The Use and Abuse of Literature (36 page)

A third book we might put on the shelf of books about repurposing the reading of great books is Stuart Kelly’s
The Book of Lost Books
, subtitled, in that explanatory way to which we have become accustomed in subtitles of late,
An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read.
⁸⁸
Kelly is not French, and his book even has an index, albeit a brief one. In a series of short chapters (typically three to five pages), he identifies, historicizes, and speculates about lost books by famous writers, from Anonymous and Homer to Sylvia Plath and Georges Perec. For some reason, the most recent authors are listed by their full formal names (Dylan Marlais Thomas, William Seward Burroughs, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV), making them sound vaguely parodic. And
not all of the lost works are equally persuasive; Shakespeare’s
Love’s Labour’s Won
is a constant source of speculation, Lowell’s notional epic on the crusades less so. Basically, the book is literary gossip. It’s probably unfair to quote from the jacket flap—which the author almost surely didn’t write—but the cascade of adverbs and adjectives is indicative: “In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination.”

Why do I classify this book with
How to Talk
and the Proust books? Because all are para-literary, alluding to literature obliquely. None requires that the reader actually have a firsthand encounter with the great works on which they are propped. In the case of Kelly’s book, all the works are conveniently unavailable, objects of speculation rather than contemplation. For Bayard, reading is not only unnecessary but sometimes counterproductive; for de Botton, Proust becomes a sophisticated advice giver, a Dr. Marcel to rival television’s Dr. Phil. Decades after the culture wars worried about whether college students were being taught the right stuff, these books suggest that you can have a literary experience without having to bother to experience literature, and that it’s stylish—even cool—to do so.

There was a time when Hugh Blair’s
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
, written by the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh and initially published in 1783, was the most popular and widely taught language text in Britain and the United States. Blair’s lectures, on topics like Taste, the Sublime in Writing, Metaphor, the History of Eloquence, the Nature of Poetry, Dramatic Poetry, and Versification, contained extended discussions of major works in English literature. The lectures were intended, Blair explained, for those who sought professional employment in composition and public speaking, and also for those who simply wanted to improve their taste so that they could judge works of literature for themselves. But Blair also suggested that his course of study could be of assistance in fashionable society:

Reading “works of genius and literature” was to provide the aspiring socialite with “fashionable topics of discourse.” So one use to which literature could be put, for the polite society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the achievement, and maintenance, of a proper social place or rank. This was not Blair’s preferred application of his precepts
and examples—he would have preferred something “of solid and intrinsical use, independent, of appearance and show”—but he readily acknowledged that the eighteenth-century equivalent of “walking to and fro, talking of Michelangelo” could have positive social and intellectual results.

It’s worth noting that eloquence in the current political climate is often as much distrusted as it is admired. As we’ve noted, in the 2008 presidential race, the word
eloquent
went from a term of praise to an epithet in a campaign minute, as rivals to Barack Obama—both in his own party and in the opposition—deployed it against the eventual winner. “I admire so much Senator Obama’s eloquence,” said his Republican opponent, John McCain, before turning to a perceived difference between words and actions. Twice in the same debate, McCain used “the eloquence of Senator Obama” as a preface to a put-down, a practice that had been earlier used by several conservative broadcasters and columnists, and even by Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. “It’s time to get real about how we actually win this election,” said Clinton at a campaign rally. “It’s time that we move from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.”
²
This formulation, itself an eloquent model of tropes in action (
anaphora
, the beginning of consecutive sentences, clauses, or phrases with the same phrase or word;
prosonomasia
, a punning on words that resemble one another), is a typical and often successful debater’s move. In any case, we might wish to contrast such eloquent flights, even those that apparently speak ill of eloquence, with the full-blown collapse of syntax and figure, characteristic of such plain-spoken politicians as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush, that is taken to be unpretentious, honest, and authentic—the opposite of “sophistic,” “sophistical,” or sophisticated.
³
Although these two politicians are Republicans, I should say at once that resistance to syntax or rhetorical style is an equal-opportunity failing (or success, depending upon your point of view).

The distrust of eloquence echoes the distrust of rhetoric expressed in classical times by those who excoriated the sophists, who were professional rhetoricians, because their eloquence was purchased for a price. We might compare this practice to that of a modern defense attorney or
speechwriter or advertising copywriter, all of whom deploy language and rhetoric in the service of a professional task for which they are compensated. No one requires these professionals to believe in their products or their candidates or their client’s innocence, although sometimes the persuaders persuade themselves.

