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WORK TITLE: The Hatred of Literature
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE: 8/31/1966
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COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
Phone: 01 40 97 73 17/58 19; william.marx@parisnanterre.fr
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 31, 1966, in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, Provence, France.
EDUCATION:École Normale Supérieure, Paris, studied the classics and French literature; Paris-Sorbonne University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Paris Nanterre, professor of comparative literature.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
French academic William Marx is professor of comparative literature at Paris Nanterre University. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Paris-Sorbonne University. He has published books in French on the aesthetic in modernity of twentieth-century literature, the history of devaluation in literature, life of the scholar, and literary tragedy. His 2015 book, La Haine de la Littérature was translated by Nicholas Elliott and released in English as The Hatred of Literature in 2018.
In the book, Marx discusses the suppression of literature from the ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago. From Plato’s banishment of the poets and Pope Gregory the Great’s condemnation of pagan literature because it was too elegant to modern haters like French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Marx traces politicians, philosophers, theologians, and pedagogues who have denigrated literature and questioned its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness. These people find literature dangerous, harmful, a threat to the status quo or to the ruling parties, or simply a waste of time. Today, teachers in universities are afraid to teach certain books for fear of offending students’ sensibilities.
Marx names four condemnations of literature in the Western world—authority, truth, morality, and society—that have been invoked throughout the centuries by anti-literary forces ruled by misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and rhetorical wars. Marx observed that literature did not exist until it was derided, as far back as when Plato drove the poets out of Greece. Human nature being what it is, the more literature is censored, the more people want to read those books and their popularity skyrockets. Ultimately, Marx says, arguments against literature paradoxically convey an importance and power to the form.
“The result is little more than a compendium of overstatement, melodrama and banality so arranged and articulated as to put one in mind of oppressive weather,” according to National reviewer Matthew Adams. Complaining about Marx’s familiar critiques and misreadings, Adams added the book “is at its worst almost supernaturally soporific. Literature could benefit yet from a crisp, fresh and robust consideration of its uniquely edifying climate. With friends like Marx on its side, one feels it might more fruitfully be grateful for its foes.”
Understanding Marx’s thesis, Jonathon Sturgeon highlighted on the Literature Shrugged Website the absurdity Marx presents, saying: “Wisely, Marx’s strategy is not to argue that literature offers a liberating truthiness. Instead, he draws attention to the absurd and ad hominem aggression of partisans of science.” For example, philosopher Gregory Currie wrote in 2011 that novelists cannot understand human psychology like scientists do, cannot understand the world and its truths, and mostly suffer from severe pathology. Observing Marx’s use of sarcasm, VQR commentator Trevor Quirk noted: “Hatred reads like an overblown victimology of literature in that its assailants have never presented a lethal threat. Belied, banned, or burned, stories and poems find a way of transcending their plight. For Marx, the true annihilator of literature is simply ‘indifference.’”
Writing online at Times of Higher Education, Gary Day observed that by taking the definition of hatred at face value, Marx misses an opportunity. Day said: “It is a pity that Marx does not bring these different meanings of hatred into play as it might well have resulted in a more nuanced account of the relationship between literature and its detractors.” Nevertheless, Day admitted: “His book is a sparkling constellation of wit, learning and insight.” According to a writer in Publishers Weekly, the book is a complex and humorous exploration of literature and its detractors that “makes for a persuasive case for literature’s value as ‘the ultimate illegitimate discourse’ and for a witty attack on censoriousness.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of The Hatred of Literature, p. 51.
ONLINE
Literature Shrugged, https://thebaffler.com/ (March 2, 2018), Jonathon Sturgeon, review of The Hatred of Literature.
National, https://www.thenational.ae/ (February 25, 2018), Matthew Adams, review of The Hatred of Literature.
Times of Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (February 1, 2018), Gary Day, review of The Hatred of Literature.
VQR, https://www.vqronline.org/ (May 31, 2019), Trevor Quirk, review of The Hatred of Literature.
