The Use and Abuse of Literature (46 page)

1.
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,”
Four Quartets
in
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 118.

2.
Errol Morris, “Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One),” as cited in Week in Review, Op-Extra,
The New York Times
, April 6, 2008.

3.
Sir Philip Sidney,
Defence of Poesie
, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London: Macmillan, 1962), 33.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Ibid., 18. The truth value of “poesie” (by which Sidney means all imaginative writing, whether in verse or in prose) lay in its verisimilitude, not in its verifiability.

6.
Motoko Rich and Brian Stelter, “As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers,”
The New York Times
, December 31, 2008, C1.

7.
Gabriel Sherman, “The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold,”
The New Republic
, December 25, 2008.

8.
Harris Salomon, president of Atlantic Overseas Pictures, which was scheduled to produce a film based on the story
Flower at the Fence
. Quoted in Sherman, “Greatest Love Story.” The objects of Salomon’s attack included not only Lipstadt but also Kenneth Walzer, director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University.

9.
Motoko Rich, “Publisher Cancels Holocaust Memoir,”
The New York Times
, December 28, 2008.

10.
York House Press, “Publishers’ Statement Regarding New Herman Rosenblat Book,” January 2, 2009.

11.
Jacques Derrida,
Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29.

12.
Melissa Trujillo, “Writer Admits Holocaust Book Is Not True,” Associated Press, February 29, 2008.

13.
Daniel Mendelsohn, “Stolen Suffering,” Week in Review, Op-Ed,
The New York Times
, March 9, 2008.

14.
Mimi Read, “A Refugee from Gangland,”
The New York Times
, February 28, 2008.

15.
Anne Bernays, letter to the editor,
The New York Times
, March 7, 2008. Others wrote to the same effect, including Corinne Demas, the author of a memoir of her own, as well as books of fiction for children and adults. Demas, who teaches fiction writing at Wellesley College, noted that “readers will dismiss a work of fiction
when the character’s story doesn’t ring true, but call that same work a memoir, and they’re gullible,” then went on to suggest that “Given the current appetite for sensational memoirs, it’s not surprising that young writers eager to be heard will eschew the tradition of fiction—where everything depends upon the power of the prose—for one where they can easily capture an audience through their titillating content.” Corinne Demas, letter to the editor,
The New York Times
, March 7, 2008.

16.
Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his “novel—er, memoir.” Mendelsohn, “Stolen Suffering.”

17.
Daniel Defoe,
Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
(London: printed for and sold by W. Chetwood, at Cato’s-Head, in Russel-street, Covent-Garden, and T. Edling, at the Prince’s-Arms, over-against-Exeter-Change in the Strand, 1722).

18.
Jill Lepore also cites the example of
Robinson Crusoe
in an article on history and fiction, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,”
The New Yorker
, March 24, 2008, 79–82.

19.
Samuel Richardson,
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
, eds. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 7. Prefatory letter attributed to the Reverend William Webster. For Richardson as “editor,” see 3, 4, 6, 9, 412.

20.
James W. Pennebaker,
Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval
(Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Press, 2004), and
Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions
(New York: Guildford Press, 1997).

21.
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud,
Studies on Hysteria
, vol. 2,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 8.

22.
Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, September 21, 1897, in
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904
, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 264.

23.
Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism
(New York: Columbia Univresity Press, 1984), 69.

24.
“Best-Seller List,”
The New York Times Book Review
, March 9, 2008.

25.
All published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, a trade press.

26.
Drake Bennett, “House of Cards.”
Boston Globe
, April 6, 2008, C2.

27.
Ibid.

28.
Ibid.

29.
Ibid.

30.
Matthew Gilbert, “Blurring in ‘Billionaires’ Is No Accident,”
The Boston Globe
, July 19, 2009, N1.

31.
Janet Maslin, “Harvard Pals Grow Rich: Chronicling Facebook Without Face Time,”
The New York Times
, July 20, 2009, C4.

32.
Motoko Rich, “New CUNY Center to Focus on the Art of the Biography,”
The New York Times
, February 23, 2008.

33.
Ibid.

34.
Ibid.

35.
Ibid.

36.
Plutarch,
Life of Alexander
, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 3.

37.
For example, the “Epistle Dedicatory” to Nicholas Harpsfield’s biography of
Thomas More, in which he says that the biographer presents a “lively image” of a human being that compares favorably to the work of a sculptor or a painter, or Izaak Walton’s biography of John Donne, where he will present
“the best plain Picture”
of Donne’s life and, using the language of drawing, the most accurate that
“my artless Pensil, guided by the hand of truth, could presnt.”
Judith H. Anderson,
Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 15.

