The Use and Abuse of Literature
By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - 0 Comments
Book by Marjorie Garber
Literature, as Harvard professor Garber points out, was once something an educated person possessed, a familiarity with the best writing and criticism, not something he or she read or studied. And even when that usage—Samuel Johnson said that John Milton “had more than common literature”—passed, the familiarity with quotations and references remained as a signifier of education, a means by which people of similar backgrounds and interests recognized one another. That social function has long since been usurped among most people, by references from film, TV and the digital world. Small wonder then, Garber argues, that those still immersed in the old literary culture—and who fail to separate literature’s intrinsic value from its social utility—feel we are plunging into the cultural abyss: it’s all part of what Garber calls the abuse of literature.
The title of her book is archly ironic. It pays tribute to Nietzsche, author of On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, and thus father of dozens of book titles like Use and Abuse of Statistics. Readers understand instinctively what their authors mean to say—any human construct can be turned to good or ill. But, contrary to her own title, Garber argues persuasively that, in literature, use and abuse are distinctions without a difference.
That’s because, whatever its past social role, literature is practically useless. It answers no questions—it only raises them. Endless questions, too: people have discussed the meaning of Hamlet for centuries and will go on doing so until the end of time. Indeed, to paraphrase a famous judicial remark about recognizing pornography, that’s how we know literature when we see it: the real thing is inexhaustible and subversive. As Emily Dickinson said, “If I read a book and I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Literature has no set meaning, or real use, or real capacity for abuse. It merely makes us think and imagine; it merely blows the tops of our heads off.
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A comeback for banned books in Tunisia
By Erica Alini - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 6:42 AM - 3 Comments
After chasing out former president Ben Ali and his family, Tunisians can’t stop reading about them
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
After chasing out former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family, it seems Tunisians can’t stop reading about them. Long-banned books about the deposed leader, his children and much-detested wife, Leila Trabelsi, are turning up on bookshop shelves in the country, along with other once-prohibited volumes delving into corruption, Islamism and political repression under the regime. A sign reading “Livres interdits” (“forbidden books”) on display in the window of a prominent bookstore in the capital, Tunis, attracted crowds of passersby, writes the Irish Times.
Across Tunisia, taboo titles surfacing to the public realm include La Regente de Carthage, an unflattering portrayal of the former first lady, and writings by journalist Toaufik Ben Brik, a notorious critic of the president, according to the Guardian newspaper. Gone, it seems—hopefully for good—are the days when importing a book required obtaining a visa for it from the interior ministry, and keeping track of an ever-changing official list of prohibited foreign tomes.
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Dead: happily-ever-after endings
By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
Lasting romance, if not dead in contemporary literature, certainly isn’t winning any prizes
“If you look at our prize-winning literature, you would think we are humourless, violent and pathetic.” So says Ben McNally, an influential Toronto bookseller whose voice—think James Taylor after a bottle of Xanax–belies the sting of his zingers. He has a point: lasting romance, if not dead in contemporary literary novels, certainly isn’t winning any prizes these days. Sex, death, violence and depravity, yes, but true happily-ever-afterness? Dodo bird. “Conflict is where it’s at,” McNally laments before hanging up.A review of winners of the Giller, Canada’s top prize for literature, shows that not a single winning book has a happy ending for a romantic couple since its inception in 1994. It is much the same for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Since 1936, the winners of the award have been showered in superlatives—2007 winner Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje, is replete with “tenderness, compassion and grace”—yet hardly any of the winning titles end with the ultimate culmination of tenderness, compassion or grace.
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A very small elephant in the room
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments
Whatever literary prize juries may think, less, in Helen Humphreys’ hands, is decidedly more
Helen Humphreys is reluctant to talk about it, but six popular and critically admired books later, her enduring absence from the national literary prize lists is reaching elephant-in-the-room proportions. No Governor General’s nominations, no appearances on the Giller short list, not even a nod, during the last three years, from the new Giller long list. “I have to admit I was disappointed not to get on the long list this year,” she says from her Kingston, Ont., home about her new novel Coventry (HarperCollins). Perhaps, Humphreys says with a laugh, there’s some sort of feeling out there that a reader just doesn’t get as much bang for the buck from one of her books.
She may be joking, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that size does matter. In this, a thin year for the Giller short list—normally a plus-350 pages crowd—the five finalists still average 278 pages, while the Governor General’s nominees inked an average of 392. No Humphreys book ever topped 200 pages. And critics do take note. Coventry centres on the experiences of Harriet Marsh, a Great War widow, on the night of Nov. 14, 1940, when the British city perished under a Second World War bombing raid. Reviews have been positive, but some also find the novel slight in achievement almost precisely because it’s slight (180 pages) in length, too short to have enough backstory for Harriet and the two other major characters. Less, in much literary judgment, is decidedly not more.
Yet Humphreys’ minimalism is not only exquisitely rendered, it’s virtually inevitable given her writing history, temperament and material. Her fiction, she says, “tends to be about the emotional lives of my characters at a high pitch.” There is very little down time in a Humphreys novel, where characters can rest, and the intensity of her situations, the author continues, means that both she and her readers “can only stay there for a while—that kind of terrain is not good to linger in.”
Humphreys began writing as a poet, and she still “tries poetry,” only to find herself invariably wrapping those poetic ideas into whatever novel she’s working on—“novels are black holes that suck in everything you’ve got.” She misses what she calls poetry’s “immediate gratification,” and seeks it, to the extent it can be found, in her fiction, which means adhering to its spare economy with words. (Even so, Humphreys’ brevity can still surprise her. “I always think each novel is going to be longer,” she says. “Then I get to page 150 or so and I think ‘Oh no, it’s coming to an end.’ ”)
