The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [9]
Is a discussion of literature either a blind or a category mistake when what is really under critique is the role of literary criticism, especially literary theory, in the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s? It is conventional, though perhaps neither inevitable nor exhaustive, to divide the realms of literary study into literary criticism, literary theory, and literary history, broad rubrics under which a variety of approaches, from post-structuralism to biography, could be subsumed. But for some readers, and some thinkers, this will miss the point, because even so broad a division omits the actual composition of literary works. What is the use of writing literature? And what is the difference between creative writing and literature? Or even, for that matter, between critical writing (what used to be called intellectual prose) and literature? If Bacon’s Essays and Johnson’s Rambler and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own are literature, what about the book reviews and essays and feature articles in today’s newspapers and magazines? Do they need to stand the test of time?
What is at stake, anyhow, in classifying something as literature, or as literary, at a time when that adjective seems itself somewhat contestatory, re-posing the very problem it would seem to resolve: is the literary a marker of quality, of intent, of genre, of context, or of readership and reception? What about post-facto designations of works as literary, although they were very differently received when they first appeared? Examples in this realm would include Renaissance drama, early ballads, popular novels of the nineteenth century, and the graphic novel (aka comic book) of the twentieth. Or might we decide that most, if not all, discussions of use are inevitably post facto? Is the need to explore the use of literature a manifest indication of the increasingly minor place that literature—and literary study—occupies in a visual, aural, musical, and technological era?
It was Immanuel Kant who set the philosophical terms for the modern discussion of the use of art. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant said, in a phrase that would be cited and echoed many times, that the beautiful object exhibited “purposiveness without purpose.” In other words, a work of art (whether it was a painting, a garden, or a poem) was created on purpose but not for a particular purpose. The artwork was (in a positive sense) useless, and the apprehension of beauty was a disinterested activity, one not motivated by a desire to achieve an effect or result. “All interest,” Kant wrote, “ruins a judgment of taste and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if, instead of making the purposiveness precede the feeling of pleasure as the interest of reason does, that interest bases the purposiveness on the feeling of pleasure.”23
Later critics have debated Kant’s central point. The literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued that, far from being “useless” in Kant’s sense, the work of art has a function—an economic “use value.”24 Some vestiges of the extreme position Smith describes here can be seen, for example, in the periodic surfacing of complaints about commercial art and advertising, “found” art, and a sentimental branch of amateurism that regards book contracts and lecture fees as suspect while exalting the idea of literary prizes (from the Booker Prize to the Tony Awards) as disinterested rewards for excellence. For writers and literary critics in the years that followed Kant’s Critique, though, the question of use was posed not so much in terms of the literary object itself but, rather, in relation to what literature could do, and should do, in the world.
To Matthew Arnold, literature was a path to moral improvement and spiritual growth, and a potential gateway for workers, as well as for the educated and the privileged, to accede to social, economic, and cultural power. In his essay “The Function of Criticism