The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [15]
W. H. Auden famously declared, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But he did so in the context of a memorial poem for another poet, W. B. Yeats, who was deeply concerned with social and political issues—just like Auden himself.
Revisiting Auden’s great poem evokes the despairing political climate of Europe on the eve of World War II (“Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face”) while it also raises the issue of the impossibility and undesirability of seeking a single message or meaning for poetry.
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
…
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections …
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
…
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives …
A way of happening, a mouth.
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature’s most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation—the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered—is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.
ONE
Use and Abuse
In his Defence of Poesie, Sir Philip Sidney responded to the claim that Plato had banished poets from his ideal republic by asserting that Plato banished “the abuse, not the thing.”1 The poets he sought to discredit were those who “filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence,” and Plato “therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.” But, Sidney observed, the poets did not create those wrong opinions; they merely gave them expression. Plato disapproved not of poetry but of the abuse of poetic gifts. “So as Plato, banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banishing it, but giving due honour unto it, shall be our patron and not our adversary.”
Yet it was the power of poetry, not the “depraved … opinions,” which was apparently seductive. (Sidney made sure to remind his readers that the ancient poets “had not the light of Christ.”)2 It is because poetry is powerful that its abuse has any effect. Thus, the arguments against poetry that Sidney set out to refute (it lies; it wastes time; it is “the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilential desires”; Plato “banished” poets) are, it is not surprising to see, identical to its main attractions. I do not mean this cynically, nor in a negative light. If “lies”=fiction; “wastes time”=leisure and entertainment; “pestilential desires”=allure and seductiveness; and “banishment”=transgression and risk, we have at hand all the ingredients for a contemporary best seller.
The phrase use and abuse has a chiming resonance that authors and publishers have found difficult to resist. Among the many dozens of works that employ these words in their titles, we might consider:
The Use and Abuse of Africa in Brazil
The Use and Abuse of Arsenic in the Treatment of Skin-Disease
The Use and Abuse of Art
The Use and Abuse of Books
The Use and Abuse of Expert Testimony
The Use and Abuse of Female Sexual Imagery in the Book of Hosea
The Use and Abuse of Force in Making an Arrest
The Use and Abuse of History
The Use and Abuse of Money
The Use and Abuse of Power
The Use and Abuse of the Public Range
The Use and Abuse of Reading
The Use and Abuse of Sea Water
The Use and Abuse of Smoking
The Use and Abuse of Social Science
The Use and Abuse of Spectacles
The Use and Abuse of Statistics
The Use and Abuse of the Sublime
The Use and