The Hatred of Literature by William Marx & Nicholas Elliott

Author:William Marx & Nicholas Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historiography, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Books & Reading, Philosophy, Criticism, Social Science, Media Studies
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

After the many extreme arguments expressed throughout the tract, this conclusion seems surprisingly moderate: Tanneguy recognizes that poetry can be somewhat useful for learning languages, puts forward a model of writing drawn from the Bible, and admits that poetry sometimes aims to do good, though with meager results. But in fact the principal argument here is of a different stripe. Avoiding the usual rhetoric of anti-literary discourse, which revels in grandiloquence and excess, this argument centers on a pragmatic and, one might venture to say, bourgeois calculation of the advantages and disadvantages of the study of poetry: the bookkeeping of profit and loss.

It is not insignificant that the book was written and published in Amsterdam, an industrious trading city—and by a minister at that. As Max Weber showed, Protestantism played a crucial role in the birth of modern capitalism. Tanneguy the younger’s emigration from France to the Netherlands corresponds to the transition from an aristocratic regime based on lavish spending, of which poetry is the linguistic analogue, to a bourgeois, merchant society attentive to the profitability of industry and exchanges. The only relevant moral code here is that of work: Is it useful? Can one see the results? Is the intended goal worth the effort expended?

Up to this point, the moral condemnation of poetry had been absolute and was based on a dogmatic opposition between good and evil, defined ex cathedra. Now good and evil came to be defined and measured in relative terms: good was assessed according to the amount of evil required to attain it, evil according to the good it could lead to. Categorical denunciations were a thing of the past; now it was enough to compare and calculate. This double-entry bookkeeping is the only language understood by the shopkeeper, the only one heard by a society founded on the pursuit of the greatest profit and the optimization of spending—such as our own, perhaps.

In such a society, it would be counterproductive to threaten novice poets with the suffering of hell in the hereafter: hell always attracts people, if only out of a desire to provoke. One only has to show hell or boredom here on earth, in a literary activity spinning its wheels and having no goal or usefulness: in poetry, the torture of Sisyphus is in the here and now.

And so the underlying principle of this book by Tanneguy Le Fèvre the younger consists of one of the most powerful anti-literary diatribes possible, which is also one of those most often heard today. I certainly have qualms about saving it from the oblivion into which it had fallen for more than three centuries, just as a biologist might hesitate before exhuming the plague virus from the ice where it has remained buried for millennia. I can only hope that it does not seize this opportunity to recover its strength.

SUCH AN ATTACK could not go unanswered. A year after publication of Tanneguy Le Fèvre the younger’s De futilitate poetices, on Sunday June 29, 1698, the young academic Friedrich Wilhelm Schütz presented a public refutation of it in Leipzig.

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