on gender discrimination in higher education.” Indeed, the relationship between literature and litter, though not etymologically correct, seems seductively close. (This homology, in fact, occurred to Jacques Lacan, who attributed it to James Joyce.)12 Literature is, all too often, pieces of paper we should consult for expertise but often simply toss in a drawer or in the trash.
To overschematize a little for the sake of argument, let us say that there are two poles in the debate over the “use” or “value” of literature. One pole is utilitarian or instrumental: the idea that literature is good for you because it produces beneficial societal effects: better citizens, for example, or more ethically attuned reasoners. The other pole might be characterized as ecstatic, affective, or mystical: the idea that literature is a pleasurable jolt to the system, a source of powerful feeling that—rather like Judge Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement about pornography—is unmistakable even if undefinable. (For Stewart’s “I know it when I see it,” we could substitute “I know it when I read it / hear it.”) Emily Dickinson’s “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” is perhaps the best-known expression of this view. It’s worth quoting the longer passage from which this sentence is excerpted, since it makes the point even more vividly:
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?13
The poet A. E. Housman offered a similar somatic test:
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”14
For Housman, a noted classical scholar who prized the intellect, poetry was nonetheless “more physical than intellectual.” Other symptoms he reported included “a shiver down the spine,” “a constriction in the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes,” and a sensation in the pit of the stomach that he likened to a phrase from Keats, when “everything … goes through me like a spear.” Although these symptoms may sound painful, Housman clearly associates them with a singular kind of pleasure.
So, once again: “feels good” or “is good for you.” Both of these desiderata, we might think, are covered by Horace’s Ars Poetica, with its celebrated advice that poetry should be “dulce et utile,” its aims to delight and to instruct.
A latter-day “Ars Poetica”—one too often dismissed these days—is the popular poem by Archibald MacLeish, with its two famous and quotable pronouncements:
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
And
These precepts, so perfectly attuned to close reading and New Critical thinking, also embody a sentiment elegantly summarized by Keats when he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket.”15 Yet some of the best literature, whether poetry or prose, has been polemical, political, and/or religious (not always in an orthodox way; think of Blake, whose Jerusalem hymn is, ironically, sung in churches all over Britain). Some of the novels of Dickens (the Brontës, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Cervantes, Flaubert) have had palpable designs for political, social, or moral change, as have the great epics, from those by Homer and Virgil to those by Milton and Joyce. This palpable design of epic is the glorification of nationalism and empire; Wordsworth’s personal epic, The Prelude, acknowledges the boldness of using such a public genre for chronicling “the growth of a poet’s mind.” But MacLeish’s poem is a poem about poems. Paradoxically, this witty, sensuous verse about what poetry should not do—it should not “mean,” it should not be taken as true—has been read both as a truism and as an explanation of a poem’s proper “meaning.”
Before we leave the questions of whether and how literature can be good for you, we should perhaps note that in the matter of whether works of fiction should model—or inculcate—virtue and morality, “good for you” and “bad for you” have the same status. Both are judgmental and moral. These effects may be claimed or discerned by preachers or censors or even by the courts. But they are incidental and accidental by-products of literature, not literary qualities. In The Art of Fiction, Henry James queried the whole category of the morality of the novel: “Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair … The only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is … that it be interesting.”16
There have always been schools of thought about literature and its value, or lack of value, from Plato’s suspicions of poetry to Aristotle’s codification of its terms and rules. (The fact that Plato’s chosen form was the dialogue, and Aristotle’s, the category, sorts oddly with their views, since Plato is arguably writing “literature,” just as Aristotle is writing “criticism.”) Horace’s Ars Poetica claimed literature as an art or craft—just what Plato said it was not—and proposed genial, workmanlike procedures for the aspiring poet. Pope and others followed in this tradition, establishing what are sometimes thought of as classical rules, only to be disrupted by the return of admiration for the mad or inspired poet, a taste often associated with Romanticism. There were vatic, inspired, and mad poets before the Romantic period, and classical poets during it; like all pairs of opposites, these are as much alike as they are different. It is the claim of their difference, the insistence on the overthrow of the imprisoning past at the same time that the past is inevitably repeated, that produces the dialectical push and pull of literary history—and often generates some of the best kinds of literary criticism. But it is hard to imagine today the claims for the importance of literature that were still being debated in the middle of the twentieth century. What happened to the primacy of literature, once regarded as the indispensable lingua franca for educated men and women?
