The Use and Abuse of Literature (22 page)

What is “not criticism” to Virginia Woolf? In this specific case, it is what we might call free association—or rather, because nothing is really free (of context, of motivation, of effect), associative thinking. From “Egyptian” and “Hebrew,” presumably, Hazlitt’s mind moves not only to palm trees in the margins but also to “camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years,” to “the dry desert of learning,” the “insatiable thirst of knowledge,” the “ruined monuments of antiquity,” “the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks),” and so on. No piece of poetry, no historic fact, no detail from the text of an old author is cited—what the reader gets instead is the mind of the essayist, dreaming, or, as Woolf says, “taking the liberties of a lover.” In Hazlitt, we may say, if we like, that this is delightful or, if we like, that it is romantic or, if we like, that the essayist has earned the right to be fanciful—or, if we prefer, that this is indeed “not criticism” and that we wish he would return to the critical task at hand. For Hazlitt, presumably, all such attitudes are plausible. But what if a critic today undertook such a set of associations, “taking the liberty of a lover”? With a published critic, readers are likely to find it of some interest—if, for example, such a reverie were to appear as a back-page essay in
The New York Times Rook Review
. But would we allow such liberties to a sophomore English major? What is the relationship of this kind of love, that permits itself to wander far from the textual starting point and the study of literature?

Woolf’s piece on Hazlitt was itself a piece of criticism: she was reviewing his collected works, first for the
New York Herald Tribune
, and then, in a slightly revised form, for
The Times Literary Supplement.
⁴⁰
But what is also striking, and typically witty, is Woolf’s iteration of the idea of love
in connection with Hazlitt, an author celebrated for having written an essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”
⁴¹
—an essay Woolf never mentions in her review, but that seems to inform it nonetheless. Hazlitt contended that love and hate were closely allied in literature and in life. He suggested that the popularity of the Scottish novel in his time was related to its harking back to old feuds, while part of tragedy’s appeal is that it permits the resurgence of primal feelings that refinement has compelled society to repress. “As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity: ‘Off, you lendings!’ The wild beast resumes its sway within us.”
⁴²

The pleasure of hating in this sense was a
literary
pleasure, however it might also function in politics or in social life. As such, it was also, arguably, a
useful
pleasure, in that it allowed for vicarious action, strong emotion without visible repercussion, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings diverted, (almost) harmlessly, into the activity of reading—and into the development, without conscious awareness of its psychic utility, of a best-seller list and a literary canon.

Sigmund Freud made a similar argument when he came to describe the difference between Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex
and Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. Oedipus acts, however unwittingly, in killing his father and marrying his mother. Hamlet, famously, delays, contemplating the killing of the king (and, in Freud’s reading, having incestuous feelings for his mother), but failing to act. Inaction, mental conflict, delay; these were evidence of “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.”
⁴³
Discomforting as these conflicts might be for the patient, their results when it came to literature were more ambiguously interesting. Repression produces neurosis; neurosis produces a compellingly conflicted modern character, torn between desire and inhibition—and so, by implication, becomes instrumental in the development of modern literature.

But this is an argument about the tensions
within a literary character
. What possible relevance can it have to the question of pleasure and unpleasure, or love and hate, when it comes to the writer and the reader? What’s love got to do with
that
? This, too, was a topic that Freud took up, notably in an essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,”
first delivered as a lecture in the rooms of a Viennese bookseller and publisher and later printed in a literary magazine.
⁴⁴
If a daydreamer were to communicate his fantasies directly, Freud suggests, “he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures”—indeed his fantasies (wrote the analyst in a pretabloid, pre–Jerry Springer age) would “repel us or at least leave us cold.”

This displacement of personal fantasies into an author’s imaginative writing speaks to the popularity of what is sometimes called personal writing—the appeal of memoirs, confessions, inspirational stories, survivor’s tales, and other self-revealing narratives that collectively constitute a genre of literary schadenfreude omnipresent in today’s tabloid journalism. At the same time, Freud’s erotic theory of literary enjoyment, the idea that “the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure” which a writer offers us in the presentation provides a kind of
fore-pleasure
prior to a “release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychological sources,” proposes yet another kind of answer to the question of literature as love.

In the middle years of the twentieth century, the methods of New Criticism (close textual analysis, attention to word choice, verse forms, etc.) were the common pedagogy of college and university English departments, and the standard mode of instruction in grade, middle, and secondary schools. Poems were analyzed as poems, and more often than not, as reflexive objects that had poetry as their not so hidden topic. A good short example of this is Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son”:

The son’s name, like the father’s, was Benjamin, which means, in Hebrew,
son of the right hand
. But the right hand is, by implication, also Jonson’s writing hand, and the word
poetry
comes from the Greek word that means making. So the making of the son and the making of the poem are parallel acts, and in this case, the one substitutes for the other. The embedded inscription, “Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece
of poetry,” gestures, in a way that is technically called
deixis
, pointing or indicating, to the fact that the poem itself functions like a funeral monument. (“Here” is the sign, often found on actual monuments.) The enjambed line (“Here doth lie / Ben Jonson”) suggests both a colon and a question (
who lies here?
), while the use of “his,” in what is now an archaic form (“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” rather than “Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry”), allows for a double meaning: what lies “here” is both the poet’s “best piece of poetry,” or making, and also Ben Jonson, the father and the son. The personal adjectives and personal pronouns in the lines that follow (“for whose sake”; “all his vows”; “what he loves”) continue the willed conflation or confusion of father and son. “On My First Son” becomes the monument; the word “on,” typical of epigrams, essays, and other short pieces in the period, is also a pointer gesturing toward the poem. (This is what rhetoricians call deictis.)

