The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [12]
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.34
Wilde’s art, and his artfully crafted aesthetic persona, did, of course, achieve the material rewards sardonically noted by Gautier, and at the end of his life, after the reversal of fortune brought about by his trial and conviction, the writing and publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol might fairly be considered spiritual, whether or not it was useful (the poem, when published, sold extremely well). “Catastrophes in life bring about catastrophes in Art,” Wilde told one friend, and to another he described The Ballad as “the cry of Marsyas and not the song of Apollo. I have probed the depths of most of the experiences in life, and I have come to the conclusion that we are meant to suffer. There are moments when it takes you like a tiger, by the throat, and it was only when I was in the depths of suffering that I wrote my poem.”35 As Richard Ellmann noted, The Ballad had for Wilde an explicit and specific use: “The length of the poem was necessary, he said, to shake confidence in the penal system; he knew that it must fall between poetry and propaganda, but he was prepared to face some artistic imperfection for the sake of changing what was intolerable.”36
As a young man at Oxford, Wilde had been the student of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and he was impressed by both the moral view of art held by Ruskin and by the aestheticism and conscious “decadence” of Pater. Pater became Wilde’s tutor and made editorial suggestions about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ruskin took him—and other students—on a road-building expedition and gave credence to Wilde’s view that art had a role to play in the improvement of society. Ellmann, tracing the beginnings of Wilde’s career, saw Ruskin and Pater as “heralds beckoning him in opposite directions” and noted quietly that “he outgrew them both.”37
We might note here that all of these writers—Arnold, Gautier, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde—were both artists and critics. Arnold wrote poetry (“Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gypsy,” “Empedocles on Etna”), Ruskin and Pater, works of elegant essayistic prose (Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Pater’s The Renaissance). When they offered strongly held views about the use of poetry, literature, or criticism, they gestured at once toward the activities of reading, writing, and study. The question of use (or uselessness) here does not translate into the question of whether or not there was value in being an artist—though this was clearly on the mind of each—but rather on the value of literature. Even the word value, though, carries a certain connotation of use, whether measured by merit, social utility, instrumentality, or evaluation.
Another kind of use was on the minds of Marxist writers and critics. Karl Marx himself had been an exceptionally literary economist, often demonstrating his theoretical arguments by means of extended references to works from Shakespeare’s plays to Robinson Crusoe. Despite some early attempts to remand literature to the category of superstructure rather than base, influential and foundational moves were made by critics like Lukács and the members of the Frankfurt School, as well as by writers like Bertolt Brecht, to bring to the forefront instances of both use and abuse.
Some genres, such as realist fiction and drama, were more readily seen as agents of social change than others, such as lyric poetry or pastoral (even though these had been effective instruments of cultural critique in the past). But works of art were the products of social labor. Thus, Theodor Adorno contended, “That artworks are offered for sale at the market—just as pots and statuettes once were—is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production.”38 As for the idea of art for art’s sake, Adorno saw it as an unwitting strategy for “the neutralization of art”: “What is ideological in