The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [65]
What used to be called “appreciation” (and, at the advanced or professional or donor level, “connoisseurship”) is now sometimes folded into aesthetics or into the history of affect or taste. It was partly in resistance to this idea of literary culture, and the accomplishments of the gentlemanly art of belles-lettres (literally, beautiful or fine writing), that some early-twentieth-century scholars turned to history or to philology as more scientific, archival research fields. What was at issue, sometimes explicitly, was the status of literature as an amateur or a professional pursuit. As time has gone by and the difference between amateurs (who, etymologically at least, are in it for love) and professionals (who do it as their profession and expect to be paid for their work) has continued to erode in fields like sports, music, or politics, literary studies has continued to worry, and to worry about, the distinction. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. One key reason, certainly the one most pertinent to this discussion, is the belief that literature and love have a special relationship to each other: that loving literature is, after all, what literary study is all about.
Amo, Amas, Amat
The poet and literary critic R. P. Blackmur began a justly celebrated essay called “The Critic’s Job of Work” with a declaration that was also a gauntlet deftly thrown down: “Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur.”8 We might notice, admiringly, the seeming casualness of “I take it”—and the rhythm that this personal aside imparts to the utterance. Without it, the statement would be flat, prescriptive, far less interesting: “Criticism is the formal discourse of an amateur”—an example of the very kind of “doctrine” he will go on to critique in his next few pages. Blackmur is not, however, doctrinaire when he comes to the question of the use of concepts that may be “propitious and helpful in getting over gaps,” so long as that use remains “consciously provisional, speculative, and dramatic.” Writing in 1935, he observed that the “classic contemporary example of use and misuse” was “attached to the name of Freud.”
Freud himself has constantly emphasized the provisional, dramatic character of his speculations; they are employed as imaginative illumination, to be relied on no more and no less than the sailor relies upon his buoys and beacons. But the impetus of Freud was so great that a school of literalists arose with all the mad consequence of schism and heresy and fundamentalism which have no more honorable place in the scientific than the artistic imagination.9
The little word has here tells part of the story: Freud was still alive when this essay was written, but his work had already begun to be literalized and turned into doctrine. Yet Blackmur was a perceptive reader (and user) of Freud, as he demonstrates in this elegant peroration in the penultimate paragraph: “Art is the looking-glass of the preconscious, and when it is deepest seems to participate in it sensibly”—by which he means with the senses. And what of criticism? What is its nature and role? “Criticism may have as an object the establishment and evaluation (comparison and analysis) of the modes of making the preconscious consciously available.”10 To make the preconscious consciously available is the task of the critic. But what does he mean by “the formal discourse of an amateur”?
Blackmur himself was an amateur only in a technical sense. He had no higher degrees, and from 1928 to 1940, he was a freelance poet