The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [8]
Sidney’s Defence of Poesie famously declared that “the poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.” The truths told by poetry are figurative, not literal.
What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters on an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If then a man can arrive at that child’s age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written.20
In this, he thought, the poet differed from the philosopher and the historian, who argued their cases by precept and example rather than by story and figure. “The philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomaches; the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher.”21
Almost four centuries later, the issue of whether poetry (by which Sidney meant all imaginative literature) should affirm its truths in the world was still very much on the agenda.
In 1961 the French literary review Tel Quel asked critic and literary theorist Roland Barthes to answer a questionnaire about literature. The questions and responses were published by Barthes under the title “Literature Today.” Here is an extract from his salient commentary in those more political, and yet somehow more innocent, years: “it is not literature that is going to free the world,” Barthes wrote, “Yet, in this ‘reduced’ state in which history places us today, there are several ways of creating literature: there is a choice, and consequently the writer has if not a morality at least a responsibility.”
We can make literature into an assertive value—either in repletion, by reconciling it with society’s conservative values, or in tension, by making it the instrument of a struggle for liberation; conversely, we can grant literature an essentially interrogative value; … the writer can then at one and the same time profoundly commit his work to the world, to the world’s questions, yet suspend the commitment precisely where doctrines, political parties, groups, and cultures prompt him to an answer …
This interrogation is not: what is the meaning of the world? nor even perhaps: does the world have a meaning? but only: here is the world: is there meaning in it? Literature is then truth, but the truth of literature is at once its very importance to answer the world’s questions and its power to ask real questions, total questions, whose answer is not somehow presupposed in the very form of the question: an enterprise which no philosophy, perhaps, has brought off and which would then belong, truly, to literature.22
Notice that Barthes stresses the role of questions, rather than answers. This is a point that needs to be emphasized in trying to explain the specificity of literature in comparison with other modes of writing, thinking, and research.
The Use of “Use”
So what is the use of a discussion about the use of literature? Inevitably, it will depend on the context. Do we mean by this question the social utility of literature in the practical world? Or the cultural value of qualities sometimes called aesthetic or philosophical, as they seem to be derived from reading literary works? Are we trying to assess why a college student should major in literature, or even in the humanities, rather than in something more pragmatic, more lucrative, more amenable to the generation of data, or more directly applicable to the improvement of society? Or are we asking whether there is still, or was ever, anything persuasive in the poet Shelley’s statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Is literature useful because it is beautiful or moving (both of these are claims that have been made by some commentators