Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (35 page)
In its own way, this description is a triumph. It makes the point that the author wants to make, but in order to do so it becomes necessary to project her feelings, or the reader’s, into the mind of the horse.
Seabiscuit
is meticulously documented, with silent notes placed at the back of the book, so as not to disturb the narrative flow. Given the nature of the story, most of the sources are newspaper articles, features from
Turf & Sport Digest
or the
Daily Racing Form
, audiotapes of race calls, films and newsreels, or previous versions of Seabiscuit’s life story. But in none of these is there a viva voce interview with the biographical subject. If Seabiscuit felt that he was “a new horse,” if he brimmed with “cool confidence,” if he “finally understood the game,” it was something said by others, or by the biographer, not (how can one resist this? it is, after all, the point of the cliché) straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since the distinctions I am drawing—between the technique of speculation and the style of free indirect discourse—may seem to be minor or evanescent, let me try to make them sharper by saying that what I’ve called speculative biography imputes motives, intentions, and causes, linking historical events in an arc of character intentionality that is a fictional construct. Why did X do this or that? Perhaps he thought; did she imagine; were they hoping? Here it may be helpful to see how a reviewer described a recent book about the life of the poet Robert Frost:
The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a
vie romancée
, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction. Variations on this form have become increasingly fashionable in recent years—so
fashionable, in fact, that two fictional portraits of Henry James alone were published in 2004, with another trailing along the next year.
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In a work like Colm Tóibín’s
The Master: A Novel
(one of the two fictional books about James noted in the review) it seems as if the term
novel
allows the author to have things both ways: the gravitas of biography and the freedom to identify and psychologize that comes with the writing of a certain kind of fiction.
Half a century ago René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote briskly in their
Theory of Literature
about the relationship between literature and biography—a relationship they considered dangerously misleading:
No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of “sincerity” is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulnesss, correspondence to the author’s experience or feelings as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relationship between “sincerity” and value as art.
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As specific counterexamples, they adduce “the volumes of agonizingly felt love poetry perpetrated by adolescents,” and “the dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries.”
The sincerity issue (Wellek and Warren are clearly speaking back to Lionel Trilling) connects to biography and to the memoir. Their point, firmly stated and reinforced by examples, was that any assumption about a direct or causative relationship between the facts of a life and the work of a writer disregards something fundamental about the nature of literature: “The whole view that art is self-expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feelings and experiences,” they contend, “is demonstrably false.” Again, “the biographical approach actually
obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-cycle of an individual.” It also “ignores” what they call “quite simple psychological facts”: that a work of art may embody the “dream,” “mask,” or “antiself” of its author, rather than facets of the actual life.
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So for Wellek and Warren, much literary biography is not literary.
Perhaps inevitably, their chief example is a selection of biographies of Shakespeare, which from the vantage point of midcentury meant the work of Georg Brandes, Frank Harris, and their nineteenth-century precursors, Hazlitt, Schlegel, and Dowden. Since “we have absolutely nothing in the form of letters, diaries, reminiscences, except a few anecdotes of doubtful authenticity,” they point out, there is no real biographical information, only “facts of chronology” and illustrations of Shakespeare’s “social status and associations.”
The vast effort which has been expended upon the study of Shakespeare’s life has yielded only few results of literary profit … One cannot, from fictional statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer.
There is no logic to the idea that emotions and fictional descriptions are linked by anything causal. “One may gravely doubt,” write Wellek and Warren, “even the usual view that Shakespeare passes through a period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve some serenity of resolution in
The Tempest
. It is not self-evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or that he writes comedies when he is pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the sorrows of Shakespeare.”
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They insist that there is no more reason to identify the playwright’s views with that of a wise protagonist like Prospero, or a disaffected speaker like Timon of Athens, than with those of Doll Tearsheet or Iago: “authors cannot be assigned the ideas, feelings, views, virtues and vices of their heroes.”
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Moreover, the same is true of the first-person
I
of a lyric poem. Whether Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud or not has no effect upon the artistic merit or propositional truth of his verse.
So what uses might biography have? Again Wellek and Warren are clear. Biographical information can explain allusions in the work, can accumulate materials for literary history (what the author read, where he or she traveled, etc.). By
literary history
they mean tradition, influences, sources. But where they draw the line, as we have seen, is at evaluation. Biography has no “
critical
importance.” A work of literature need have no correlation with events or data related to the author’s life, nor do those events explain (or cause) the work.
If biography is not literature—or if only some biographies are literature, and those are considered so for reasons of style and form rather than a supposed fidelity to facts—then why worry about the uses of biography? One response would be that the truth claims—and explanatory claims—made on behalf of biographical, autobiographical, or personal facts have, to a certain extent, preempted or short-circuited the role of criticism and interpretation when it comes to assessing literature, not only for “the common reader” but for many specialists as well.
