The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [29]
Nevertheless some literary historians and historicist critics within departments of literary study are in danger of forgetting or devaluing the history of their own craft and practice, which is based not only on the contextual understanding of literary works but also on the words on the page. Counterintuitive interpretation, reading that understands the adjacency of literature, fantasy, and dream, the subliminal association of words through patterns of sound or tics of meaning, the serendipity of images and ideas, the sometimes unintended echoes of other writers, the powerful formal scaffolding of rhetoric or of genre—all these are as richly transgressive as any political interpreter might desire, and as elusively evocative as any archive-trained researcher could wish to unearth or detect.
A passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” has always seemed to me to describe with particular eloquence what we do as critics when we study how writing works:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. (137–153)
The specific contribution of literary studies to intellectual life inheres in the way it differs from other disciplines—in its methodology and in its aim—rather than from the way it resembles them. What literary scholars can offer to the readers of all texts (not just those explicitly certified as literature) is a way of asking literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why. It is not that literary studies is uninterested in the what and the why—in recent years, such questions have preoccupied scholars whose models are drawn from adjacent disciplines like history and social science. But literariness, which lies at the heart of literary studies, is a matter of style, form, genre, and verbal interplay, as well as of social and political context—not only the realm of reference and context but also intrinsic structural elements like grammar, rhetoric, and syntax; tropes and figures; assonance and echo. A manifesto for literary studies will claim for it an unapologetic freestanding power to change the world by reading what is manifest, and what is latent, within and through the language of the text.
The best way for literary scholars to reinstate the study of literature, language, and culture as a key player among the academic humanities is to do what we do best, to engage in big public questions of intellectual importance and to address them by using the tools of our trade, which include not only material culture but also theory, interpretation, linguistic analysis, and a close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action. The future importance of literary studies—and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world—will come from taking risks, not from playing it safe.
TWO
The Pleasures of the Canon
The notion of a literary canon, a body of works considered centrally important and worthy of study, is—linguistically, at least—a fairly recent idea.