The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society

by Alvin B. Kernan

Overview

In this speculative treatment of literature as a social institution, Alvin B. Kernan explores the inability of contemporary writers and critics to maintain a literary vision in a society that denies their values and methods.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691614564
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Essays in Literature , #726
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

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The Imaginary Library

An Essay on Literature and Society

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By Alvin B. Kernan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06504-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Actual and Imaginary Library: Literature as a Social Institution

To those inside the academic institution, which is where most of the readers of this book will be, literature still seems, or at least has seemed until quite recently, "a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world ... given, unalterable and self-evident." (Berger, 1969, p. 59) For us, literature is as solid as the books shelved row on row in the literature section of the libraries, as real as the library catalogues which distinguish literature from other categories of knowledge such as history, philosophy, science, and, in some classification systems, popular fiction. Literature is there in the literary curricula of most of our universities and colleges, in the texts and anthologies used in them, in the examinations, set sequences of study, and the degrees given for proficiency in the subject. Literature is also objectively there in the publishing houses which devote a good deal of money and time to soliciting, editing, advertising, producing, and distributing the books that are the central fact of literature. Reviews, magazines devoted to literary studies, scrupulously edited texts, collected and selected editions, literary prizes, rare-book libraries, literary symposia and professional meetings, all are part of the vast and complex structure that states the values of literature and gives it objective status, making it solidly, really there.

But literature is not only objects and events, it is also roles: poets, novelists, playwrights, critics, editors, literary historians, teachers, publishers, reviewers, library bibliographers, and students, all of whose deep involvement with literature gives it further substance. It is real too because the objective fact of literature has been reinforced, made denser and deeper, by a vast body of criticism which has over many centuries defined literature as a particular mode of writing, established a canon, arranged it in a chronology, linked its components in a history, interpreted individual literary works again and again, woven them together into various thematic structures, commented on and edited the texts with elaborate care, established a literary way of reading texts, written the lives of the poets, compiled bibliographies and concordances, etc., etc. Despite its obviously crucial contributions to the deep objectivity of literature, criticism in all its many aspects is usually thought of as a secondary activity of much less importance to literature than the primary work of the poets, the literary artists who created texts of such power that they lend credibility to all the other critical, teaching, publishing, and library activities that surround them. Homer, Sophocles, Vergil, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Racine, Goethe, Wordsworth, Balzac, Flaubert, Doestoevsky, Joyce: this is the line, of both men and works, which seems to stretch out to the crack of doom, like the statues in the niches around many a nineteenth-century library, validating literature by making its artifacts as real as rocks and stones and trees.

But, somewhat paradoxically, the ultimate reality of literature lies not so much finally in these tangible objects, persons, places, and events as it does in a conception of literature, a kind of "literary competence," comparable to "linguistic competence," which is internalized in the minds of those who are a part of the institution. For us, and to a lesser degree for other members of western culture in which literature is but one minor institution, the idea of literature is something like a language, a system for organizing in a certain way a part of the written world, so completely internalized as to seem no longer learned but an exact image of an external reality which is there for all to see who will only look and reason rightly. In fact, however, the internalization of the idea of literature is considerably less absolute than that regularly achieved in the case of language, and more closely approximates the situation in religion. Although never equaling religion in its importance to western culture, literature and religion resemble one another in many often-noted ways. Both institutions center on a body of sacred texts, have established a canon of authorized works and an unauthoritative but always troublesome apocrypha, have built up a body of doctrinal interpretation — theology in one case, criticism in the other — and have made strenuous and extensive efforts to define and fix orthodoxy. The great systematic theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, or Tillich have, however, obviously been more successful in this regard than our metacritics like Aristotle, Scaliger, Coleridge, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Frye; and because literature has never been able to formulate an orthodox externalized literary world-view with the intricacy and comprehensiveness of Christian theology, it has always had more difficulty than religion — though religion has obviously not been entirely successful in this regard — in fixing an internalized systematic conception of literature as a given, necessary reality.

