The Use and Abuse of Literature (19 page)

When English was taught in the university, it was often in the form of historical surveys (“without reference, necessarily, to the texts of the classics themselves”
⁴
) or the study of philology and rhetoric. The first real courses in English were not offered at Harvard until 1872–73 (long after Henry James was a student), and even then two of the three courses
were in Anglo-Saxon and in the history and grammar of the English language. Shakespeare, a popular subject for undergraduates, became a Harvard course in 1876, but even so, the reading and discussion of English poetry and of Shakespeare continued to be largely relegated either to family training at home (or through tutors) or to social clubs on college campuses. Love of literature, when it existed—as manifestly it did, since the period produced numerous writers and poets of distinction—was a personal pleasure, not an academic goal. Was literature useful—or useless? For Emerson, Longfellow, and Henry James, it was invaluable; they lived it and breathed it. Longfellow retired from teaching and devoted himself to writing once his income from publishing permitted him to do so. James decided he did not want to study law (and as we’ve seen, he couldn’t have studied English or literature in the sense we understand those fields today). Instead, he traveled in Europe, wrote fiction, and began to contribute to magazines like
The Nation
and
The Atlantic Monthly
.

In the novels of Jane Austen, both women and men read aloud for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of their listeners. In
Mansfield Park
(1814), Fanny Price is inclined to resist the too easy manner of Henry Crawford, but she has to acknowledge his skill as a performer when he takes up the “volume of Shakespeare” she herself had been reading aloud to entertain the indolent and demanding Lady Bertram:

Even more striking is the way in which courtship is accomplished through reading aloud in the posthumously published
Persuasion
(1818), where
the flighty Louisa Musgrove, confined to a sickbed because of an accident, is wooed, and won, by the widower Captain Benwick, described as “a clever man, a reading man,” who sits by her bed and reads her poetry. However dissimilar they might be, muses the heroine, Anne Elliot, they would become more alike over time. Louisa “would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry.”
⁶

Reading aloud, taking books from the public library, participating in book clubs and reading groups—these were not only modes of self-improvement but also opportunities for pleasure and sometimes for romance. As they are still today. Oprah’s Book Club and thousands of individually organized book groups invite lovers of literature (or “lovers of books”) to participate in weekly or monthly discussions. Some of these groups read best sellers; others read classics or books chosen to reflect on a central theme. Special-topic areas, like African-American women’s reading groups and gay men’s reading groups, have formed, and are flourishing, around the country and the world. Lists of book-group favorites are posted, and authors of popular novels and self-help books periodically make themselves available to attend sessions. Dozens of Shakespeare reading groups advertise online and by personal invitation offering an opportunity to read the plays aloud. And many successful adult professionals, having made careers in fields like law, medicine, economics, and technology, return to extension and continuing education courses, in person or online, to pursue their interest in, and love of, literature.

The number of American college students graduating with B.A. degrees in English, which in 1950 was about 17,000, or 4 for every 100 bachelor’s degrees, increased in the next decade, peaking in 1971 (when there were more than 64,000 English graduates nationwide, or 7.66 per hundred total bachelor’s degrees). From that point it began to decline, with a minor uptick in the early nineties. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the percentages had returned to the level of fifty years previously, 4 in 100.
⁷
(Meantime, other humanities fields were experiencing
even more serious declines.) By 2006–7 the number had decreased further, to 3.62 of every 100 bachelor’s degrees.

A variety of reasons for this decline can be offered or guessed at, including the economy, information technology, the lure of lucrative careers in the financial sector, the great expansion of academic fields beyond the basic subject areas of midcentury, the national push for science education, and so on. Many English (and other modern literature) majors always planned to go on to law school or other kinds of professional training after college, but the old truism—that a degree in English made you seem literate and well grounded in general education—was gradually replaced by a new truism, that the English major was useless. It was only a short step to thinking that perhaps this made it somehow self-indulgent, whereas ambitious young students ought to be networking, laying the groundwork for a legitimate career, developing marketable skills—in short, thinking ahead. If they thought far enough ahead, they might envisage themselves enrolling in evening courses or cultural tour groups in an attempt to get back in touch with their interests in literature.

It’s always been difficult to explain to administrators and fund-raisers why criticism and theory are research. Undergraduate education in the literary classics is considered a part of general education, but specialization, while normative for intellectual advancement in the social sciences and the sciences, has often been looked upon with skepticism or suspicion when conducted in the humanities. Epithets like
political
or
ideological
(terms that are, incidentally, perfectly acceptable categories of analysis in other areas) have been hurled at literary scholars as if such interests somehow undermine or make less pure their interest in works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Robert Alter’s 1989 book
The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age
argued that pleasure and love of literature was the proper province of literary study. If literary scholarship were to become too professional, the elusive but crucial element of love might drop out. You can see that this is a kind of double bind: if literary study is centered on love of literature, it is regarded as basic but not advanced,
general but not specialized, ancillary and pleasurable but not essential. But when literary study moves into the realm of theory, or editorial practice, or material culture, or any other of its myriad edges, left or right, up or down, it runs the risk of abandoning its main mission to give pleasure, inspire love, and be, in effect, its own reward.

If a scientist were to tell us he or she loved science (as scientists frequently do), we probably would not consider such a remark tantamount to saying that science was not professional, or did not involve research or specialization, or that the speaker was a fan or a dilettante rather than a working scientist. Love of politics does not mean that the lover is not also a potential scholar, or candidate, or bureau chief. But love of literature (or love of art or music) often is taken to indicate a set of recreational interests or a level of social—rather than intellectual—sophistication.

So literary criticism and literary studies, which were once considered the accoutrements of a gentleman’s or a lady’s social education, or alternatively, in the spirit of Matthew Arnold, a bootstrapping opportunity for the achievement of meritocracy without the advantages of inherited wealth or position, or, in the spirit of the Great Books movement and James Conant’s
General Education in a Free Society
, the necessary preparation for productive citizenship in a democracy, are now again—for slightly different reasons and with a different populace—an “extra,” an elective, an enhancement rather than either a necessity or a power position.

What used to be called “appreciation” (and, at the advanced or professional or donor level, “connoisseurship”) is now sometimes folded into aesthetics or into the history of affect or taste. It was partly in resistance to this idea of literary culture, and the accomplishments of the gentlemanly art of belles-lettres (literally, beautiful or fine writing), that some early-twentieth-century scholars turned to history or to philology as more scientific, archival research fields. What was at issue, sometimes explicitly, was the status of literature as an amateur or a professional pursuit. As time has gone by and the difference between amateurs (who, etymologically at least, are in it for love) and professionals (who do it as their profession and expect to be paid for their work) has continued to erode in fields like sports, music, or politics, literary studies has continued
to worry, and to worry about, the distinction. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. One key reason, certainly the one most pertinent to this discussion, is the belief that literature and love have a special relationship to each other: that loving literature is, after all, what literary study is all about.

The poet and literary critic R. P. Blackmur began a justly celebrated essay called “The Critic’s Job of Work” with a declaration that was also a gauntlet deftly thrown down: “Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur.”
⁸
We might notice, admiringly, the seeming casualness of “I take it”—and the rhythm that this personal aside imparts to the utterance. Without it, the statement would be flat, prescriptive, far less interesting: “Criticism is the formal discourse of an amateur”—an example of the very kind of “doctrine” he will go on to critique in his next few pages. Blackmur is not, however, doctrinaire when he comes to the question of the use of concepts that may be “propitious and helpful in getting over gaps,” so long as that use remains “consciously provisional, speculative, and dramatic.” Writing in 1935, he observed that the “classic contemporary example of use and misuse” was “attached to the name of Freud.”

The little word
has
here tells part of the story: Freud was still alive when this essay was written, but his work had already begun to be literalized and turned into doctrine. Yet Blackmur was a perceptive reader
(and user) of Freud, as he demonstrates in this elegant peroration in the penultimate paragraph: “Art is the looking-glass of the preconscious, and when it is deepest seems to participate in it sensibly”—by which he means with the senses. And what of criticism? What is its nature and role? “Criticism may have as an object the establishment and evaluation (comparison and analysis) of the modes of making the preconscious
consciously
available.”
¹⁰
To make the preconscious consciously available is the task of the critic. But what does he mean by “the formal discourse of an amateur”?

Blackmur himself was an amateur only in a technical sense. He had no higher degrees, and from 1928 to 1940, he was a freelance poet and critic, until he began an affiliation with Princeton University and became a professor of English. He unpacked the notion of love at the beginning of his essay: criticism “names and arranges what it knows and loves, and searches endlessly with every fresh impulse or impression for better names and more orderly arrangements.”
¹¹
Those names and arrangements are the formal aspects of the work. The discourse is the mode of communication: the presentation of the critic’s ideas as a connected series of utterances so they provide a unit and a model for analysis. And amateur? Does it mean lover or reader? Critic rather than textual editor or historical scholar? A close reader of the text rather than the context?

Because Blackmur begins with this wonderfully tendentious phrase about an amateur, it might be easy to mistake his meaning—until the reader plunges into the heart of his essay. “A Critic’s Job of Work” (the appealingly homely title is a bit misleading) speaks out in favor of Plato and Montaigne, of “imaginative skepticism and dramatic irony” that “keep the mind athletic and the spirit on the stretch,” and, wittily, of the “juvenescence of
The Tempest
,” and the “air almost of precocity of [G. B. Shaw’s]
Back to Methuselah
,”
¹²
venerable texts about age that remain forever young. What Blackmur objects to is contemporary criticism that is “primarily concerned with the
ulterior purposes of literature
,” and here he cites three texts, all well reputed, that he thinks are pointing in the wrong direction for literary study: George Santayana’s essay on Lucretius, Van Wyck Brooks’s
The Pilgrimage of Henry James
, and Granville Hicks’s
The Great Tradition
. The problem with all three, however different
they may seem, is that they are “concerned with the
separable content of literature
, with what may be said without consideration of its specific setting and apparition in a form; which is why, perhaps, all three
leave literature so soon behind.
”
¹³