The Use and Abuse of Literature (18 page)

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”:

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.

To say you love literature would seem to be a prerequisite for life as a teacher and critic. But it’s also the case that when students, buffs, and fans profess that they love Shakespeare or they love Jane Austen—the two most frequently mentioned love objects, in my experience—the teacher often worries as much as she rejoices. Love is not a critical stance; it does not necessarily welcome interpretations, especially multiple interpretations. What Freud accurately called “the overestimation of the object”—the idea that the loved one is imbued with extra value, with superlatives, even with perfection, as a way of ensuring that the lover stays in love—is sometimes a way of avoiding analysis and critique rather than pursuing them.

Like many other people who teach and write about literature for a living (the biographer R. W. B. Lewis once memorably said to me that “teaching Shakespeare was taking money for jam”), I’ve often encountered undergraduate and graduate students who were concerned that literary criticism, literary analysis, and literary theory would take away their pleasure in reading rather than making it richer and fuller. Happily, that tends to be a brief moment rather than a lasting one, since the delights of literary immersion, whether through an examination of imagery, symbolism, prosody, rhetoric and syntax, historical context, and/or performance, tend almost always to produce new ways of loving familiar texts as well as encounters with new texts to love. Still, there are moments of evasion, avoidance, disavowal: “I don’t want to
spoil
it for myself.” But there is no cause for concern. Poems, plays, novels, critical essays, aphorisms—these are all vivid, vigorous, healthy, tough, resistant: they will survive. Dismembering them through analysis and
interpretation is one of many ways of engaging with and remembering them. Works of literature are not soap bubbles or daylilies or meteors or mirages: they will last, indeed much longer than any reader or critic.

The idea of an “English major” is a fairly recent development, as institutional histories go, dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1850s, wrote Andrew Dickson White, later the cofounder and first president of Cornell University, “there was never a single lecture on any subject in literature, either ancient or modern … As regards the great field of modern literature, nothing whatever was done. In the English literature and language, every man was left to his own devices.”
¹
Frederick Barnard, who would later become president of Columbia College, reported that he gained what literary training he could, not in Yale’s courses, but in the literary societies.
²
The novelist Henry James, who spent a brief time at Harvard Law School (but took no degree), said, “A student might read the literature of our own language privately, but it was not a subject of instruction … Professor [Francis James] Child provided an introduction to the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer. There, so far as English literature was to be considered, the College stopped.”
³
Child was then the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; it was not until 1876 that he was appointed the first, and at that time the only, professor of English at Harvard. From 1834 to 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres, where, in addition to teaching English, he supervised students in Italian, Spanish, French, and German, as well as offering, or being prepared to offer, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.