There is nonetheless a commonly understood conception of literature which we have internalized and on which we have, at least until quite recently, loosely agreed. Phrased roughly, and very tentatively, it might run something like the following. Literature, the name we now give to an expanded version of what was earlier called belles lettres and poetry, is a body of texts distinguishable from other forms of writing, or of speaking in oral societies, such as science, history, and philosophy. A precise universal definition of literary, as distinguished from non-literary, texts has never quite been formulated, despite many attempts, but literature is now generally thought to be identified by a group of leading characteristics such as fictionality, absolute structural coherence, meticulous verbal craftsmanship, the meaningfulness of every part of the whole, metaphor, symbolism, etc. At times the literary text has been thought to have a particular subject matter: morals, love, universal truths, or, at the present, the feelings of the private self. A particular style: meter, rhyme, metaphor, complexity, clarity. A particular structure: beginning, middle, and end, the unities, or organic development. Views on what constitutes the essence of a literary text have shifted from age to age and even from person to person so radically as to make it extremely difficult to say with any precision just why one work can be defined as literature and another excluded from the category. But however vague the idea may be, it nonetheless subjectively seems to us very obvious that literature is a special kind of text, and that its special status entitles it to such names as "myth," "the work of art," or the "literary artifact," all terms attributing objective reality to literature.

The power of the literary texts derives, we believe, from their being the expression of certain innate psychological powers, variously called imagination, creativity, feeling, taste, or vision, a collective unconscious, or an aesthetic instinct. These psychological powers, however differently defined at various times, are thought to be primary powers of the mind, lying below and prior to the rational faculties, expressing out most essential humanity. Because these literature-making powers are thought to be always present in man, literature, despite local differences, appears, it is believed, wherever man does, and the poet, the generic and still most prestigious name for the creator of literature, can trace his lineage back, as older writers like Boccaccio and Sidney did, to Moses, to Orpheus, and to King David. Because literature is conceived of as truly universal, the western poet also finds his image in the anonymous creators of works very different from his own, such as the Polynesian canoe songs, the tales of the oral singers of ancient epic, and the stories of the dreamtime told by the Australian aborigines.

In this view of literature, the poet is a central figure, marked out in particular ways — most dramatically by blindness, madness, or sickness of particular kinds such as tuberculosis — which manifest his genius in physical terms. That genius lies, however, in the poet's peculiarly intense powers of imagination, creativity, or craft, and through him these powers find expression in the form and matter of literature.

The poetic energies which originate in the poet and are embodied in the text are transmitted by this means to the reader or audience. Powerfully affected, we assume, by the especially potent language of the text, the reader is, in various formulations, purged of pity and fear, taught to shun vice and follow virtue, made to know the best that has been thought and said, or psychically relieved by the controlled expression of forbidden desires.

All else follows from these basic conceptions of literature. The historian collects from various places and times the works of literature already, independent of his judgment, there, waiting to be identified and classified. The editor provides us with the true ideal texts, which exist prior to the corruptions incurred during the historical process of transmission. The critic explains and encourages appreciation of the given texts, while analyzing them to abstract and define the essential literary quality, even as the chemist analyzes lead and gold. The teacher teaches literature in such a way as to insure its effect upon a new generation of readers and to develop what is assumed to be their innate conception of literature, the literary competency that is there in the mind in potentia.

To us, then, literature, in both its subjective conception and the objective forms which manifest the idea, appears and is a "given, unalterable, and self-evident" fact, a characteristically human way of thinking, feeling, speaking, and writing that appears wherever man does. It may and does change with time and place, we recognize; but only its outward forms, its accidentals, change, while it remains everywhere always the same in its essential nature. The degree to which it appears to us as an unquestionable fact of the human mind, of culture, of language, measures the success and strength of literature, for it is the mark of all functioning institutions that they obliterate any evidence that they have been socially constructed, and persuade us that they are inevitabilities of culture or nature. It becomes, in fact, possible to think of literature as a changing, man-made social institution rather than a natural or cultural given only at a point of time such as, I will argue, the present moment, when the fundamental beliefs and values of the institution are being questioned in so radical a fashion as to call attention to their inconsistencies, contradictions and arbitrary nature — when the "facts," that is, cease to be entirely believable. For example, even in the minds of believers, severe doubts are being raised presently about the consistency of the literary canon, which we have assumed to be unified by the presence in each literary work of some literary essence. But the canon, on closer inspection, of the kind it is getting now from critics like Frank Kermode, E. D. Hirsch, and Alastair Fowler, turns out to contain a wide variety of works, ranging from prose essays to oral epics, which seem to have been assembled historically in a somewhat random, at times even almost arbitrary, fashion. Furthermore, the canon appears to have changed more or less constantly, and no specific, generally agreed-upon definition of "literariness," the quality that makes it absolutely certain that a text belongs to literature rather than some other category of discourse, seems applicable to all the many diverse works in the canon: the probable rather than the possible? the sublime? a golden world replacing nature's brazen one? what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed? just representations of general nature? the unacknowledged legislation of the world? spontaneous overflows of powerful feelings? the best that has been thought and said?