Matthew Arnold considered a knowledge of literature to be beneficial not only to the critical thinking and moral health of the individual but also to a program of social advancement. In his work as an inspector of schools, he saw English education as a way of “civilizing the next generation of the lower classes, who, as things are going, will have most of the political power of the country in their hands.”17 It’s important to note from today’s vantage point that Arnold—who was named professor of poetry at Oxford during the period when he also served as a government schools inspector—understood literature to be a key aspect of social improvement, both for the individual and for the general culture. In his view, poetry and criticism were not merely pleasant diversions but, rather, undertakings as serious and valuable as moneymaking or scientific advancement. The way to secure the future of England—then a Victorian powerhouse of industry and empire—and the future of the laboring classes, was through literary education, a kind of education heretofore regarded as the privilege of the privileged.
Today that sense has pretty much disappeared, replaced by expertise in science and in information technology, on the one hand, and by visual literacy on the other. By visual, what is now meant is moving images (films, videos, television, MTV, advertising) as well as paintings and photographs. Quotable quotes are far more likely to be cited from films, television, or advertisements than from literature. “Just do it.” “Go ahead, make my day.” “I’ll be back.” Even politicians, who once studiously quoted poets and philosophers, now choose slogans and citations from popular culture. “Mission accomplished.” “Bring ’em on.” So the idea that knowledge of and easy familiarity with literature is either a social accomplishment or a cultural or professional asset must seem quaint. Yet the wordplay involved in coining terms for modern popular culture—especially in visual rebuses like INXS, Ludacris, or Xzibit—is not completely dissimilar to the kind of visual cleverness in, for example, the hieroglyphic poems of George Herbert in the seventeenth century.
After a spurt of enthusiasm among scholars in adjacent fields like history, anthropology, and philosophy—the so-called linguistic turn of the 1970s and 1980s—literature, literary theory, and literary studies have fallen behind in both academic cachet and intellectual influence. More to the point—for the key questions here do not concern scholars so much as they do readers and the general public—literature is often undervalued or misunderstood as something that needs to be applied to the experiences of life. Practical concerns with careers and financial security have dominated the choices made by ambitious and worried young people who want to make sure education fits them for the lives they think they want to lead. Careers in economics, banking, technology, or law do not include literature, except as an add-on or elective. Nor is the typical English major necessarily the way to encounter literature in an active, inquiring way. Even when literature is read, taught, and studied, it is often interrogated for wisdom or moral lessons. The clumsy formulations I grew up with—what is the moral of the story? what is the hero’s or heroine’s tragic flaw?—still influence and flatten the questions people often ask about literary works, as if there were one answer, and a right answer, at that. The genius of literary study comes in asking questions, not in finding answers.
On the one side, hard science and social science, including technology; on the other side, contemporary visual and musical culture, framed by moving images, file swapping, and the Internet. Between these two poles, one of which implicitly defines literature as a potentially useful social enhancement for success in financial and practical life, the other one of which leaves literature behind in favor of livelier, more supposedly “interactive” cultural forms, literature has been devalued—sometimes for reasons that seem, on the surface, benevolent, and sometimes by those who profess to love it best.
In his essay collection Promises, Promises, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips refers with a sense of nostalgia to “what was once called Literature.”
Coming, as they say, from what was then called Literature as a student in the early 1970s, to psychoanalysis in the late 1970s, has made me wonder what I thought psychoanalysis could do for me—or what I wanted psychoanalysis to do for me—that Literature could not. And, of course, what I might have been using Literature for that made psychoanalysis the next best thing—or rather, the other best thing.18
And again,
Anyone who loves what was once called Literature can teach it, write it, and of course, read it. But people who love psychoanalysis can teach it, write it, read it, and practise it. Because there is a real sense—a pragmatic sense—in which we can practise what Freud writes, we can wonder, by the same token, what it would be to practise Henry James or Shakespeare, and what the effect on our reading is when we are finding out how to do something.19
It wouldn’t be unjust to call this set of constraints and wishes a kind of love letter, one that—from the author of a book on monogamy—represents a desire for both surprise and fulfillment. In seeking literature, Phillips found psychoanalysis. But having found psychoanalysis, he still fantasizes about his first love, literature. Phillips wants literature to have something like a use, what he calls a practice. But what if we were to understand literature as its own practice?
