The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [76]
A sense of boredom—the New Critical reading, while elegant, was at the same time predictable—and limitation led to the resuscitation and reinvigoration of other critical modes, often versions of the same modes so strongly repudiated by the New Critics: historical, contextual, biographical, editorial, and overtly political or overtly religious readings, that depended as much upon context or history as the actual language on the page. No orthodoxy of reading is without its blind spots. New Criticism’s rigorous pointing toward the text needed to be corrected or at least was augmented when the next generation of readers and critics readmitted history to the realm of possible literary evidence. Deconstruction, an extension of rather than a replacement for New Criticism, looked precisely for the blind spots, the apparent discordances, opacities, or unresolvabilities of the literary text, rather than the moments of concord or pleasurable but controllable ambiguity. The deconstructive aporia—not a new or fanciful coinage but an old and honored word from the history of rhetoric (“Aporia, or the Doubtfull, [so] called … because oftentimes we will seem to cast perils, and make doubt of things when by a plaine manner of speech wee might affirme or deny him”1)—was, in fact, the counterpart of the New Critic’s ambiguity, the desirable goal and end point of a literary analysis. Aporia, as perplexing difficulty, has a long history of usage and has only recently—and unhistorically—been reclassified as critical jargon. This blind spot, or aporia, is analogous to Freud’s description of the “navel of the dream,” the place where “it reaches down into the unknown.”2
Literature produces, and is in turn produced by, modes of critical analysis. Literature reads us as much as we read literature. As certain kinds of critical or social thinking become popular, the kind of literature they are effective in analyzing become the kind of literature we recognize as good or even great.
But What Is the Use of Literary Reading?
It is potentially risky to paraphrase any critic’s words on the subject of paraphrasing. Nonetheless, it’s a risk worth taking, both because Cleanth Brooks’s essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase” poses a deft and cogent argument well worth revisiting, and also because Brooks twice goes out of his way to discuss, in signifying quotation marks, the “uses of poetry.” Poetry, says Brooks—and here he does not wish to distinguish poetry from other imaginative writing, like novels or plays—cannot be reduced to, or summed up in, a statement, proposition, or message. “What the poem ‘says’ ” is not only not equivalent to the poem or its value; it is also ultimately undeterminable because of vital issues of tone, style, and irony. “The paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem.”3 “The ‘prose-sense’ of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung … it does not represent the ‘inner’ structure or the ‘essential’ structure or the ‘real’ structure of the poem.”4 In fact, he suggests, “one may sum up by saying that most of the distempers of criticism come about from yielding to the temptation to take certain remarks which we make about the poem—statements about what it says or about what truth it gives or about what formulations it illustrates—for the essential core of the poem itself.”
For Brooks, poems are not received truth but “parables”5 about poetry. It is this self-referential element to his formalism that has led some successors to feel that his readings have a certain family similarity, that they all wind up in a similar place, affirming the value of poetry and gesturing toward the iconicity of the poem itself, the “well-wrought urn” of Donne’s “Canonization” that provides Brooks with the title of his essay collection. But Brooks goes out of his way in this essay and elsewhere to insist that he is not interested in a “special ‘use of poetry’—some therapeutic value for the sake of which poetry is to be cultivated.”6 In a short manifesto in The Kenyon Review,