Harvard's Marjorie Garber gets them all wrong.

Marjorie Garber's new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay. My marginal comments might as well have been written in red: "What is the point of this paragraph?" "Where are we in the argument—and what exactly is the argument?" "Sloppy thinking." "You need to unpack this." "Again, is there a point here, or just a mass of notes?" "You have to develop your thesis, not just keep reiterating it." The Use and Abuse of Literature purports to be a rallying cry for serious reading by a decorated and prolific Harvard professor, but once you pick your way through its heap of critical detritus—its mildewed commonplaces and shot-springed arguments, its half-chewed digressions and butt ends of academic cliché—you uncover underneath it all a single dubious and self-serving claim: that the central actor in the literary process is, what do you know, the English professor.

Garber begins with the ancient question of pleasure vs. use. Is literature valuable because it feels good or because it's good for you? Her answer is, neither: It is valuable as a "way of thinking." This is the thesis she keeps belaboring: that literary thinking means endless interpretability, the never-ending multiplication of meanings, questions leading not to answers but to further questions. Literature isn't "about" anything but itself, refuses "to be grounded or compromised by referentiality" and so must be disentangled from issues of its "outcome, impact, and application"—that is, of pleasure or use.

Needless to say, the common reader (whom Garber condescends to as "a crucial ancillary part of the world of readers," though she's paraphrasing Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf and may dispute the "crucial" part) is not up to the task. For that we need the heroic professor. "A manifesto for literary studies"—literary studies, mind, not literature—"will claim for it an unapologetic freestanding power to change the world." How? By "asking literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means."

The argument is both remarkable and banal. Banal, because the self-enclosure of the literary artifact has been a commonplace of theory since the New Criticism of the 1930s—in fact, since the art-for-art's-sake aestheticism of the late and indeed the early 19^th century. Remarkable, because it cuts literature off from the very thing it most obviously wants to connect to: the world. Garber speaks of a procession of meanings, but what does she think meaning means? We can (and should) debate what Hamlet has to say about the moral content of violence, or the burden of the past, or yes, the nature of language, but when we do we're making claims about the play's ideas about that which lies outside itself. Yes, I said "ideas"—a dirty word in criticism these past many decades, but a fair one nonetheless.

Because literature, for Garber, is self-enclosed, so are literary studies. The point of asking questions, it seems, is just to ask questions. Call it crit for crit's sake. That is the reason that Garber can only repeat her central idea, never take the risk of explaining or exemplifying it. Why does literary reading have the "freestanding power to change the world"? Does it make us more alert, more skeptical, more humble, more open? She can't say, because any one of those would be a "use."

The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum is not neither, but both. What is more, they are the same thing. "Use" does not mean instruction, as it did to Horace or the Victorians, the inculcation of virtue through the presentation of moral exempla. It means awareness. Literature is "useful" because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement—of plans, anxieties, resentments, habits, the fog that clings to our eyes as we stumble through the day, stumble through our lives—and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all. The pleasure of serious literature is not escape or fantasy, it is this very shiver of consciousness, this troubling exhilaration. Reading is thinking and feeling, both at once and both together, simultaneous and identical. Pleasure is use, use pleasure.