If it is not only the acknowledged faux or hoax memoirs that are fictions, but also all memoirs, and much biographical writing of the speculative (“if he knew
this
, did it influence him when he did that”) mode, then their truth claims, which may be compelling (or not), have the status, precisely, of
fictional truth
. Aristotle famously said about plots that he preferred a plausible impossibility to an implausible possibility, and “truth” in this sense, with or without quotation marks, is Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. The most effective (and compellingly literary) passage on this matter remains that of Nietzsche, in “On Truth or Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten
that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
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This remarkable paragraph is often assumed by hasty readers—especially those who associate it with deconstruction and thus, by a series of leaps, with nihilism—to be a rejection of the idea of truth rather than a genealogy of truth’s maturity. In fact, we could read the passage as “the biography of truth.” One of its lineal relations is Francis Bacon’s “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.” Nietzsche’s essay doesn’t say that there is no such thing as truth, but that what is true may change over time, depending upon the intellectual and cultural framework. “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Human beings, Nietzsche claims, “lie unconsciously” in this way, and “precisely
because of this unconsciousness
, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth.”
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The art of biography, for all the reasons we’ve noted, seems to be at an interesting crossroads. We have entered a time when books about the lives of writers sometimes elect to take the form of memoirs, describing the author’s experience of reading. Consider two striking cases in point, both about Marcel Proust (and both published in 1997): Alain de Botton,
How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel
, and Phyllis Rose,
The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time
. Rose is a biographer by profession, the author of well-received books on Victorian marriages and on the black jazz performer Josephine Baker. De Botton is a fiction writer and cultural critic. Like his book’s title, his chapter headings read, cleverly, like the titles of self-help books: “How to Suffer Successfully”; “How to Express Your Emotions”; “How to Be Happy in Love.” If not Proust Lite, or even Proust Without Tears, this is Proust Without the Eggheads. And, to a certain extent, Proust Without the Proust.
Like the famous Bette Midler line, “But enough about me. What do
you
think of me?,” these snapshots of readers watching themselves reading—or living—are engaging on first bounce. In a review of Rose’s memoir, Victor Brombert remarks that despite the presence of Proust’s name in the title, “he plays a minimal role” in the book, and observes that this decision may have discouraged readers not familiar with Proust’s work and frustrated those who were.
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(Brombert’s review begins by recalling André Malraux’s comment in
Anti-Memoirs:
“What do I care about what only I care about?”)
Michiko Kakutani described de Botton’s book as “quirky” but possessed of a “certain genial charm,” and she noted that its author had “hit upon a formula for talking about art and highbrow concerns in a deliberately lowbrow way.”
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De Botton went on to “expand upon that formula” with
The Consolations of Philosophy
, finding helpful hints in the works of philosophers like Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Socrates. The book begat a television program in England, where its author was metamorphosed into a philosophical advice-giving figure known as Dr. Love. This is presumably one of the uses of literature, after a fashion. How-to is definitely
use;
whether these adapted sound bites from Montaigne (or Proust) retain their tang as literature or have crossed over into the soothing realm of banality is another question.
Perhaps inevitably, Pierre Bayard’s book on how not to read a book (
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
)
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focuses, at the outset, on Proust, an author Bayard is proud not to have read, and who—as he hastens to tell us—Paul Valéry also hadn’t read and made much of not reading. Bayard gets lots of mileage in this short book by citing long passages from writers who discuss not reading. Whether he himself has read these books (or skimmed them, or heard of them, to use two of his book’s chosen designations) is unclear and, in the long (or short) run, unimportant. What does seem at least fleetingly important is that such a book can not only be published but gain a fandom of sorts. Its most praised section, on the anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s retelling of the plot of
Hamlet
to an African tribe, is a familiar story based upon a well-known essay, retold here as if there were no history of discussions of this famous incident.
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Bayard’s book is not a book about reading, and it is
not a book about not reading, and it is not even a book about the social pretense (and pretension) of “having read.” It is a book about the
theme
of not reading as located in a few idiosyncratically chosen texts.
The back cover of
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
asks which of a group of great books the reader has ever talked about without reading:
Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man, A Room of One’s Own, Being and Nothingness, In Cold Blood, The Scarlet Letter, The Man Without Qualities, Lolita, Jane Eyre, The Sun Also Rises
. But of this list, Bayard discusses only one, Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
. This slim volume is full of long block quotations, separated by passages of plot summary for those who haven’t read what Bayard hasn’t read, and occasional in-your-face bromides. If he weren’t French and telegenic, he would never have gotten away with it.
Taken together, de Botton’s book on Proust as a self-help manual and Bayard’s book about the theme of not reading may say something about the cachet of French cultural essayists in the American market, or about the defensive self-congratulation of American anti-intellectualism (here validated by a generation of French “intellectuals” who write in a style distinctly different from the “difficult” Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault) or about what it means to be “after the humanities” in the most negative sense. To the extent that the books discuss the use of literature, that use is turned, however wittily, into a social function rather than an intellectual or aesthetic one. As such, books like these are symptomatic. They are the “On Bullshit” of literary life.
