Why Literature Matters

Glenn C. Arbery is a literature professor, and he knows his limits. Literature professors can’t bestow importance on great literature, writes Arbery (Why Literature Matters). What they are qualified to do, he says, is to bestow honor, “because meaningful praise has to come from those who know the excellences of things” (xiii).

Arbery’s book is a beautifully written, entertaining book that bestows honor on the excellences of literature, and also bestows opprobrium where it’s deserved. He doesn’t have much use for Tom Wolfe’s pyrotechnics, for instance. Where Arbery excels, though, is in close reading of texts. He doesn’t denounce Wolfe. He shows where he is sloppily unliterary, and unconvincing.

He quotes this from Wolfe’s A Man in Full: Charlie Crocker has just heard a reference to Michel Foucault, and we go inside his head to follow his thought processes: “Who? thought Charlie. Michelle Fookoe? He looked at Serena, who was turned about in her chair drinking in every word as if it were ambrosia” (quoted, p. 8). Arbery writes, “Insecure, Charlie plausibly glances at his wife to see whether she . . . knows the name he does not recognize. But the phonetic rendering of ‘Foucault’ . . . unfortunately does not bode well for the urbane simile. This description of Serena . .  . requires Charlie to make the ironic comparison of Myrer’s critical jargon to ambrosia, which means that he has to know the classical qualities of ambrosia, including its capacity to immortalize those who are allowed to partake of it. Is there something either in Charlie’s down-home background or in his acquired tastes to make classical allusions spontaneous? . . . Not at all: his favorite work of art is an N.C. Wyeth illustration of the wounded Jim Bowie fighting off Mexicans with his big Bowie knife” (8). Wolfe, he adds, doesn’t want to create a plausible character but to “satirize the Types,” and that leads to “examples of indifferent art on every page” (8–9).

He doesn’t think that Wolfe can defend himself by claiming to render life as it is today. To do that, a novel has to succeed as literature: “A novel that does not succeed at being literature cannot fruitfully address the actual condition of the world. Why? Because it has not addressed, with sufficient awareness or care, its own actual condition as a made thing. There is no reason to trust it as wisdom, and its inflated contemporaneity will eventually hit a low pressure trough and drop into the waters” (19).

Arbery describes his own epiphany about literature, when he heard a college teacher explain how Shakespeare deliberately, artfully varied the stresses and jammed up words in Sonnet 73: “What impressed me was the teacher’s point that the poem leads its reader to expect an unstressed syllable at the beginning of the fourth line, but instead Shakespeare uses a stressed one. I suddenly felt the word ‘bare,’ how it cuts across an established expectation, the way a good tennis player catches his opponent leaning the wrong way, or a pitcher throws only fastballs, then  gets the batter to swing at a change-up.”

He became suddenly aware how “Shakespeare could write three lines of more or less iambic pentameter about getting old, that he could be deliberately indecisive about those leaves and get the word ‘hang,’ after all those changing-his-mind commas, to hang there, that he could emphasize ‘cold’ with the rhyme, and that he could suddenly, at the beginning of the fourth line, write on purpose, ‘Bare, ruin’d choirs, where’—a glutinous sound clump, a gobbet of near-rhymes full of r’s that have to be laboriously pulled apart” and then end the line with a phrase as “clear and airy” as “where late the sweet birds sang” (xvii-xviii).

Arbery doesn’t explain why literature matters. He shows.