The Use and Abuse of Literature (43 page)

Animal Farm
was published in 1946. Six years later, there appeared another book about writing and unwriting on an animal farm, this time with a distinctly uplifting tone: E. B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web
. Written by a major contributor to
The New Yorker
, this “children’s book” offered the story of a spider who labored to write messages in her web in order to save her friend Wilbur the pig from slaughter. From “Some Pig” to “Terrific” to “Radiant” and “Humble,” the words that “magically” appeared in the web caught the attention of farmers, fairgoers, and the national media. “Right spang in the middle of the web there were the words ‘Some Pig,’ ” Farmer Zuckerman tells his wife.

It’s not necessary to see
Charlotte’s Web
as a deliberate response to
Animal Farm
in order to note the several connections between them: mysterious writing, a clueless pig hero rather than a manipulative pig tyrant and villain, a team of animals of various kinds working together, a frame story involving thoughtful rather than scheming humans. Both texts, to be sure, have formal closure: in Orwell’s powerful satire, the pigs and men become visually indistinguishable (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which”),
³⁰
while in White’s book, despite the heroic death of Charlotte, her spider offspring live on, and so does Wilbur. “Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.”
³¹
In Orwell, animals become more like men, to their detriment; in White, men become more like animals, to their benefit. What remains “open”
rather than “closed” however, is not only the ambivalent power of writing but also the question of interpretation. Political satire? Children’s story? Moral fable? Through the presence in both novels of the manifest theme of writing, reading, and interpretation, each becomes itself an allegory of the dangerous activity it describes and enacts.

This Möbius-strip structure—the shape of a surface with only one side that can be formed into a continuous loop—is a familiar image from modernist art and sculpture. It was a favorite, for example, of M. C. Escher, as well as a recurring presence in science fiction and time-travel narratives. This image goes back to ancient times, when it was associated, as we’ve seen, with the ouroboros, the serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. Is this a figure of closure, or of its impossibility? The riddling form suggests that the answer to both is yes.

For a literary practice that turns this set of ideas and concepts to brilliant account, we might look to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. His short stories, essays, and parables render the sense of history, and literary history, a
mise en abyme
(or, as the title of his collection puts it, a labyrinth) in which ends and beginnings, befores and afters, are put in serious, witty, and profound question. The opening paragraph of “The Library of Babel” sounds strikingly similar to the Piranesi vision of staircases leading ever onward: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.” Borges’s compelling story, which has been seen to predict the vastness of the information network and has been subjected to a philosophical analysis by W. V. Quine, concludes with a meditation by the narrator:

As André Maurois comments, “in Borges’ narratives the usual distinction between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between the world of literature and the world of the reader.”
³³
This does not necessarily mean that there
is
no distinction between them but, rather, that Borges plays with consummate skill upon the apparent differences. His stories end where they “ought” to begin; his narrators and heroes find themselves not only quoting other authors but, in the process, becoming them. In his works, characters discover that history copies literature and not the other way around. Here is a discourse—or, if you prefer, a fiction—of literature as a first-order phenomenon, offering readers a chance to rethink priorities, whether we understand “priority” to refer to chronology or to importance. Thus the short parable entitled “Everything and Nothing” closes with the voice of the Lord speaking from a whirlwind to a figure heretofore unidentified in the text: “I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”
³⁴

Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas
(1759), a philosophical romance about the pursuit of happiness, ends with a chapter titled “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” The phrase seems apposite for Dr. Johnson’s rather stoical account (the prince, his sister, and their philosopher friend decide that none of their wishes can be obtained, and resolve to return home). But it also strikes me as a fitting way to conclude my much more optimistic narrative.

We sometimes talk about literature and language in a figural way: for
example, as an enfilade—doors opening onto other doors that open onto other doors; a vista that stretches out between rows of trees into the infinite distance—or a
mise en abyme
, a term from heraldry describing a shield that bears at its heart the image of another shield. Like the enfilade, the
mise en abyme
is an image not only for self-reflection within a literary work, but also, equally powerfully, for the process of reading, which is never-ending, always opening outward into another scene. The device itself tempts the eye and the mind to move beyond what it can see, to an imagined and imaginable space that is both a plurality of meanings and a future of thought.

Literary interpretation, like literature, does not seek answers or closure. A multiplicity of persuasive and well-argued “meanings” does not mean the death or loss of meaning, but rather the living presence of the literary work in culture, society, and the individual creative imagination. To say that closure is impossible is to acknowledge the richness and fecundity of both the reading and the writing process.

The use of literature begins here.