The Use and Abuse of Literature (14 page)

A ballad is a simple song or narrative that tells a story in verse. The category encompasses everything from medieval minstrelsy to printed broadside ballads celebrating or attacking individuals, events, and institutions.

Two familiar examples from Shakespeare will show something of the low or popular status of the ballad in the English Renaissance, and its complicated relationship with true reporting. In
The Winter’s Tale
, the rogue Autolycus presents himself as a peddler selling ballads, several of which, from their description (here offered by a clueless country servant who comically misstates the case), are of the sort that a modern newspaper might call unsuitable for family fare.

The ballads include one about a usurer’s wife who gave birth to twenty moneybags, and another about a woman who was turned into a cold fish because she would not sleep with her lover. The latter one sung by the fish, its veracity attested to by “historical” detail: it “appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids” (276–279). One eager consumer is a shepherdess, who declares that she “love[s] a ballad in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true” (261–262). Her confident assertion might well serve as a warning to readers of all eras
with respect to the automatic credibility of the media, whether printed or electronic. If art is in print, does it mean it is true?

Shakespeare’s other unquestioning believer in the truth-telling capacity of ballads is Bottom the weaver, in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Having experienced with remarkable aplomb and lack of anxiety a physical transformation into an ass, an erotic relationship with the fairy queen, and a subsequent return to fully human form, Bottom decides that the best way to report the events he thinks he has dreamed is to transform them into a ballad. “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream; it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (
MND
, 4.1.212–16). The ballad both contains the marvelous events and defuses them: art here makes the unbelievable believable, converting danger into pleasure.

Ballads began to be collected and published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among these early collectors were Samuel Pepys and Robert Harley, the First Earl of Oxford, and Mortimer, whose “Harleian Collection” is a main part of the British Library. Bishop Thomas Percy’s collected
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765) inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge to publish their
Lyrical Ballads
(1798), which entered the world as what we would now call literature. Sir Walter Scott, similarly intrigued by Percy’s
Reliques
, set about collecting the ballads he would publish in 1802 in
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
. But the popular appeal of Percy’s collection also motivated studies of folklore and folk tales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and in Germany as well as in Scotland, the ballad craze contributed to the growth of what is sometimes called romantic nationalism. It was not until the Harvard professor Francis James Child produced his collection
English and Scottish Popular Ballads
, however, that the study of these ballads became scholarly, in the sense of collecting variants, classifying and numbering them, and (no small factor) establishing them within the vernacular literature tradition taught at a major university. During the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, it became de rigueur to point
toward the authenticity of song lyrics by citing Child’s filing system for ballads. Thus,
Time
magazine, in an article about folksinger Joan Baez, noted that “Folkupmanship absolutely requires that a ballad be referred to as Child 12, Child 200, or Child 209 rather than Lord Randal, Gypsie Laddie, or Geordie.”
¹⁴

So “what isn’t literature?” may depend upon who is asking, and who is answering, and for what ends: institutional, social, aesthetic, and so on. As Susan Stewart observed, “the literary tradition, in rescuing a ‘folk’ tradition, can just as surely kill it off.” For example, “in order to imagine folklore, the literary community of the eighteenth century had to invent a folk, singing and dancing ‘below the level’ of ‘conscious literary art.’ ” Stewart adds, equally perceptively, that this development has hardly ceased. “The advent of modern literary scholarship, with its task of genealogy—the establishment of paternity and lines of influence—and its role in the legislation of originality and authenticity, depended upon the articulation of a ‘folk’ literature that ‘literature’ was not.”
¹⁵
Meantime, the saga of the ballad continues. While one branch of this field has reconverged with the public and with performance, through folk singers, blues ballads, and the ballad traditions of America, Australia, and other geographical areas, another branch has taken on a new energy within academic work, with the founding of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The archive aims to make these fragile objects, often printed on cheap, degradable paper, accessible to scholars worldwide, by transcribing the black-letter font into more easily readable Roman type, and providing online audio recordings, visual facsimiles, and essays that place the ballads in a historical context. Whether any of these uses are “literary” will depend, still, on whether the ballads are being interpreted as signs of the times or as works of art.