Central to this book is the question of how we can understand the importance of “what was once called Literature,” and how we can distinguish it from other distinct, though valuable, human enterprises like morality, politics, and aesthetics. My purpose and my goal are to explain the specificity of literature and literary reading.
Philip Sidney wrote a Defence of Poesie in 1595. Percy Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry in 1821. Why, we might ask, does literature have to defend itself?
In part, it’s Plato’s fault. His famous exiling of poets from a well-ordered republic, on the grounds that they offered doxa, or opinion, rather than logos, or reason/discourse, instantiated an unhappy split between what we now call art and what we now call science. For Plato, the classic Greek poets—Homer and the tragic dramatists—whose work had formed the basis of a Greek education (paideia) depicted in their work all manner of deleterious behavior: murder, incest, cruelty, cowardice, treachery, strong passions out of control. Poetry thus weakened moral character and potentially influenced both actor/performer and audience. Since poetry in this period meant oral poetry, whether epic or dramatic—not the reading and study of written texts—the possibility of such emotional effects, rather than a rational assessment and distance, was, he thought, strong. If a schoolchild memorized Homer on the wrath of Achilles, what he learned was wrath, not poetry.
From the perspective of a modern educational system, where poetry is far less central than it was to the ancient Greeks, Plato’s insistence on the dangers of poetry and poets may seem either quaint or excessive. But that is because we have so diminished the importance of literature (and music and art) over the years.
Both in Republic, where he describes what he regards as an ideal education for guardians and citizens of Athens, and elsewhere in his dialogues, Plato emphasizes the role of poetry and music on the one hand, and physical training on the other, as the key elements for training the soul and the body. In his own academy, Plato taught a different kind of learning, one based upon dialectics and philosophical reasoning, with the claim that literature should serve a moral and social function and should teach cultural elements like goodness, grace, reason, and respect for law.
This instrumental view of literature (Plato’s poetry includes epic, tragedy, and other modes of imaginative writing), which demands that it do some good in the world, is, I will argue, part of the difficulty that literary study has wrestled with from its beginnings to the present. What is often called “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” the idea (voiced from the side of philosophy since Plato) that literature needs to make us better people, is now partnered with and augmented by a more modern set of questions about why we should read and study literature in a world increasingly global, economic, technological, and visual. Are the blandishments of the rhapsodes and sophists, the interpreters and orators, still dangerous? Still seductive? Does literature threaten society, or does it help to build society’s values and institutions? Or are these the wrong questions and the wrong justifications for literature and its readers?
Sidney’s Defence of Poesie famously declared that “the poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.” The truths told by poetry are figurative, not literal.
What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters on an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If then a man can arrive at that child’s age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written.20
In this, he thought, the poet differed from the philosopher and the historian, who argued their cases by precept and example rather than by story and figure. “The philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomaches; the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher.”21
Almost four centuries later, the issue of whether poetry (by which Sidney meant all imaginative literature) should affirm its truths in the world was still very much on the agenda.
In 1961 the French literary review Tel Quel asked critic and literary theorist Roland Barthes to answer a questionnaire about literature. The questions and responses were published by Barthes under the title “Literature Today.” Here is an extract from his salient commentary in those more political, and yet somehow more innocent, years: “it is not literature that is going to free the world,” Barthes wrote, “Yet, in this ‘reduced’ state in which history places us today, there are several ways of creating literature: there is a choice, and consequently the writer has if not a morality at least a responsibility.”
We can make literature into an assertive value—either in repletion, by reconciling it with society’s conservative values, or in tension, by making it the instrument of a struggle for liberation; conversely, we can grant literature an essentially interrogative value; … the writer can then at one and the same time profoundly commit his work to the world, to the world’s questions, yet suspend the commitment precisely where doctrines, political parties, groups, and cultures prompt him to an answer …
This interrogation is not: what is the meaning of the world? nor even perhaps: does the world have a meaning? but only: here is the world: is there meaning in it? Literature is then truth, but the truth of literature is at once its very importance to answer the world’s questions and its power to ask real questions, total questions, whose answer is not somehow presupposed in the very form of the question: an enterprise which no philosophy, perhaps, has brought off and which would then belong, truly, to literature.22
Notice that Barthes stresses the role of questions, rather than answers. This is a point that needs to be emphasized in trying to explain the specificity of literature in comparison with other modes of writing, thinking, and research.
