The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [71]
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot—how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
Who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.
Dante, Inferno, 127–13831
Gallehault, or Galeott, was the go-between who brought together Lancelot and Guinevere. His name became a synonym for pander, which is, as the poem suggests, what the book they were reading became for Paolo and Francesca—and what this passage has become for other poets and other readers: a go-between linking literature and life.
But if the topic of love is in a way not only as old as literature but also coterminous and coextensive with it—if, to stretch the point only a little, all literature is about love, whether it’s human love, divine love, disappointed love, love of nature, love of art, love of country, or self-love—then to ask how we should feel about love of literature is to ask the question less precisely than we might. To accuse someone of lacking a love for literature is to say he or she doesn’t love literature in the same way we do. What we might rather want to propose is that (1) loving literature is the beginning rather than the end (or the use) of a relationship with it, and (2) like all loves, love of literature is risky, sometimes dangerous, and occasionally disappointing in part precisely because of “the overestimation of the object.”
Uncommon Readers
Two examples from Virginia Woolf may helpfully complicate this question of love and what it might have to do with the use (or use and abuse) of literature. The first is from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?,” which we’ve already noticed as the locus of some of her thoughts on the contemporaneity of literature. In this case, Woolf’s subject might be called the overprofessionalization of book reviewing, “when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot,” and thus may miss the mark as frequently as he or she hit it.
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work?32
People reading for the love of reading may, she speculates, make books “stronger, richer, and more varied.” This pleasant fantasy—Woolf herself was a book reviewer as well as a novelist and essayist, and she depended upon published critics and criticism—is succeeded by another, equally fanciful: she imagines readers coming to the gate of heaven at the Day of Judgment “with our books under our arms,” to be told they need no further reward: “We have nothing to give them here,” Woolf’s version of the Almighty says to her version of Saint Peter. “They have loved reading.”33
However uncharacteristically warm and fuzzy this may seem to us (the original version of “How Should One Read a Book?” was delivered at a private school for girls), it echoes the theme begun with the title of Woolf’s essay collections The Common Reader, a phrase she borrows, with full attribution, from Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Gray.” By choosing Johnson’s phrase as the title of her book of collected and “refurbished” essays and reviews, Woolf raises an interesting problem of identification. The sophisticated writing published under this seemingly modest title was hardly the work of a common reader as described by Johnson or Woolf. Originally