Today, however, discussion of the power of figurative language has moved away from literature and toward cognition theory and brain science. Cognitive psychologists and cognitive linguists seek to read
through
metaphor and other rhetorical figures to discover something about the functioning of the mind.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book
Metaphors We Live By
(1980) focuses on metaphor’s “power to define reality.” In most cases, they argue, “what is at issue is not the truth or the falsity of a metaphor but the perceptions and inferences that follow from it.”
⁴
Metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is an aspect of cognitive thinking, “pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.”
⁵
Metaphors We Live By
offers examples like “Argument Is War,” “Time Is Money,” “Life Is a Journey,” and then, in a chapter called “Some Further Examples,” a list of concepts, each an umbrella topic under which actual metaphors could be grouped, such as “Theories Are Buildings” (sample metaphorical terms:
foundation, buttress
), “Ideas Are Food” (
half-baked, fishy, can’t swallow
), “Love Is Magic” (
cast a spell, entranced, bewitching
), and so on.
⁶
Ideas, as Lakoff and Johnson would have it, can be not only food but also people, plants, products, commodities, money, cutting instruments, and fashions, while love can be magic, madness, war, a magnet, or a patient. In other words, language is figure. The notion that metaphor is not “just” language but also influences thought and action means that—as poets, linguists, philosophers, rhetoricians, and politicians have known for quite a while—what people say and how they say it affects, shapes, and directs understanding and response. But the phrase
not just in language
is indicative of a devaluation of the power and
nature of words and rhetoric, and it contributes to the remanding of the literary to a secondary or tertiary role. This point is underscored in an afterword, where the supposed primacy of the conceptual is described under the heading “Persistent Fallacies”:

Notice the rhetoric of diminishment: “nothing but linguistic expressions”; “a mere matter of words.” Could we call this, following Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphor of “Language Is Negligible”?

“Life is a journey” and “time is money” are cultural clichés of the kind that we associate with the greeting-card industry. Actually most of the metaphors mentioned above or listed in
Metaphors to Live By
are often (and erroneously) called dead metaphors, which is to say, metaphors whose originality of expression has eroded over time so that we no longer encounter them as figurative (for example, the
horsepower
of an engine, or the
foot
of a page). Do readers who encounter the phrase
half-baked ideas
think, consciously or subliminally, of cookie dough? In short, the concept of metaphor becomes a metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson’s work. “Happy Is Up” (to use another of their examples, the one they call “the major metaphor in our culture”)
⁸
is
not
a metaphor; it is a concept.

In subsequent books, George Lakoff pushes his claim about metaphor to encompass, for example, the political differences between progressives (who, he claims, cleave to a Nurturant Parent Model) and conservatives (who prefer a Strict Father Model). The index to
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
includes two columns of metaphors, with keywords capitalized in what had by that time become the author’s trademark style. These include the Moral Accounting metaphor, the Moral Action as Financial Transaction metaphor, the Moral Boundaries metaphor, the Moral Essence metaphor, the Moral Growth metaphor, the Morality as Empathy metaphor,
and many other capitalized metaphors of the same kind. Thus the section on Moral Health includes the propositions “Morality Is Health” and “Immorality Is Disease.” Without question, these are powerful paradigms, but they are even more powerful when the figure precedes the ground or, to use the standard phrase about metaphors, the vehicle precedes the tenor.

The “X is Y” formulation irresistibly suggests the George Orwell of both
1984
and
Animal Farm
but these literary and critical examples, together with the ironies and interpretive dangers they present, are few and far between. Orwell is, however, mentioned as the inventor of Big Brother, the “nightmare head of state” whose title illustrates the pervasiveness of “the Nation as Family metaphor.”
⁹
In fact George Orwell is the
only
literary author mentioned in
Moral Politics
, a book that cites Christine Todd Whitman but not Walt Whitman, William Bennett but not Arnold Bennett, Katherine Harris but not Joel Chandler Harris, Sandra Day O’Connor but not Flannery O’Connor. Lakoff and another collaborator, Mark Turner, did, however, address the question of metaphors in literature in a book called
More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
. With advanced degrees in both mathematics and English literature, Turner was well placed to participate in ongoing conversations about such cognitive topics as “conceptual blending,” “conceptual integration,” and “the mind as an autocatalytic vortex.” He would later write several influential books that combined literary study and neuroscience. What is especially notable may be that his own career has migrated from English studies to cognitive science, where his professorial appointment is located.

In the preface to his book
The Literary Mind
Turner makes a set of claims about the centrality of literary thinking that might be considered compatible with the argument I’m making here. He sets out three “principles of mind,” which he calls
story, projection
, and
parable
, and makes a case for considering them fundamental to all thinking, not just the specialized processes and practices that are often called literary.

“In this book,” he continues, “I explore technical details of the brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable … I explore the possibility that language is not the source of parable but instead its complex product.”

In itself, this is not a surprising idea. Narratologists from Vladimir Propp to Tzvetan Todorov to Gerard Genette have made claims for the role of story and fable. As early as the 1920s, Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale
distinguished between
fabula
(the content of the story) and
sujet
(the form that the telling of the tale imposes on that content).
¹⁰
In the late sixties, when ideas about the scientific (or social scientific) basis of literature provided an impetus for literary theorists, some of this work became important in the anthropological and critical practice known as structuralism. Man as the fiction-making animal was a favorite trope of the mid-twentieth century, in disciplines from literary studies to anthropology. Thus, for example, an innovative course, “Man and His Fictions”—otherwise known as Literature X—was the starting point of the new literature major at Yale in the 1970s. Subsequently, the diverse set of literary critical practices generally described under the rubric of post-structuralism challenged the belief in a stable set of significations, or meanings, across cultures, and in the concept of the universal category of “man.”