So what is the use of a discussion about the use of literature? Inevitably, it will depend on the context. Do we mean by this question the social utility of literature in the practical world? Or the cultural value of qualities sometimes called aesthetic or philosophical, as they seem to be derived from reading literary works? Are we trying to assess why a college student should major in literature, or even in the humanities, rather than in something more pragmatic, more lucrative, more amenable to the generation of data, or more directly applicable to the improvement of society? Or are we asking whether there is still, or was ever, anything persuasive in the poet Shelley’s statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Is literature useful because it is beautiful or moving (both of these are claims that have been made by some commentators and dismissed by others as impressionistic and unprovable)? Is it useful because it puts commonly shared ideas into words.
Is a discussion of literature either a blind or a category mistake when what is really under critique is the role of literary criticism, especially literary theory, in the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s? It is conventional, though perhaps neither inevitable nor exhaustive, to divide the realms of literary study into literary criticism, literary theory, and literary history, broad rubrics under which a variety of approaches, from post-structuralism to biography, could be subsumed. But for some readers, and some thinkers, this will miss the point, because even so broad a division omits the actual composition of literary works. What is the use of writing literature? And what is the difference between creative writing and literature? Or even, for that matter, between critical writing (what used to be called intellectual prose) and literature? If Bacon’s Essays and Johnson’s Rambler and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own are literature, what about the book reviews and essays and feature articles in today’s newspapers and magazines? Do they need to stand the test of time?
What is at stake, anyhow, in classifying something as literature, or as literary, at a time when that adjective seems itself somewhat contestatory, re-posing the very problem it would seem to resolve: is the literary a marker of quality, of intent, of genre, of context, or of readership and reception? What about post-facto designations of works as literary, although they were very differently received when they first appeared? Examples in this realm would include Renaissance drama, early ballads, popular novels of the nineteenth century, and the graphic novel (aka comic book) of the twentieth. Or might we decide that most, if not all, discussions of use are inevitably post facto? Is the need to explore the use of literature a manifest indication of the increasingly minor place that literature—and literary study—occupies in a visual, aural, musical, and technological era?
It was Immanuel Kant who set the philosophical terms for the modern discussion of the use of art. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant said, in a phrase that would be cited and echoed many times, that the beautiful object exhibited “purposiveness without purpose.” In other words, a work of art (whether it was a painting, a garden, or a poem) was created on purpose but not for a particular purpose. The artwork was (in a positive sense) useless, and the apprehension of beauty was a disinterested activity, one not motivated by a desire to achieve an effect or result. “All interest,” Kant wrote, “ruins a judgment of taste and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if, instead of making the purposiveness precede the feeling of pleasure as the interest of reason does, that interest bases the purposiveness on the feeling of pleasure.”23
Later critics have debated Kant’s central point. The literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued that, far from being “useless” in Kant’s sense, the work of art has a function—an economic “use value.”24 Some vestiges of the extreme position Smith describes here can be seen, for example, in the periodic surfacing of complaints about commercial art and advertising, “found” art, and a sentimental branch of amateurism that regards book contracts and lecture fees as suspect while exalting the idea of literary prizes (from the Booker Prize to the Tony Awards) as disinterested rewards for excellence. For writers and literary critics in the years that followed Kant’s Critique, though, the question of use was posed not so much in terms of the literary object itself but, rather, in relation to what literature could do, and should do, in the world.
To Matthew Arnold, literature was a path to moral improvement and spiritual growth, and a potential gateway for workers, as well as for the educated and the privileged, to accede to social, economic, and cultural power. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” first delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1864, Arnold defined criticism as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” and maintained that “to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try to possess one great literature, at least, besides his own.”25
Arnold’s theory of critical disinterestedness, clearly indebted to Kant (and reinforced later by T. S. Eliot), has been challenged—and sometimes simply dismissed—by later critics concerned with the “situatedness” of literature and criticism and with what Stanley Fish called “interpretive communities.” Arnold’s idea that a critic should, and could, “know the best that is known and thought in the world” presumes both a wide and capacious reading and a somewhat restricted world. And his belief that a generally accepted canon of what he called “touchstones” from classical literature could be used as a measure of the greatness of modern poets has been often taken, or mistaken, as a naive notion about universal standards of value. Arnold did not hesitate to evaluate authors and works: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are classics. Chaucer and Burns “come short of the high seriousness of the great classics.” Dryden and Pope are classics of prose but not of poetry; it is Thomas Gray who is the “poetical classic” of their period. Not every critic will agree with these views. But Arnold’s method was designedly comparative, aimed at avoiding the personal when it comes to judging the poetry of times so near that a critic’s feelings are likely to be not only personal but “personal with passion.” Thus he thought that “using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone” might “correct” an overly personal assessment, or at least put it in a broader context.26
Arnold was forthright about suggesting the function of criticism. But what was the use of poetry? Again, he was not reluctant to say what he thought.
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.27
It is because of these lofty ideals that Arnold proceeded, in his essay “The Study of Poetry,” to articulate a plan for identifying “the best poetry,” the “really excellent.” His comparative—and, to a certain extent, transnational and transhistorical—project was conceived as a way of getting beyond the historical and the personal toward “the best, the truly classic, in poetry.” This goal may strike some twenty-first-century readers as misguided or impossible, but it is premised on the notion that poetry and literature count—that a great deal is at stake.
We are often told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of monetary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world’s deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper—by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.28
I think it would be wrong to think of this spirited peroration as utilitarian. Arnold’s “end … of supreme importance” is enjoyment; he thinks of that as coterminous with the instinct of self-preservation, not as the evolutionary by-product of that instinct. If anything is subliminal or instinctual here, it is poetry, which is why he could say that “the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.”29
Matthew Arnold’s essay on “The Function of Criticism” was written in 1864, “The Study of Poetry” in 1880. It’s intriguing to compare the ideas of the earnest though determinedly polemical Arnold to the more deliberately provocative statements of adherents to what became known as “art for art’s sake” in the same years.
These writers—novelists, poets, and critics—were not only temperamentally attracted to in-your-face confrontation; they also felt themselves to be pushing back against a suffocating, and insufferable, tide of utilitarian moralism. Conservative critics insisted that art must be conducive to virtue; liberal critics, that art must “do good,” must be enlisted in the cause of social justice. In response to such apologists, moralists, and crusaders, whatever their political or religious doctrines, “aesthetes,” delighting in the paradox, claimed that the true use of art was to be useless.
The originator of the phrase l’art pour l’art (often translated as “art for art’s sake”) in the nineteenth century was the novelist Théophile Gautier. The phrase was used first in English by two figures associated with the Aesthetic Movement, Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The essence of art for art’s sake was captured in J. M. Whistler’s oft-quoted remark that “art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone … and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.”30
“Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless,” Gautier asserted in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), and Oscar Wilde adapted this as “All art is quite useless” in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In his preface, Gautier wrote feelingly about “moral journalists” and the “fine sermons which have replaced literary criticism in the public prints” and addressed himself directly, and at length, to “utilitarian critics” and the vexed question of “use.”
When an author tossed some or other book, novel or poetry, on to their desk—these gentlemen lay back nonchalantly in their armchairs, balanced them on their back legs, and, rocking to and fro with a knowing look, a superior air, they said:
“What is the use of this book? How can one apply it to moralization and to the well-being of the largest and poorest class? What! Not a word about the needs of society, nothing civilizing and progressive! How, instead of making the great synthesis of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of regenerating and providential inspiration, how can one produce poems and novels which lead nowhere, and do not advance the present generation along the path to the future? How can one be concerned with style and rhyme in the presence of such grave matters? What do we care, ourselves, about style, and rhyme, and form?”
The “very faithful imitation of the utilitarian style,” as he happily admitted, was Gautier’s own, and he was therefore able to offer, immediately, his scathing reply: “a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous spurt; a drama is not a railways, though all of these things are essentially civilizing, and they advance humanity along the path of progress.”31
A novel has two uses: one is material, the other spiritual, if you can use that expression about a novel. The material use is, for a start, the several thousand francs which go into the author’s pocket … The spiritual use of novels is that, while people read them, they sleep, and don’t read useful, virtuous and progressive periodicals, or other similar indigestible and stupefying drugs.32
And what of beauty, music, and painting? In a strictly utilitarian sense, none of these entities is useful, since “nothing useful is indispensable for life,” and “nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless.” Contrariwise, “everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful room in the house is the lavatory.”33
When Oscar Wilde came to adapt and adopt these sentiments almost half a century later, he focused on the persona of the artist as maker:
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.34
Wilde’s art, and his artfully crafted aesthetic persona, did, of course, achieve the material rewards sardonically noted by Gautier, and at the end of his life, after the reversal of fortune brought about by his trial and conviction, the writing and publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol might fairly be considered spiritual, whether or not it was useful (the poem, when published, sold extremely well). “Catastrophes in life bring about catastrophes in Art,” Wilde told one friend, and to another he described The Ballad as “the cry of Marsyas and not the song of Apollo. I have probed the depths of most of the experiences in life, and I have come to the conclusion that we are meant to suffer. There are moments when it takes you like a tiger, by the throat, and it was only when I was in the depths of suffering that I wrote my poem.”35 As Richard Ellmann noted, The Ballad had for Wilde an explicit and specific use: “The length of the poem was necessary, he said, to shake confidence in the penal system; he knew that it must fall between poetry and propaganda, but he was prepared to face some artistic imperfection for the sake of changing what was intolerable.”36
As a young man at Oxford, Wilde had been the student of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and he was impressed by both the moral view of art held by Ruskin and by the aestheticism and conscious “decadence” of Pater. Pater became Wilde’s tutor and made editorial suggestions about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ruskin took him—and other students—on a road-building expedition and gave credence to Wilde’s view that art had a role to play in the improvement of society. Ellmann, tracing the beginnings of Wilde’s career, saw Ruskin and Pater as “heralds beckoning him in opposite directions” and noted quietly that “he outgrew them both.”37
We might note here that all of these writers—Arnold, Gautier, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde—were both artists and critics. Arnold wrote poetry (“Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gypsy,” “Empedocles on Etna”), Ruskin and Pater, works of elegant essayistic prose (Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Pater’s The Renaissance). When they offered strongly held views about the use of poetry, literature, or criticism, they gestured at once toward the activities of reading, writing, and study. The question of use (or uselessness) here does not translate into the question of whether or not there was value in being an artist—though this was clearly on the mind of each—but rather on the value of literature. Even the word value, though, carries a certain connotation of use, whether measured by merit, social utility, instrumentality, or evaluation.
Another kind of use was on the minds of Marxist writers and critics. Karl Marx himself had been an exceptionally literary economist, often demonstrating his theoretical arguments by means of extended references to works from Shakespeare’s plays to Robinson Crusoe. Despite some early attempts to remand literature to the category of superstructure rather than base, influential and foundational moves were made by critics like Lukács and the members of the Frankfurt School, as well as by writers like Bertolt Brecht, to bring to the forefront instances of both use and abuse.
Some genres, such as realist fiction and drama, were more readily seen as agents of social change than others, such as lyric poetry or pastoral (even though these had been effective instruments of cultural critique in the past). But works of art were the products of social labor. Thus, Theodor Adorno contended, “That artworks are offered for sale at the market—just as pots and statuettes once were—is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production.”38 As for the idea of art for art’s sake, Adorno saw it as an unwitting strategy for “the neutralization of art”: “What is ideological in the principle of l’art pour l’art does not have its locus in the energetic antithesis of art to the empirical world but rather in the abstractness and facile character of this antithesis.”39
Whatever the conscious claims of art (or literature) with respect to purposelessness, its unconscious function was always a motivation, always a kind of use. Here it might also be of interest to recall what Adorno and Max Horkheimer had to say about use and uselessness in their essay “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The use which men in this antagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art is itself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless which is abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art, by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives men of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur.40
Uselessness itself becomes a commodity, and a sign of leisure, culture, and social standing.
Raymond Williams, who deftly traced the history of literature as a term, noted that even as it changed from the old sense of “literacy” toward our modern understanding of the word, literature was “a reading rather than a writing” and “a category of use and condition rather than of production.”41 Williams suggested that the emergence of literature in a modern sense was a class-based event that established “the reading public” as a bourgeois accomplishment. It was at about this time that the general term in older use, poetry or poesy, was supplemented or replaced by literature. Criticism and the development of a concept of taste and discrimination became linked to “the use or (conspicuous) consumption of works, rather than on their production.”42 Subsequent categories of value, like imaginative literature (distinguished from intellectual prose, discursive or factual writing) were also responses to “a new social order: that of capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism.” Distinctions began to be made within categories as well as between them: not all writing was classed as literature, and (“ironically,” Williams thought) where the idea of literature had developed simultaneously with the dissemination of printed books as a mark of the new reading class, now popular writing and “mass culture” were to be distinguished from “literature.” Ideas of “national literature” and of a literary “tradition” were part of this new “recognition of ‘literature’ as a specializing social and historical category.”43
Williams’s account of Marxism and literature was itself written from within a historical, social, and national context, as he readily acknowledged. But these categories of national, social, historical, political, ideological, and other motivating frameworks shaped the debate about “use” from other twentieth-century perspectives as well.