38.
David Hume, “Of the Study of History,” in
Essays Moral, Political, Literary
(1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987). Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” 81.

39.
Anderson,
Biographical Truth
, 2.

40.
Ibid., 69.

41.
Ibid., 1.

42.
Ibid., 69.

43.
Julia Blackburn,
The Three of Us: A Family Story
(New York: Pantheon, 2008). “100 Notable Books of 2008,”
The New York Times
, December 7, 2008.

44.
Elizabeth McCracken,
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
(New York: Little, Brown, 2008).

45.
For example, chosen at random from a biography sitting on my desk at the moment, p. 340, “I intend no sacrilege …”
Variety
article by Azariah Rapoport, December 18, 1963, or—just below it—p. 340, “Unashamed vulgarity …”
Boston Globe
, February 1, 1964. Humphrey Burton,
Leonard Bernstein
(New York: Doubleday, 1994), 562.

46.
Sometimes, however, the absence of footnotes leads to difficulty for the publisher or the author. See, for example, Laura Secor, “Muse of the Beltway Book,”
The New York Times
, June 27, 2004; Timothy Noah, “How to Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic,”
Slate
, January 28, 2002.

47.
Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” originally published in the
New York Herald Tribune
, October 30, 1927. Reprinted in Woolf,
Collected Essays
(London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 230.

48.
Ibid., 231.

49.
Ibid., 229.

50.
Ibid.

51.
Ibid., 231.

52.
Ibid.

53.
Ibid., 234.

54.
Virginia Woolf,
Flush: A Biography
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 82.

55.
Ibid., 175.

56.
Lytton Strachey,
Queen Victoria, 1
921 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 125–26.

57.
Correspondence of Sarah Spencer Lady Lyttelton, 1787–1870
, ed. Mrs. Hugh Wyndham (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1912), 303.

58.
Ibid., 354.

59.
Ibid., 402.

60.
Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in Woolf,
Collected Essays
(London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 223.

61.
Lytton Strachey,
Eminent Victorians, 1
918 (London and New York: Penguin, 1986), 1–2.

62.
Ibid.

63.
Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 4, 223.

64.
Ibid., 4, 224.

65.
Ibid., 4, 226.

66.
John Updike,
On Literary Biography
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 36.

67.
N. Janet Malcolm,
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
(New York: Knopf, 1994), 154, 24.

68.
David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 175.

69.
Janet Browne,
Charles Darwin: Voyaging
(New York: Knopf, 1995), 391.

70.
Laura Hillenbrand,
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
(New York: Random House, 2001).

71.
David Shipman,
Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend
(New York: Hyperion, 1993), 155.

72.
Steven Bach,
Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend
(New York: William Morrow, 1992), 229.

73.
Thomas C. Reeves,
A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Free Press, 1991), 272.

74.
Anne Sewell,
Black Beauty
(London and New York: Puffin, 2008), 2.

75.
Hillenbrand,
Seabiscuit
, 41, 58.

76.
Ibid., 107.

77.
From Jonathan Miles, “All the Difference,” a review of Brian Hall,
Fall of Frost
(New York: Viking, 2008), in
The New York Times Book Review
, May 11, 2008, 14.

78.
René Wellek and Austin Warren,
Theory of Literature
, 3rd edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 80.

79.
Ibid., 78.

80.
Ibid., 76–77.

81.
Ibid., 77. I have made a similar argument in an essay called “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” in Marjorie Garber,
Profiling Shakespeare
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 278.

82.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” trans. Walter Kaufmann,
The Portable Nietzsche
(New York: Penguin, 1954), 46.

83.
Ibid.

84.
Victor Brombert, “Pass the Madeleines,”
The New York Times
, November 9, 1997.

85.
Michiko Kakutani, Books of the Times,
The New York Times
, August 9, 2002. Her remarks are prefatory to a discussion of a subsequent book by the same author,
The Art of Travel
.

86.
Pierre Bayard,
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
, trans. Jeffrey Mehlmann (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2007).

87.
Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush,” which first appeared in
Natural History
in 1966, and which Bayard cites from the Internet, is a classic account, and appears in the first essay in David Scott Kastan’s edited collection of
Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet
, published in 1995. (London: G. K. Hall; Prentice Hall International).

88.
Stuart Kelly,
The Book of Lost Books
(New York: Random House, 2005).

1.
Hugh Blair,
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
, eds. Linda Ferreia-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 7.

