'Use and Abuse of Literature,' by Marjorie Garber NONFICTION

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The Use and Abuse of Literature

By Marjorie Garber

(Pantheon; 320 pages; $28.95)

Why read? You'd think that with the e-book and the Internet, with Google searching and channel surfing, the experience of curling up with a good book is as archaic as a buggy ride. You'd think, too, that with graphic novels and celebrity memoirs, and with Wikipedia offering their entries in "simple English," the very idea of literature itself had disappeared and, along with it, the language of craft and cadence that made memorable all writers from Shakespeare to Shaw.

Not so, argues Marjorie Garber, in "The Use and Abuse of Literature," an immensely readable yet vastly erudite reflection on the history of literary writing, literary criticism and the social value of both. Garber, a renowned Harvard professor, offers us a lesson in community and common sense in her book. Less a polemic than a meditation, she poses all the central questions of a literate person's life: What do we mean by literature today? Why study it? Is there a form of writing that is not literary?

This is a book of questions rather than answers. For Garber argues that literature is a form of writing that offers unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions. Literary language is rife with figures of speech, allusions to other writings and characters facing ambiguous moral decisions.

The teaching and study of literature, too, is full of questions. As Garber puts it, in a lively classroom anecdote about teaching her most beloved author, "Since Shakespeare wrote so many years ago, scholars had had all this time to get it right, hadn't they? What was the problem, and why couldn't the professor give the right answer right away, instead of beating around the bush?"

Garber responds like a true college professor (as one myself, I applaud her frankness): "The absence of answers or determinate meanings" is exactly the set of "qualities that make a passage or a work literary." Literary works have no single meaning, whatever the author intended. Indeed, Garber points out, "one of the key features of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending."

This is not relativism. This is not deconstruction. People have been saying things like this about literature since Horace - and indeed, Horace's ancient dictum (that literature should both teach and delight) is, I believe, one of the underlying themes of Garber's book. It's just that what Garber thinks literature teaches is not a set of univocal moral truths but rather a habit of mind: a way of questioning the world, a way of understanding just how hard it is to make decisions, fall in love, express desire, worship, rule and serve.

We read books often to learn how others do these things - and often to learn how others failed to do them. We read books to be pleasured, too, into an admiration for a writer's choice of words or for an author's command of our emotions. One of the most vivid points that Garber makes is that "scenes of reading in literature are often sites of seduction."

When we read stories of other people reading, invariably they are stories about characters falling in love, or lust, over a book. Garber makes us remember Dante's Paolo and Francesca, twirling in hell because they fell in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. She makes us remember Jane Austen's Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick, who fell in love "over poetry." And she makes us remember, too, that when we read we are ourselves seduced by literature.

It is this point that leads to what I think is the most powerful of Garber's claims: that all literature, of whatever time, is in fact contemporary, because when we read it, we make it our own. This is not the sin of presentism (the idea that all that matters is me at this time and what I think about this book). It is the story of history.

People have been reading Chaucer for 600 years. They read him differently depending on their time, and when we come to read him, we come to a 14th century world with 21st century eyes. We can try to be historical about it (say, to ignore post-Freudian notions of the psyche, or post-Marxist notions of class), but we are who we are.

"If every production of a play," Garber writes, "is an interpretation, then so is every reading of that play. This is especially true for lyric poetry, for fiction, for sermons, for treatises, for political speeches, for any work in language that makes a claim upon our literary attention." Or, as she puts it elsewhere, "Reading and criticism are themselves creative acts, remaking the work, making it new, making it contemporary, making it personal, making it productively strange and therefore endowing it with fresh and startling power."

Each time we read a book, we see it differently; each time we read a book, we see ourselves differently in it. Garber seems to have read everything, and this book offers, in addition to seductive argument, a complete anthology of quotations and engagements with poets, playwrights, novelists, biographers and literary theorists. Her book is a testament not simply to Great Books but also to a great conversation between ourselves and the past and among ourselves as present readers. Why read? In the end, the answer to the question is as complex and compelling as "why live?"