The Use and Abuse of Literature (21 page)

Wilson is covering all his bases: he will be the true lover of literature—rescuing it from what he elsewhere calls “the very small group of monomaniac bibliographers”
²⁹
who are “[not] much interested in literature”—and also the true professional, who could laugh at the ineptitude of scholars so dim they will work for years on a literary project without any assurance that they will get paid for it. Wilson quite plausibly equates “professional” with “writes for money.” The unnamed academics, while they draw salaries, are writing for “prestige,” which might translate itself into a new job or a promotion but is also, like the “esteem” of
succès d’éstime
—or the esteem of self-esteem—a kind of love. But Gordon Ray’s claim, also plausible, is that the resistance to footnotes, sources, explanatory information, and other “literary garbage” is itself an amateur move. As another of the contributors to
Professional Standards
argues, “where a major author is concerned, there is very little literary garbage.”
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Which is the amateur and which is the professional? Do any of these persons, or any of these institutions, from publishers to universities, love literature? It seems most reasonable to say that they all do, in their fashion. Reason and love, as Bottom so well observed, keep little company together nowadays. In the upshot, Wilson got his archival series of uniformly bound classics, and scholars got their annotated editions, and the
world moved on. This was a contretemps—perhaps it would be just as accurate to call it a spat—that predates the Internet, hypertext editions, and an expansion (and professionalization) of the American academic scene well beyond what was imagined or caricatured in the late sixties. But one thing I’d venture to say is that it never works to accuse someone else of lacking the capacity to love.

What’s love got to do with the use and abuse of literature? For one thing, love—as news stories remind us every day, and as classic novels, poems, and plays have told us for centuries, is often about use and abuse. And as with literature, it is sometimes not easy to tell the difference. Consider Hamlet and Ophelia, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Achilles and Patroclus, Humbert Humbert and Lolita. (Adepts of
The Faerie Queene
will recall that in Book 3 of Spenser’s poem, the enchanter Busirane briefly captures the maiden Amoret.) Even, or perhaps especially, in religious poetry, this intrinsic doubling occurs, from Herbert’s “Jordan” poems to Donne’s Holy Sonnets (“Batter my heart”) to “Sir Gawain” and the quests of Spenser’s knights. That love is one of literature’s favorite, indeed obsessive, topics creates a certain kind of feedback loop, or what is sometimes called, in literary study, a textual effect, which means that something
in
the text is shaping, often without the conscious awareness of the reader or critic, how the text is being read.

Consider John Donne’s lyric “The Canonization,” which uses as one of its master tropes the coincidence of sacred and profane love to make the earthly lovers also saints, “us canonized for love.” The direct, intemperate, and colloquial address of the first line, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love,” once revisited at the end of the poem, turns out to have more than one connotation, since the poem suggests that their love is “for God’s sake” as well as for their own. Donne’s poem, a favorite of the New Critics and therefore often taught and studied in introductory English courses, became foundational in the mid-twentieth century to what was described as the English literary canon. In effect, then, the
poem, as well as its fictional legendary lovers, was
canonized
—we might even say
canonized for love
.

Scenes of reading in literature are often sites of seduction (for literary characters) as well as seductive (for the reader). We’ve already noticed this in the case of Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
, where the unlikely couple of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick are said to have “fallen in love over poetry.” One of the most famous scenes of reading is found in Dante’s
Inferno
, where Paolo and Francesca are seduced by reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere and become, themselves, adulterous lovers:

Gallehault, or Galeott, was the go-between who brought together Lancelot and Guinevere. His name became a synonym for
pander
, which is, as the poem suggests, what the book they were reading became for Paolo and Francesca—and what this passage has become for other poets and other readers: a go-between linking literature and life.

But if the topic of love is in a way not only as old as literature but also coterminous and coextensive with it—if, to stretch the point only a little, all literature is about love, whether it’s human love, divine love,
disappointed love, love of nature, love of art, love of country, or self-love—then to ask how we should feel about love of literature is to ask the question less precisely than we might. To accuse someone of lacking a love for literature is to say he or she doesn’t love literature in the same way we do. What we might rather want to propose is that (1) loving literature is the beginning rather than the end (or the use) of a relationship with it, and (2) like all loves, love of literature is risky, sometimes dangerous, and occasionally disappointing in part precisely because of “the overestimation of the object.”

