A Humble Defense of Literature

My grandpa once asked me, condescendingly (though, without meaning to be), while we sat around the dinner table at my parent’s house after a hefty meal, “How will you make money with an English degree?” What I thought was this: “I probably won’t, Grandpa.” What I actually said though was, “Well Grandpa, I’m planning to teach Literature at a college somewhere.” Curiously, he sipped his coffee (its steam fogged his glasses for a moment), and asked, “What exactly will you teach people about Literature?” Naturally, this spawned a screed, lasting at least hours, about literary theory, Shakespeare, the Restoration, modernism, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, postmodernism, reader response criticism, and other seemingly random topics in literature. Again he sipped his coffee, but it did not fog his glasses this time.

Sometimes, when I talk about literature, I become so energized by the attention that I obfuscate simple questions. This is especially true when my fordist Grandfather asks me about the Humanities. But the question, though, is actually a simple one. It was echoed in a class I took at Saginaw Valley with Paul Munn, an especially erudite and demanding professor. (One student reported on ratemyprofessor.com that he had “never felt so inadequate in all [his] life” after taking a class with Dr. Munn, which may or may not prove my point.) He put this question into the simplest of terms: what is the value of literature anyway? Extensively, this is what Grandpa was asking, and it is a question that has been asked by brilliant thinkers since before the first century.

Not willing to repeat what Cheever once said—that “Literature is invincible”—but certainly willing to defend the value of literature, I should have responded to Grandpa and Munn the same way Sidney responded to Gosson in his An Apology for Poetry (1595). He says that the value of literature is that it can “teach and delight.” Similarly, dulce et utile is how Horace phrases it in Ars Poetica—literature is “pleasing and useful.”

These are the makings of my humble defense of literature. I say “humble” because I know that I have loads to learn still. And as I’m currently reading through Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory again, my next post may be “A Humble Defense of Literature Revised,” but I want to take what I know about literature and attempt to articulate why it is important to me in a succinct, convincing, academic…blog post. Here goes…

First, I find great joy in studying literature. I would argue that literature instructors are akin to professional baseball players in many ways. The careers are not comparable in regards to salary (nor the excessive use of steroids), but both fields are incredibly competitive, both fields require dedication to their expertise, and, most similarly, in both fields, experts find immense pleasure in doing what they do. Horace was right—literature is pleasurable!

Like many readers and critics, I love the way certain writers fashion words together. When Virginia Woolf describes Clarissa Dalloway’s lonely words fading like the sparks of a firework (“Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hill-sides soften and fall in”), for instance, my skin becomes riddled with goose bumps. I love the feeling of a striking and stimulating metaphor or play on words. Formalists call this the “defamiliarization” of language. Eagleton’s text explores this (Formalism) and many other approaches to literature. He says, the formalists “saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence: literature is a ‘special’ kind of language, in contrast to the ‘ordinary’ language we commonly use” (4). New Criticism, which looks at a given text and identifies where the writer has “made strange” one’s language, is the American cousin of Formalism (which has its roots in Russia). New Critics are most associated with the literary appliance that is the close reading. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms describes this as a “thorough and nuanced analysis of a literary text, with particular emphasis on the interrelationships among its constituent elements (allusions, images, sound effects, etc.).” The close read is a tool of all literary students and scholars, but they would tell you that locating the defamiliarization of words is not enough. Connecting the language used in a text to the wider meaning of that text is the real task of a learned scholar.

So literature brings me joy. Great. But joy alone is not enough to determine one’s life’s work. I find joy in drinking IPAs with my friends, but I will probably not make it my life’s work (though, if this literature thing doesn’t play out, we’ll see).

I do find great joy in Literature, but it is a different kind of joy than the joy I get from drinking beer; I learn from literature and am challenged by it. Literature is a creative forum for issues, social and moral, that gives us insight into history and also into the state of our current society. I think that this is what makes literature useful. The best literature asks readers to consider their belief systems, political ideology, and attitudes toward gender, race, war, and other social concerns. It encourages analytical thinking and satirizes societies who ignore it (see Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man and John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe).

Still, literature’s usefulness has been widely debated over centuries. Plato, for instance, favored the dialectic and believed that most writing should be banned. Unless it promoted virtuous action (specifically in terms of the military; literature should inspire honor), literature had little worth. The irony, of course, is that he used writing to convince readers that writing was secondary to dialogue. In his defense, his writing took the form of a discussion between two figures. Many scholars refer to this as the Platonic Dialogue. Phaedrus (370 B.C.E.) and Ion (390 B.C.E.) are both famous examples of the Platonic Dialogue. In Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the value of dialogue. Socrates argues that truth becomes real in the presence of philosophers where the dialectic transpires. Writing, to Socrates, prohibits memory and truth cannot flourish because writing is a synthetic adaptation of our thoughts, whereas the dialogue captures thought more closely. Plato’s criticism also acknowledged that writing endorses emotion, and, to Plato, emotion does not lead to truth—only logic and reason leads to truth.

Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) responds to Plato in many ways. Like Plato, Sidney affirms that literature (most read the Apology as a defense of all literature, not just poetry) has the power to inspire honorable action. He says:

But if anything be already said in the defence of sweet poetry, all concurreth to the maintaining the heorical, which is not only a kind, but the best and most accomplished kind of poetry. For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 345)

To Sidney, literature teaches “how to be worthy” and moves (“stirreth”) readers into action. Though much of his defense refers to the religious fervor of the late 16th century (basically, he argues that literature can bring us closer to the Lord’s favor, for it can inspire readers to live justly), Sidney’s application of literature highlights the contagiousness of literature and can translate into other facets of the social world, today.

Sidney’s argument diverges from Plato’s here when he considers how emotion can move a reader to action. “For who will be taught,” he says in the Apology, “if he be not moved with desire to be taught; and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (I speak still of moral doctrine) as that it moveth one to do that which it doth teach?” (340). To Sidney, the emotional response is an important component of the experience literature, for how would literature cultivate action if it does not “moveth one to do that which it doth teach”?

I appreciate the emotional appeal of literature and embrace it, for emotions are an essential part of being human. Who is not pushed to tears when the pregnant Catharine Barkley dies at the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929)? Whose heart is not pulled off of the ledge with Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as he tragically commits suicide? There are so many emotional moments in literature that teach us about everything from human relationships to the tragedy of war, the nightmares of history. (Thank you, James Joyce, for coining such a striking phrase. And thank you, Dr. Cook, for situating an entire class around it!)

Literature is both “pleasing and useful”, Grandpa, and though I won’t make as much money as a professional baseball player, I will find much joy in teaching others to find joy and meaning in it. We will uncover truths about ourselves and the world we live in, we will grapple with ideologies that may not perpetuate our own, and we will probably drink a few IPAs while doing it. Oh, and btw, you know that we’re named after a famous author, right? I can’t believe our inherent literariness didn’t catch on with you and Dad!