Books banned as indecent, obscene, or pornographic are often remanded, at least by those who ban them, to the category of something other
than literature. This has been the case with some of the most critically admired works of the twentieth century, including Joyce’s
Ulysses
, D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
. From the point of view of critics, these were never, arguably, “not literature,” but the customs and postal authorities of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and other nations that have at one time or another outlawed them saw the matter differently. Here again, the question of use (and of abuse) enters the equation, since one of the criteria for a ruling of obscenity has been that a work has “no redeeming social value.” In this case, it is probably unnecessary to add that
abuse
(whether self-abuse, child abuse, or some other kind) is sometimes suggested as the intended
use
, or outcome, of the reading or even the simple possession of the banned book.

Ruling in the case of
United States v. One Book Called
Ulysses in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey memorably declared that the book nowhere exhibited “the leer of the sensualist.”
¹⁶
Defending the frequency with which sex seemed to be on the minds of Joyce’s characters, he observed drily, “it must be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”
¹⁷
And on the question of whether reading the book led to “sexually impure and lustful thoughts,” or provoked “sex impulses,” Woolsey gave it as his opinion that although the effect of
Ulysses
was “undoubtedly somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac,” and that its “net effect” on some readers to whom he himself had given the book was “that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”
¹⁸

Even to quote these phrases indicates how far we have come in accepting the aphrodisiac (and the emetic) as a commonplace effect of reading modern literature—and also how far we have come since the time when such felicitous phrases, generated on behalf of a book the judge had read and admired, would give evidence of an admirable literary style. By contrast, when the U.S. Court of Appeals reviewed Judge Woolsey’s decision, they decided in advance, since they wanted to avoid publicity, that the opinion should, if possible, contain “not a single quotable line.”
¹⁹
In a foreword to the Random House edition of
Ulysses
, Morris Ernst,
the cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that Judge Woolsey had “written an opinion which raises him to the level of former Supreme Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a master of juridical prose.” But we might also want to add that he had mastered the art of the literary review and of literary criticism.

Woolsey found Ulysses “an amazing
tour de force
,” describing it as “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns.” Joyce, he thought, was “a real artist.”
²¹
The question of law on which the judge was asked to rule was whether the book was written with pornographic “intent”—“that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.” This he emphatically denied.
Ulysses
was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.”
²²
It was not obscene under the law.

By comparison, we might note that one of the judges in an earlier 1920 New York court case about the publication of the “Nausicaa” episode of
Ulysses
refused to allow passages to be read aloud in the courtroom because there were women present—including, as it happened, some of the editors of the book.
²³

The standard in the
Ulysses
case in the U.S. in 1933 was whether or not the work was written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity. In the U.K.
in 1960, the decision about
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
rested, according to the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, on whether the work in question had literary merit. A group of recognized literary experts—Helen Gardner, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams—were called to testify. The chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the members of the jury whether it was the kind of book “you would even wish your wife or servants to read.”

This class breakdown doubtless contributed to the ridicule of the prosecution as out of touch with the times, although the mention of “your wife or servants” seems particularly and ironically germane to the plot of the novel. In any case, what was chiefly deplored was the danger such a novel posed to the moral character of readers. The defense, in general, preferred to move the debate away from the dangers of reading and toward either a standard of literary merit that presumably stood apart from and above the social, or a broad and impassioned articulation of the importance of freedom of expression. The jurors in the case returned a verdict of not guilty—and the 1961 Penguin edition of the novel was dedicated to them.

In both
Ulysses
and
Lady Chatterley
the index of the literary was determinative. Judge and jurors attempted to decide whether the works had literary quality and were written with literary intent. Probably the most cited piece of literature to come out of the trials was Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” with its well-known opening stanza:

Similar issues had been raised in connection with Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
, which was banned in the United Kingdom and in France before its eventual publication. In an interview with the London
Times
, the novelist Graham Greene had called
Lolita
one of the best novels of 1955. The editor of the
Sunday Express
immediately denounced it as “sheer unrestrained pornography” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Were these books literature, or were they “filth”? This was the question bandied in the court of public opinion and argued in the courts of law. From a present-day perspective, it would be possible to regard the contretemps as quaint, signs of a very different time. (Morris Ernst indeed compared the lifting of the ban on
Ulysses
to the end of Prohibition.)
²⁵

For these novels,
literary
was a qualitative honorific, borne out by subsequent critical judgment, and the binary alternative set up by the law as the opposite of obscene. Judge Woolsey’s decision, as we saw, was itself an extended and effective piece of literary criticism. All three books are now regularly taught, and highly praised, in college courses. But what about works with a less certain or less acclaimed literary status?