Two examples from Virginia Woolf may helpfully complicate this question of love and what it might have to do with the use (or use and abuse) of literature. The first is from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?,” which we’ve already noticed as the locus of some of her thoughts on the contemporaneity of literature. In this case, Woolf’s subject might be called the overprofessionalization of book reviewing, “when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot,” and thus may miss the mark as frequently as he or she hit it.

People reading for the love of reading may, she speculates, make books “stronger, richer, and more varied.” This pleasant fantasy—Woolf herself was a book reviewer as well as a novelist and essayist, and she depended upon published critics and criticism—is succeeded by another, equally fanciful: she imagines readers coming to the gate of heaven at the Day of Judgment “with our books under our arms,” to be told they need no
further reward: “We have nothing to give them here,” Woolf’s version of the Almighty says to her version of Saint Peter. “They have loved reading.”
³³

However uncharacteristically warm and fuzzy this may seem to us (the original version of “How Should One Read a Book?” was delivered at a private school for girls), it echoes the theme begun with the title of Woolf’s essay collections
The Common Reader
, a phrase she borrows, with full attribution, from Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Gray.” By choosing Johnson’s phrase as the title of her book of collected and “refurbished” essays and reviews, Woolf raises an interesting problem of identification. The sophisticated writing published under this seemingly modest title was hardly the work of a common reader as described by Johnson or Woolf. Originally described in her diary as a “Reading book” and then under the provisional title “Reading and Writing,”
³⁴
The Common Reader
included knowledgeable, opinionated essays on major and lesser-known literary figures from the Paston letters and Chaucer to Montaigne, Elizabethan drama, John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, and the second volume in the series would continue and expand this range. Though Woolf surely did read for her own pleasure, her essays continually, and often brilliantly, do both “impart knowledge” and “correct the opinions of others.”

Moreover, if we were to look at the
context
of Dr. Johnson’s famous paragraph, we would discover that it runs quite counter to most of what he has to say about the poet in his “Life of Gray.” Having devoted several pages to biography, Johnson now turns to his work.

And so on, through the entire corpus of Gray’s poetry, often stanza by stanza and word by word, culminating in a general assessment of his work before the paragraph on Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” that, coming at the end of the “Life,” contains the phrase that Woolf uses in the preface to her book.

The sentiments of the common reader are thus invoked only at the end of a long and detailed assessment of Gray’s poetry, which, in the main, finds his successes intermittent at best, and some of his work incomprehensible or overrated. This is the
only
moment in the “Life of Gray” when Johnson concurs with the common reader, and he does so in a graceful, concessive spirit that leads up to his superbly crafted, quietly devastating final sentence: “Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.” We might linger for a moment on Johnson’s phrase “useless to praise,” which carries the notion that the poetry speaks for itself (and thus that the common reader’s views would prevail without any intercession on the part of the critic). This is clearly a condition contrary to fact. The existence of
The Lives of the Poets
likewise contradicts the utopian notion that in an aesthetically just world,
quality always prevails. If love of literature is linked to the judgment of the common reader rather than that of the professional critic or scholar, the practice of these two meticulous and learned arbiters of literary taste, Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, puts that connection in question even as it seems, or is taken, to uphold it. Neither critic defers to the common reader, though both imagine him or her as a crucial ancillary part of the world of readers. Each in fact demonstrates an
uncommon
love of literature precisely by combining it with learning—as well as with a strongly urged, felicitously phrased, hard-won, and often infectious set of literary prejudices.

The second example I’d offer from Woolf on the question of literature and love is her intriguing set of observations on the English romantic essayist William Hazlitt. A hundred years after Hazlitt wrote, he was for her an important figure, and from her account of him, his work was, at least among her contemporaries, a familiar voice: “The famous passages about reading
Love for Love
and drinking coffee from a silver pot and reading
La Nouvelle Héloise
and eating a cold chicken, are known to all.”
³⁷
She admires his energy, his intelligence, his vivacity, and his prose style. “Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of famous books.” Never mind that he had decided, for one reason or another, not to read some of them:

Woolf quotes a long passage from a Hazlitt essay on old English writers that begins, “It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring
one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters, to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page,” and offers this response: