The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [16]
The Use and Abuse of Television
The Use and Abuse of Tobacco
The Use and Abuse of Zoological Names by Physicians
This is, needless to say, only a partial selection. One of the earliest texts to bear the title was Erasmus’s treatise from 1525, Lingua, The Use and Abuse of the Tongue. One of the most recent is Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2009).
The parent title here is Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874), variously translated as The Use and Abuse of History for Life; On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; On the Utility and Liability of History for Life; and many other elegant—and less than elegant—variations. It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s title is indebted to that of Leon Battista Alberti, whose De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (1428)—translated as The Use and Abuse of Books or On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters—might have been called to Nietzsche’s attention by his friend and fellow scholar Jacob Burckhardt. If that is the case, then the trail loops back to literature as a first-order troublemaker rather than depending upon the model case of history.
My purpose is to give some sense of the powerful rhetorical logic of use and abuse as the way of framing an argument—and, not completely coincidentally, to indicate some ways in which the pro/con tension depends upon the conjunction and as its fulcrum.
In fact, as we have already begun to see, use and abuse are versions of the same. The point may be clearest in titles that seem to be about addiction (tobacco, smoking, alcohol), but it is of more intellectual and theoretical interest when the element used or abused is an idea, a concept, or a way of thinking, like an academic discipline. No use without abuse; no abuse without use. The phrase as a container, and as a logic, sets the stage for the kind of debate and dialectic that will ensue.
Let’s look briefly at three symptomatic works that employ use and abuse in their titles and that speak directly to literature as an experience in the world, and to reading and criticism as a profession. As you’ll see, my three examples are rather disparate: the first is a treatise by an Italian Renaissance humanist, the second a lecture by a twentieth-century judge best known for his role in the Nuremberg trials, and the third an account of the uses and abuses of literary criticism by a British literary critic. The latter two are thus versions of the celebratory oration or the after-dinner speech, urbane, self-deprecating, learned, and droll, while the first is a passionate—and dispassionate—account of the low regard in which literary scholars are held, their low pay, sickly complexions, and general social disfavor.
The Use and Abuse of Scholarship
As we have already noted, Alberti’s De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (ca.1428–mid-1430s) is a probable source for Nietzsche’s later essay on history, and the title of the modern English translation, The Use and Abuse of Books, is a manifest homage to the current fame of Nietzsche’s work. By books or letters, Alberti meant the study of literature and an education based on reading and writing, according to the humanist program.
In fifteenth-century Italy, to study books meant also to copy them, laboriously. Before the advent of printing, copying, memorization, and quotation were essential tools of the scholar. The tone of De commodis—aptly described by Anthony Grafton as “mordant”3—is a familiar mix of irony, self-abnegation, pride, and cautious optimism, easy (like that of Machiavelli) to mistake as merely ironic or merely satirical. The humanist scholar of this period was a striver, required to balance long and arduous study—often without dictionaries or other tools—with the necessities of patronage and diplomacy, and without a clear path to wealth or even to financial independence.
Bearing this historical context in mind, I invite the modern reader to do something distinctly unscholarly: that is, to consider some passages from the text as if