This kind of analysis will be familiar to any reader of midcentury critical classics like W. K. Wimsatt’s
The Verbal Icon
or Cleanth Brooks’s
The Well-Wrought Urn
, the titles of which provide examples of the phenomenon they describe. (Brooks’s title comes from John Donne’s “The Canonization.” Two other “urn” poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” became similar iconic touchstones for close readers of poems about poetry.) I’d like to point out a number of corollaries to this method of reading, which is the one in which I was trained and which I still find deeply satisfying: first, the method validates those works that fit its methodology. Thus, poems about poetry, or poems that could be read as poems about poetry, including most so-called metaphysical verse, gained high status, including the poems of Andrew Marvell, many Romantic lyrics and Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Shakespeare’s sonnets and “Phoenix and Turtle,” and a good deal of modern poetry, from Yeats to Wallace Stevens.

Conversely, poems that seemed to resist or to deny the validity of this reading method—like, for example, Cavalier lyrics or Byron’s
Don Juan
—tended at the time to be rated lower on the scale. And poems that were either narrative (Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, Crabbe’s
The Village
) or epic (Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Pope’s
Dunciad
or
Rape of the Lock
) were either quarried for verbal gems that could be
explicated as if they were lyrics, or else subjected to a different regime of criticism, one that treated them like works of fiction (plot, character, etc.) or works of “influence” (Milton echoes and rewrites Spenser, who echoes and rewrites Virgil; Wordsworth and all the Romantics echo and rewrite Milton; Stevens rewrites Wordsworth, etc.).

A sense of boredom—the New Critical reading, while elegant, was at the same time predictable—and limitation led to the resuscitation and reinvigoration of other critical modes, often versions of the same modes so strongly repudiated by the New Critics: historical, contextual, biographical, editorial, and overtly political or overtly religious readings, that depended as much upon context or history as the actual language on the page. No orthodoxy of reading is without its blind spots. New Criticism’s rigorous pointing toward the text needed to be corrected or at least was augmented when the next generation of readers and critics readmitted history to the realm of possible literary evidence. Deconstruction, an extension of rather than a replacement for New Criticism, looked precisely for the blind spots, the apparent discordances, opacities, or unresolvabilities of the literary text, rather than the moments of concord or pleasurable but controllable ambiguity. The deconstructive
aporia
—not a new or fanciful coinage but an old and honored word from the history of rhetoric (“Aporia, or the Doubtfull, [so] called … because oftentimes we will seem to cast perils, and make doubt of things when by a plaine manner of speech wee might affirme or deny him”
¹
)—was, in fact, the counterpart of the New Critic’s ambiguity, the desirable goal and end point of a literary analysis. Aporia, as perplexing difficulty, has a long history of usage and has only recently—and unhistorically—been reclassified as critical jargon. This blind spot, or aporia, is analogous to Freud’s description of the “navel of the dream,” the place where “it reaches down into the unknown.”
²

Literature produces, and is in turn produced by, modes of critical analysis. Literature reads us as much as we read literature. As certain kinds of critical or social thinking become popular, the kind of literature they are effective in analyzing become the kind of literature we recognize as good or even great.

It is potentially risky to paraphrase any critic’s words on the subject of paraphrasing. Nonetheless, it’s a risk worth taking, both because Cleanth Brooks’s essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase” poses a deft and cogent argument well worth revisiting, and also because Brooks twice goes out of his way to discuss, in signifying quotation marks, the “uses of poetry.” Poetry, says Brooks—and here he does not wish to distinguish poetry from other imaginative writing, like novels or plays—cannot be reduced to, or summed up in, a statement, proposition, or message. “What the poem ‘says’ ” is not only not equivalent to the poem or its value; it is also ultimately undeterminable because of vital issues of tone, style, and irony. “The paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem.”
³
“The ‘prose-sense’ of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung … it does not represent the ‘inner’ structure or the ‘essential’ structure or the ‘real’ structure of the poem.”
⁴
In fact, he suggests, “one may sum up by saying that most of the distempers of criticism come about from yielding to the temptation to take certain remarks which we make
about
the poem—statements about what it says or about what truth it gives or about what formulations it illustrates—for the essential core of the poem itself.”

For Brooks, poems are not received truth but “parables”
⁵
about poetry. It is this self-referential element to his formalism that has led some successors to feel that his readings have a certain family similarity, that they all wind up in a similar place, affirming the value of poetry and gesturing toward the iconicity of the poem itself, the “well-wrought urn” of Donne’s “Canonization” that provides Brooks with the title of his essay collection. But Brooks goes out of his way in this essay and elsewhere to insist that he is not interested in a “special ‘use of poetry’—some therapeutic value for the sake of which poetry is to be cultivated.”
⁶
In a short manifesto in
The Kenyon Review
, originally entitled “My Credo,” he insists that “literature is not a surrogate for religion” and “the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.”
⁷
Formalists, he says,
assume an ideal reader because, in taking into account “a lowest common denominator” of possible readings, “we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology.”
⁸
And while Brooks acknowledges that different critics may have different goals, from editing texts to writing book reviews to presenting papers to the Modern Language Association, he is genially dismissive of both “applied” readings and the supposedly less “drab,” “brighter, more amateur, and more ‘human’ criticism” that flourishes “in the classroom presided over by the college lecturer of infectious enthusiasm, in the gossipy Book-of-the-Month-Club bulletins, and in the columns of the
Saturday Review of Literature.
”
⁹
Brooks doesn’t think these versions do much harm, but nor do they do much good. “The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism; nor does an estimate of its effects. Good literature is more than effective rhetoric applied to true ideas.”
¹⁰
“Literature is not inimical to ideas. It thrives upon ideas but it does not present ideas patly and neatly.”
¹¹
Insofar as literature has “uses,” it is the task of the critic to analyze the ways that ideas
perform
in literary works, not how works “exemplify” or “produce” them.