The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [136]
Language does change our world. It does make possible what we think and how we think it. This is one vital reason to read and study literature, rather than merely to apply its strategies. As for the conceptual metaphors, from “Life Is Fire” to “Death Is a Reaper”—perhaps we should look to the words of a former politician and rhetorical expert and ask what the meaning of is is.
Consider a wisely riddling observation by Harold Bloom from his powerful work of literary theory, The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973 and subtitled A Theory of Poetry. “The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.”41 The argument is first set out in the context of a paragraph describing what Bloom calls “antithetical criticism,” a term he develops from his reading of—and productive resistance to—his two great critical “precursors,” Nietzsche and Freud.
Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction: a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a poem not itself.42
“Tautology” is a version of what Cleanth Brooks called “paraphrase”; “reduction” is the idea that poetry conveys a message, a moral, or a theme. What Bloom proposes is what he observes in the literary tradition—that poems beget poems, that imaginative thinking produces imaginative thinking, that literature is what I have called a first-order phenomenon, not a conveyor belt for ideas that find their “impact,” their “reality,” or their “application” elsewhere.
Literature is figure.
NINE
The Impossibility of Closure
Because no interpretation of literature is “final” or “definitive,” literary study, like literature, is a process rather than a product. If it progresses, it does so in a way that often involves doubling back upon a track or meandering by the wayside rather than forging ahead, relentlessly and single-mindedly, toward some imagined goal or solution. As we have noticed, one of the defining characteristics of literature and literary study is to open questions, not to close them. This has sometimes been regarded as a trait—as something that makes literature and literary study both unique and also “useless,” in contrast with problem-solving disciplines like economics, political theory, or even certain branches of philosophy. And in an era when persistent questions about outcomes and impact have gained ascendancy for legislatures, educational researchers, and the public press, the absence of answers may look like a manifest failure either on the part of imaginative writers, or of critics and scholars, or of both. Hence some of the desire to convert passages of poetry or taglines from novels into social and ethical doxa: “Good fences make good neighbors”; “Only connect.” Quotations like this, taken out of context, seem like useful advice, or wisdom.
Let me illustrate the difficulty about closure with a brief anecdote. Once, when I was lecturing to my Shakespeare class at Harvard, I decided to give them an object lesson in literary interpretation. I chose a famous crux from one of the plays and offered an extended “answer” to it. Students all over the lecture hall wrote busily in their notebooks. I then observed that although this answer once had been deemed satisfactory, it was no longer highly regarded by critics. All over the hall, students crossed out what they had written. I next offered a newer solution to the crux with the same set of results; students took down every word I said, then reacted with consternation when I remarked that this solution, too, had been questioned by subsequent critics. It took a third “solution” and a third qualification of that solution to begin to make the point, which was that literary interpretation