The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [51]
This culture clash would seem completely trivial and forgettable, except that its upshot was to take the question of literary censorship away from the customs agents and leave the decisions, instead, to the U.S. District Courts. Senator Smoot was the co-sponsor of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, to which the decision about the importation of foreign books was an amendment, so the obscenity trial of Joyce’s Ulysses three years later came under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court and thus, as we’ve seen, to the sophisticated and humane assessment by Judge John M. Woolsey, who had (unlike Senator Smoot) read the book in question “in its entirety” from cover to cover.
It’s easy to think of these blocking figures who rail against the danger of reading as quaint survivors of an earlier, less enlightened age. On the one hand, that age is very much with us in the persistent attempts, for example, to ban The Catcher in the Rye (offensive language), The Bluest Eye (sexually explicit content), or the Harry Potter books (witchcraft) from classrooms and libraries;35 on the other hand, they are in some ways right: reading is dangerous, which is why it is important. If literary works (as well as scientific treatises—ask Galileo) did not shake up the world we think we live in, they would indeed be trivial, inconsequential, “entertaining.” It is precisely because a book can enrich the mind, challenge, disturb, and change one’s thinking, that it may after all—whatever its specific content—possess that curiously elusive quality called “redeeming social value.”
Dear Diary …
Some forms that, as forms, remain typically outside of literature nonetheless generate examples that have become recognized literary works. Take the example of the diary. Certainly the published diaries of writers like Virginia Woolf have enjoyed and merited publication and study, but what I have in mind is something more like Samuel Pepys’s Diary, a daily record kept for almost ten years by an English naval administrator, member of Parliament, and fellow of the Royal Society that chronicled his activities, personal, professional, political, and sexual, from 1660 to 1669. In the course of this period, Pepys recorded such epochal events as the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1665, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67, while also meticulously transcribing descriptions of plays, concerts, meals, and sexual encounters with women other than his wife, often in the same day’s account. The diary was written in a shorthand code. After his death, it was decoded with great labor by a scholar who was unaware that the key to the shorthand had been filed quite nearby, in Pepys’s library. Other transcriptions and editions followed, and the Diary (by turns perceptive, scurrilous, indiscreet, and wise) became a canonical work.
Robert Louis Stevenson called it “a work of art” and observed with admiration that “his is the true prose of poetry—prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive … you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare’s [or] a homily of Bunyan’s.” Stevenson’s praise was affectionate, not hyperbolic: “There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one,” he wrote, saying that Pepys was comparable to the poet Shelley in “quality” but not in “degree”—“in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly.”36 Virginia Woolf, who knew the Diary well enough to mention it regularly in her essays, considered Pepys to have a rare gift: “in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps.”37 For Woolf, there was no question but that Pepys’s Diary was literature. Is it still literature today? Certainly it has been read over the years with literary attention.
At the other end of this spectrum, consider the vicissitudes of the work we have come to know as The Diary of Anne Frank. Pepys was a grown man of the world who went many places and saw many things.