Should Literature Be Considered Useful?
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. The critic Kenneth Burke once called literature “equipment for living.” This week, Adam Kirsch and Dana Stevens discuss whether literature should be valued for its utility.
By Adam Kirsch
To reduce literature to its usefulness is to miss the sheer pleasure of word and sound that makes it literature in the first place.
In his essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Kenneth Burke invites the reader to consider literature in the light of the proverb. Proverbs, he writes, “name typical, recurrent situations,” in ways that tell us “what to expect, what to look out for”: They are verbal condensations of experience, formulas of practical wisdom. And with certain kinds of literary works, viewing them as a proverb or strategy — as active, useful knowledge, designed to clarify the reader’s world — is eminently sensible. “A Doll’s House” is useful in one way, “Gulliver’s Travels” in another, “Othello” in yet another: These works tell us something we need to know about sexual oppression, social convention, jealousy. Yet it’s immediately obvious that this approach does not help us make sense of other kinds of literary works. People have been debating for centuries what exactly we are supposed to learn from “Hamlet,” which presents us with a character whose equipment for living is highly defective. Lyric poetry, too, does not seem very proverb-like: What is the practical wisdom behind “Lycidas” or “Ode to a Nightingale”?
More important, however, is that even when a literary work has an obvious message, the articulation of that message is far in excess of its meaning. You could say that “Othello” is a long way of saying, “Be careful whom you trust,” but if that were so, why did Shakespeare bother to write, “Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars. . . . Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump”? To reduce literature to its usefulness is to miss the verbal texture, the excess, the sheer pleasure of word and sound, that make it literature in the first place. The idea of literature as equipment for living seems puritanically utilitarian — as if you were to listen to a symphony in order to sharpen your hearing, or look at a painting to improve your vision.
Yet there is a persistent impulse in our culture to offer such pragmatic excuses for art, as if only something that helped us gain an advantage in the struggle for life were worthy of respect. Nearly a century ago, the critic I. A. Richards advanced a psychological argument that reading poetry improved the responsiveness and organization of the brain. Today, the same argument is often made in Darwinian terms. There is a whole school of Darwinian aesthetics that explains art as a useful adaptation, which historically must have helped those who made it or those who enjoyed it to improve their chances at reproduction.
To Martin Heidegger, however, this way of looking at art would appear exactly backward. Equipment, tools, “gear,” are for Heidegger what we don’t notice or pay attention to so long as it is working. A hammer in good condition is like an extension of the person using it, a way for him to work his will. It is only when the tool breaks that it escapes the banality of usefulness and takes on determinate existence as a piece of wood and a piece of metal, with its own weight, hardness and luster.
Literature, in this sense, is a tool that is always broken. A functional linguistic tool is like a stop sign, which we barely even read, much less think about; we simply see it and put our foot on the brake. A poem stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from a stop sign, in that it demands attention for itself, its specific verbal weight and nuance, rather than immediately directing us to take an action. Indeed, literature famously has the power to impede action altogether, to sever our relations with the real world in ways that can lead to harm — that is one of the messages of “Madame Bovary,” to use Burke’s example. The life that literature really equips us to live is not the one Wordsworth derided as devoted to “getting and spending,” but the second life of inwardness and imagination. For those who do not believe in the reality of that second life, no amount of insisting on the usefulness of literature will justify it; for those who live it, no such insisting is necessary.
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet. He is the author of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, “Why Trilling Matters.” In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.
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By Dana Stevens
Literature may not be in a strict sense useful — may even, by its nature, mock usefulness as a category.
“What is the utility of literature?” is a deceptively innocent question that casually hurls anyone foolish enough to try answering it into at least two abysses at once: those opened up by the sub-questions “What do you mean by ‘literature’?” and “What do you mean by ‘utility’?” It invites an oblique, deflective or tautological response: a laugh or a shrug or the recitation of an Emily Dickinson poem memorized, providentially, long ago.
The very notion of measuring literature’s efficacy as a tool on the order of the wheel or the loom — a technology that, considering the human propensity for storytelling, enables the progress of humankind — points, in its absurdity, to the uniquely slippery relationship between whatever we’re (provisionally) calling “literature” and whatever we’re (even more provisionally) calling “life.” It’s impossible to imagine human civilization without stories, whether recorded in writing or passed down orally in the form of ballad, epic, legend or myth. Indeed, it seems fair to say that it wasn’t until Homo sapiens became Homo fabulans, a creature capable of verbally transmitting an account of lived experience to its fellow creatures, that human life as we know it began. Surely by the time the first caves were painted with those astonishingly sophisticated renderings of horses, mammoths and bulls — a style that continued to be reproduced on cave walls, essentially unchanged, for thousands of years of otherwise unrecorded human existence — some equally highly codified and now forever-lost body of cultural knowledge was being passed down through the generations around the crackling, mammoth-fat-fueled fire.
Literature is life’s long-lost twin, its evil double, its hidden velvet lining, its mournful ghost. The relationship between the two can be expressed only as a metaphor, permanently equivocal and impossible to pin down. But whatever genetic mutation (or angelic blessing, or demonic curse) gave rise to this human drive to recreate our lived experience in language and share that creation with our fellow hairless primates, we’re stuck with it now. Literature may not be in a strict sense useful — may even, by its nature, mock “usefulness” as a category, allying itself first with pleasure, idleness and play — but its necessity seems self-evident from the mere fact of its continued existence, so inextricably bound up with our species’ own.
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in a poem on the occasion of William Butler Yeats’s death in 1939. It’s a line that’s often quoted out of context as a critique of the inward-looking hermeticism of literary culture — and, to be sure, Auden was in part mourning the incapacity of even the most politically engaged art to stave off the awful fate looming over Europe at the time. But the rest of the stanza makes clear just how important this “nothing” that poetry enables is to the survival of human culture: “It survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper; . . . / . . . it survives / A way of happening, a mouth.”
Literature is the record we have of the conversation between those of us now alive on earth and everyone who’s come before and will come after, the cumulative repository of humanity’s knowledge, wonder, curiosity, passion, rage, grief and delight. It’s as useless as a spun-sugar snowflake and as practical as a Swiss Army knife (or, in Kafka’s stunning description of what a book should be, “an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us”). All I know is that when my daughter pushes for another chapter of Laura Ingalls Wilder at bedtime, I feel a part of something very ancient, mysterious and important, something whose existence justifies in and of itself this unlikely experiment of life on earth. I couldn’t tell you exactly what shelf in the utility closet that equipment for living occupies, but I suspect none of us storytelling apes would survive for long without it.
Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among other publications.
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