The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [6]
Today that sense has pretty much disappeared, replaced by expertise in science and in information technology, on the one hand, and by visual literacy on the other. By visual, what is now meant is moving images (films, videos, television, MTV, advertising) as well as paintings and photographs. Quotable quotes are far more likely to be cited from films, television, or advertisements than from literature. “Just do it.” “Go ahead, make my day.” “I’ll be back.” Even politicians, who once studiously quoted poets and philosophers, now choose slogans and citations from popular culture. “Mission accomplished.” “Bring ’em on.” So the idea that knowledge of and easy familiarity with literature is either a social accomplishment or a cultural or professional asset must seem quaint. Yet the wordplay involved in coining terms for modern popular culture—especially in visual rebuses like INXS, Ludacris, or Xzibit—is not completely dissimilar to the kind of visual cleverness in, for example, the hieroglyphic poems of George Herbert in the seventeenth century.
After a spurt of enthusiasm among scholars in adjacent fields like history, anthropology, and philosophy—the so-called linguistic turn of the 1970s and 1980s—literature, literary theory, and literary studies have fallen behind in both academic cachet and intellectual influence. More to the point—for the key questions here do not concern scholars so much as they do readers and the general public—literature is often undervalued or misunderstood as something that needs to be applied to the experiences of life. Practical concerns with careers and financial security have dominated the choices made by ambitious and worried young people who want to make sure education fits them for the lives they think they want to lead. Careers in economics, banking, technology, or law do not include literature, except as an add-on or elective. Nor is the typical English major necessarily the way to encounter literature in an active, inquiring way. Even when literature is read, taught, and studied, it is often interrogated for wisdom or moral lessons. The clumsy formulations I grew up with—what is the moral of the story? what is the hero’s or heroine’s tragic flaw?—still influence and flatten the questions people often ask about literary works, as if there were one answer, and a right answer, at that. The genius of literary study comes in asking questions, not in finding answers.
On the one side, hard science and social science, including technology; on the other side, contemporary visual and musical culture, framed by moving images, file swapping, and the Internet. Between these two poles, one of which implicitly defines literature as a potentially useful social enhancement for success in financial and practical life, the other one of which leaves literature behind in favor of livelier, more supposedly “interactive” cultural forms, literature has been devalued—sometimes for reasons that seem, on the surface, benevolent, and sometimes by those who profess to love it best.
In his essay collection Promises, Promises, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips refers with a sense of nostalgia to “what was once called Literature.”
Coming, as they say, from what was then called Literature as a student in the early 1970s, to psychoanalysis in the late 1970s, has made me wonder what I thought psychoanalysis could do for me—or what I wanted psychoanalysis to do for me—that Literature could not. And, of course, what I might have been using Literature for that made psychoanalysis the next best thing—or rather, the other best thing.18
And again,
Anyone