2.
John McCain, presidential debate, October 15, 2008, Hofstra University; Brian Ross and Avni Patel, “Buried in Eloquence, Obama Contradictions About Pastor,” March 19, 2008, at
http://abcnews.go.com
; George Will, “Obama’s Eloquence Fatigue,”
The Washington Post
, August 3, 2008; “Dem Race: Clinton Says Obama Offers Words, Not Actions,”
USA Today
, February 20, 2008.

3.
For one of many available analyses, see Kelly Nuxoll, “Palin’s Sentences Lack Transparency and Accountability,”
The Huffington Post
, October 3, 2008.

4.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157.

5.
Ibid., 3.

6.
In
Metaphors We Live By
, all of the headings are capitalized—THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, LOVE IS MAGIC—I find it somewhere between distracting signposting and baby talk and have therefore silently converted all of the capitalization to less distracting quotation marks.

7.
Lakoff and Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By
, 245.

8.
Ibid., 18.

9.
George Lakoff,
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2002), 153.

10.
Vladimir Propp,
Morphology of the Folktale
, 1928, trans. Laurence Scott (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1958), and “Boris Eichenbaum,” in
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 1,060.

11.
Charles E. Reagan,
Paul Ricouer: His Life and His Work
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54. Stephen J. Gould,
Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History
(New York: Random House, 1996), 443–45.

12.
The Poetics of Aristotle
, trans. and commentary by Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 55.

13.
Aristotle,
Rhetoric: The Complete Works of Aristotle
, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2,240.

14.
Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Sheldon Sacks, ed.,
On Metaphor
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 29.

15.
Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Sacks,
On Metaphor, 11
, 15.

16.
Ibid., 14, 19.

17.
Ibid., 19–20.

18.
Andrzej Warmniski,
Readings in Interpretation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), lv.

19.
Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in
Lives of the English Poets
(Dutton: New York, 1968), 11, 12.

20.
John Dryden, “Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire,” in
Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry
(1667) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 6.

21.
Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” 12.

22.
John Donne, “Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford,” in John Donne,
The Complete English Poems
, ed. Albert
James Smith (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 35–40; Abraham Cowley,
The Mistress
(1656).

23.
Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” 12–13.

24.
T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,”
Selected Essays
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1932, 1960), 247.

25.
Ibid., 248.

26.
Ibid., 250.

27.
Ibid., 242–43.

28.
T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality,” in
Collected Poems 1909–1935
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 32–33.

29.
George Lakoff and Mark Turner,
More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xi.

30.
Ibid.

31.
W. S. Merwin and J. Mouissaieff Masson, trans.
Sanskrit Love Poetry
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), reprinted as
The Peacock’s Egg
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981); Lakoff and Turner,
More Than Cool Reason
, 60, 70, 89, 91, 101, 102; Jerome Rothenberg, ed.,
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 40.

32.
Lakoff and Turner,
More Than Cool Reason
, 92.

33.
Ibid., 90.

34.
Ibid., xii.

35.
Ibid., 267.

36.
To underscore this idea and its importance, we might recall Nietzsche’s image of the “mobile army” discussed in
chapter 7
, a passage that Lakoff and Turner dispute—characterizing it as the “It’s All Metaphor Position.”

Paul de Man’s reading of this passage is indicative, since he sees it as a reminder of “the figurality of all language”:

Paul de Man,
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 111.

37.
John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in
Selected Letters of John Keats
, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54.

38.
De Man’s comments on metaphor were written some years prior to the emergence of the cognitive theories popularized by Lakoff and his collaborators, but they nonetheless provide a thoughtful counterpoint, since De Man is concerned chiefly with stressing “the futility of trying to repress the rhetorical structure of texts in the name of uncritically preconceived text models such as transcendental teleologies or, at the other end of the spectrum, mere codes.” Contrary to the primacy claimed by cognitive theorists for stories and parables as the building blocks of mind, De Man offers the possibility that “temporal articulations, such as narratives
or histories, are a correlative of rhetoric and not the reverse.” Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” 16, 19, 27, 28.

39.
Rosalie Colie,
Shakespeare’s Living Art
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 11.

40.
Thus, King Lear’s despairing “In such a night / To shut me out” harks back, in her view, to the lyrical conversation between Jessica and Lorenzo in act 5 of
The Merchant of Venice
, and both are indebted to the classical “O qualis nox?” Colie, 11
–12
.

41.
Harold Bloom,
The Anxiety of Influence
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 94.

42.
Ibid., 70.