For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, then, the debate about the usefulness of literature was focused on social issues: moral instruction, ethical concerns, and societal and political advancement. Whether the governing ideology was liberalism, conservatism, aestheticism, Marxism, or Western democracy, the arguments for use were deployed in the service of a certain vision of a humane society. From the 1990s onward, various forces converged to completely change the nature of the question. Perhaps most significant was the advent of the Internet, with its 24/7 news cycle and its globalized, democratized mode of user participation. Every reader could be a critic, publishing reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Every poem, every quotation, and every misquotation could now be searched instead of researched. Vast quantities of literature were available online, including facsimiles of rare books once only found in libraries, museums, or monasteries.
A shift in attitudes toward the role of undergraduate education was also under way. A student’s college years were seen increasingly as preparation for life, by which was often meant training in fields that led directly to jobs and careers. Words like assessment, impact, and outcome, all borrowed from the social sciences, became central in discussions of higher education, whether those discussions took place in the public media or in government circles.
Assessment is certainly one of the integral components of criticism, whether it takes the form of a review, a critical article, a book, or a decision whether or not to publish (or reprint). But the rise of this vocabulary and the accompanying bureaucratic—often computerized—processes measuring outcomes and impact of qualitative fields using quantitative methodology has arguably raised the stakes for use in ways that are inappropriate for literature and the arts. This shift has been further compounded by the economic crisis and the insistence on justifying investment and resources in the humanities using the same set of problematic keywords.
The outcome of a work of literature might occasionally be an obscenity trial and the consequent expansion of understanding about free speech, or stream of consciousness, or artistic integrity—or even, in a few rare cases, the fomenting of a revolution. In a more ordinary material sense, perhaps the outcome of a literary work would be publication or production, with or without a suitable monetary reward. But these are not the primary meanings of words like assessment and outcome when they are deployed in the context of an institutional review. As we have already noted, poems and novels do not have answers that are immutably true; they do not themselves constitute a realm of knowledge production. Instead, they raise questions, they provoke thought, they produce ideas and generate arguments, they give rise to more poems and more novels. The impact of a poem might be answered with Emily Dickinson’s phrase about feeling that the top of her head has been taken off, but this is not a reliably replicable result. And yet scientists and social scientists will often join poets, writers, critics, and general readers in saying that literature and the arts are what they are saving the world for.
Concurrent with the national debate about standards and assessment is the question of rhetoric and its power to sway and to persuade. Traditionally, aspiring politicians were encouraged to study literature, oratory, and rhetoric, in the same way that aspiring generals studied famous battles: to know the history, the terrain, and the moves. From Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the great orators of our time have been inspired by the reading of literature—inspired not only in the cadences and references of their own speeches and books but also by the way “words in their best order” made for logic, tautness of formulation, and powerful, effective figures of speech. But modern eloquence is often met with a sense of distrust, criticized as elite and not representative of the average American. It is symptomatic of the current popular ambivalence about the arts of language that Barack Obama’s rhetoric became a flashpoint for both the left and the right.44 For some listeners, his facility with language was itself suspect, while others, stirred by his words, felt visceral pleasure and deep emotional engagement.
The reemergence in the late twentieth century of politicians and world leaders who are also accomplished and honored writers, like Václav Havel, attests to the possibility of a creative synthesis between writing and politics. In a similar way, the public and political use of a work of classic literature, like the printing and distribution of a million free copies of Don Quixote by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’s novel, suggests the pleasures and the dangers of the literary in a world that, like Quixote’s, often seems both out of sync and out of joint.45
The uses of literature themselves grow and change as cultures and technologies grow and change. How we read changes, too—witness the development of the e-book, and the electronic reader. Here is another paradox: although literature is properly useless, the experience of reading it produces essential, and irreplaceable, cultural effects.
W. H. Auden famously declared, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But he did so in the context of a memorial poem for another poet, W. B. Yeats, who was deeply concerned with social and political issues—just like Auden himself.
Revisiting Auden’s great poem evokes the despairing political climate of Europe on the eve of World War II (“Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face”) while it also raises the issue of the impossibility and undesirability of seeking a single message or meaning for poetry.
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
…
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections …
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
…
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives …
A way of happening, a mouth.
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature’s most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation—the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered—is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.