The multiplicity and the vagueness of these formulations of "literariness" coupled with the constant metamorphosis and the indeterminacy of the canon force us to face the possibility not that literature does not exist, for it clearly does subjectively in our minds and objectively in the culture, but that it may have no essence and no existence outside our mental formulations and social objectifications of it. That is, that it may be a classic instance of a man-made social institution rather than a necessary fact of nature or culture. But before considering further the recent events and questions which are forcing us presently to consider that literature may be a social institution, let us look briefly at what it means to think of it in this way, and at some of the evidence suggesting that the conception of literature was constructed in interaction with events in society.

To consider literature as a social institution, similar to religion or the law, is scarcely revolutionary, since this has become a characteristic modern way of analyzing all cultural activity, but it does require a considerable shift in deeply established ways of thinking about the arts in general. Instead of assuming, for example, that literature is a cultural universal, emerging everywhere out of the human psyche or some spirit of the language, an approach to literature as an institution requires that we think of it as a social construct, assembled over long periods of time, probably without any consistent master plan, by a great variety of people in a very complex interaction with one another, with the past, and with other social institutions. Man continuously makes literature, that is to say, even as he makes the rest of his social world, out of the bits and pieces — language, texts, politics, technology, rhetoric, morals — available in the culture for the process of assemblage. Each of these pieces is not inert, apparently, but itself exerts a shaping force and therefore affects the ultimate form and beliefs of the institution of which it is a part. The printed book has, for example, contributed in crucial ways to the development of literature, but the book, as McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change have recently demonstrated, has not been merely an inert tool used to objectify a pre-existent conception of literature but has itself certain qualities or tendencies such as "fixity" and an esprit de système which have in turn profoundly influenced the view of the nature of literature.

The best concrete model I know of for this process of institutional assemblage in the arts appears not, unfortunately, in any social history of literature but in Andre Malraux's Les Voix du Silence where he shows us how the modern conception of the fine arts was constructed and objectified in the Renaissance and afterwards. The objects we now identify as art, Malraux argues, were originally parts of other institutions. Pictures were aids to piety in churches, and portraits were monuments to the fame of great men and the visual genealogy of noble houses. Busts and images in stone stood in public squares as testimony to the greatness of cities and their political lineage. Art as we understand it was as yet unknown, says Malraux, for,

The Middle Ages were as unaware of what we mean by the word "art" as were Greece and Egypt, who had no word for it. For this concept to come into being, works of art needed to be isolated from their functions. What common link existed between a "Venus" which was Venus, a crucifix which was Christ crucified, and a bust? But three "statues" can be linked together. (53)

From the beginning of the process of transforming portraits into paintings and gods into statues by removing them from their original contexts and placing them in museums, the way was open to collect and bring together within the museum and the category of art all objects which had the form, rarity, and workmanship now objectified as the distinguishing characteristics of art. Stained glass, coins, candelabra, jeweled boxes, illuminations from old manuscripts, pottery, glass figures, mosaics, the alien images of ancient cultures such as Babylonia and Sumer, the cult masks of primitive tribes, all eventually joined one another in the museum as art objects stripped of historical provenance. Objects from many different institutions and many different cultures were thus removed from their original settings and institutions and recombined in the museum to give solid substance to the concept of art, which was now objectified by this process of assemblage as a universal way of thinking and making. And once the museum had reified the concept of art the artists then elaborated and further objectified it by creating to prescription the kind of objects which fulfilled the museum's definition of art.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Introduction. The Place of Poetry in the World, pg. 3
• I. The Actual and Imaginary Library: Literature as a Social Institution, pg. 12
• II. Mighty Poets in their Misery Dead: The Death of the Poet in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, pg. 37
• III. "Battering the Object": The Attack on the Literary Text in Malamud's the Tenants, pg. 66
• IV. Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov's Pale Fire, pg. 89
• V. The Taking of the Moon: The Struggle of the Poetic and Scientific Myths in Norman Mailer's of a Fire on the Moon, pg. 130
• VI. Finding the New Thing, pg. 162
• Works Cited, pg. 176
• Index, pg. 181