The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [70]
Wilson is covering all his bases: he will be the true lover of literature—rescuing it from what he elsewhere calls “the very small group of monomaniac bibliographers”29 who are “[not] much interested in literature”—and also the true professional, who could laugh at the ineptitude of scholars so dim they will work for years on a literary project without any assurance that they will get paid for it. Wilson quite plausibly equates “professional” with “writes for money.” The unnamed academics, while they draw salaries, are writing for “prestige,” which might translate itself into a new job or a promotion but is also, like the “esteem” of succès d’éstime—or the esteem of self-esteem—a kind of love. But Gordon Ray’s claim, also plausible, is that the resistance to footnotes, sources, explanatory information, and other “literary garbage” is itself an amateur move. As another of the contributors to Professional Standards argues, “where a major author is concerned, there is very little literary garbage.”30
Which is the amateur and which is the professional? Do any of these persons, or any of these institutions, from publishers to universities, love literature? It seems most reasonable to say that they all do, in their fashion. Reason and love, as Bottom so well observed, keep little company together nowadays. In the upshot, Wilson got his archival series of uniformly bound classics, and scholars got their annotated editions, and the world moved on. This was a contretemps—perhaps it would be just as accurate to call it a spat—that predates the Internet, hypertext editions, and an expansion (and professionalization) of the American academic scene well beyond what was imagined or caricatured in the late sixties. But one thing I’d venture to say is that it never works to accuse someone else of lacking the capacity to love.
Love Stories
What’s love got to do with the use and abuse of literature? For one thing, love—as news stories remind us every day, and as classic novels, poems, and plays have told us for centuries, is often about use and abuse. And as with literature, it is sometimes not easy to tell the difference. Consider Hamlet and Ophelia, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Achilles and Patroclus, Humbert Humbert and Lolita. (Adepts of The Faerie Queene will recall that in Book 3 of Spenser’s poem, the enchanter Busirane briefly captures the maiden Amoret.) Even, or perhaps especially, in religious poetry, this intrinsic doubling occurs, from Herbert’s “Jordan” poems to Donne’s Holy Sonnets (“Batter my heart”) to “Sir Gawain” and the quests of Spenser’s knights. That love is one of literature’s favorite, indeed obsessive, topics creates a certain kind of feedback loop, or what is sometimes called, in literary study, a textual effect, which means that something in the text is shaping, often without the conscious awareness of the reader or critic, how the text is being read.
Consider John Donne’s lyric “The Canonization,” which uses as one of its master tropes the coincidence of sacred and profane love to make the earthly lovers also saints, “us canonized for love.” The direct, intemperate, and colloquial address of the first line, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love,” once revisited at the end of the poem, turns out to have more than one connotation, since the poem suggests that their love is “for God’s sake” as well as for their own. Donne’s poem, a favorite of the New Critics and therefore often taught and studied in introductory English courses, became foundational in the mid-twentieth century to what was described as the English literary canon. In effect, then, the poem, as well as its fictional legendary lovers, was canonized—we might even say canonized for love.
Scenes of reading in literature are often sites of seduction (for literary characters) as well as seductive (for the reader). We’ve already noticed this in the case of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, where the unlikely couple of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick are said to have “fallen