The Hatred of Literature
Publishers Weekly. 264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p51+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Hatred of Literature
William Marx, trans, from the French by
Nicholas Elliott. Belknap, $29.95 (240p)
ISBN 978-0-674-97612-2
If this complex and frequently funny exploration of literature and its foes had a subtitle, it might well be "In Praise of Banned Books." Marx, a professor of comparative literature, delivers an impassioned broadside bibliophiles will find inspiring during the next national conversation about appropriate reading material. The premise: a 2,500-year-old battle still rages over who controls the written word. Marx introduces the somewhat vague concept of "antiliterature" as the antagonist: the idea that literature is dangerous and should be constrained (traced back here to classical Greece). He introduces in detail exemplars of antiliterature, from Plato to Nicholas Sarkozy, and then demolishes their arguments with a curious mixture of vehemence and erudite nonchalance. For example, in response to Sarkozy's attack on reading requirements for civil service exams, he speculates that "international conventions will soon ban obligatory reading of masterpieces as inhumane and degrading treatment." His arguments invite controversy, as when Marx glibly reduces centuries of Christian thought to "an irrepressible inferiority complex" in relation to pagan culture. He's also very entertaining: his introductory recap of the Iliad is so slyly hilarious that it alone is worth the price of admission. All of this makes for a persuasive case for literature's value as "the ultimate illegitimate discourse" and for a witty attack on censoriousness. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Hatred of Literature." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 51+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575697/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=29b61650. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575697
The Hatred of Literature, by William Marx
Book of the week: A study marries passion and wit as it takes on the enemies of the canon, says Gary Day
February 1, 2018
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By Gary Day
Book burning
Source: Getty
Is there such a thing as the hatred of literature? William Marx seems to think that there is. I am not so sure. Hatred suggests a depth of passion that the enemies of literature generally lack. They seem incapable of finding any value in great works other than a strictly utilitarian one, and that rarely. Hence the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s bewilderment, in 2006, on discovering that an examination for administrative officers included a question on the early novel, almost certainly written by the Comtesse de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves (1678). “How often have you asked a ticket clerk what she thinks of [that novel]?” he inquired, no doubt in a spirit of satire. Civil servants should be promoted on the basis of their skill and expertise, not “their ability to stuff their heads with useless cultural knowledge”.
Marx gives an absorbing account of this episode. Obviously pleased with his display of wit, Sarkozy repeated it on a number of occasions, with suitable embellishments. The person who set the exam question was a “sadist” and the president himself confessed that La Princesse de Clèves had made him “suffer” – which, let’s not forget, is a relative term. At stake in this debate was not just the use or uselessness of literature for specific occupations, but also what kind of knowledge served to bind a nation together.
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Samuel Johnson once said the life of a people lay in its literature, a notion that underpinned the development of English studies at the beginning of the 20th century but that has now fallen into abeyance. The ultimate effect of Sarkozy’s sneering remarks about La Princesse de Clèves was to boost its sales, prompt public readings and media discussions and have it added to the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, “the ultimate recognition for a French author”.
One can only conclude that literature thrives on “hatred”. Marx takes the term from the novelist Gustave Flaubert, who had a notoriously exalted conception of his calling. His fellow author, Émile Zola, reports that Flaubert was infuriated by bourgeois blankness in the face of great art. Surprisingly for a man who strove for precision in his use of words, Flaubert repeatedly referred to this incomprehension as “the hatred of literature”.
Despite its apparent simplicity, hatred is a complex emotion: a volatile compound of fear, misunderstanding and hostility as well as suppressed desire. It is a pity that Marx does not bring these different meanings of hatred into play as it might well have resulted in a more nuanced account of the relationship between literature and its detractors. Instead, he accepts the term at face value and simply shows how literature’s enemies have tried to sully its reputation. To condemn it for telling lies is to define it as untruthful; to protest that it corrupts the young and impressionable is to claim that it is immoral; and, the clincher, to denounce it as futile is to rob it of its power to inspire, challenge or transport us.
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Marx gives plenty of examples of all these boringly familiar charges against literature. Pope Gregory the Great objected to pagan authors, on the grounds that they used eloquence to spread deceit. In the 17th century, Tanneguy Le Fèvre wrote that classical “poetry can only be much loved by those who overindulge in their free time”, but he conceded that it was useful for learning languages. Marx characterises this approach to literature as a form of “bourgeois calculation”, a means of adding up the profit and loss in studying poetry. A similar mindset can be found in that most misunderstood of English critics, F. R. Leavis, who sought to develop a technique of reading that would save students from “profitless memorising”, leaving them “better equipped to profit from literature”. Although Marx doesn’t say so, Leavis is an interesting case because his work is both a brilliant defence of literature, and an illustration of its entanglement in the economic thinking from which he tried to free it.
Marx is merciless in his demolition of the various “hatreds” of literature. The philosopher Gregory Currie comes in for particular scorn. Marx is irritated by Currie’s claim that novels peddle a false psychology. For example, they often show characters’ actions as the result of their conscious will when in fact “the decisive influence comes from our environment”. Readers are therefore wasting their time if they look to novels for psychological insight. So what, responds Marx, there are plenty of things that we don’t find in a novel – how to fix a tap, for example. He sarcastically concedes that we don’t find much in Marcel Proust about the altruistic properties of coffee – a reference to Currie’s claim that the beverage promotes social sympathy. And you can sense that he has almost reached boiling point as he relays Currie’s solemn observation that “our conscious decisions are not what bring about our actions but are a product of the underlying and unconscious causes of the actions themselves”.
“You don’t say!” Marx declares, pointing out, quite rightly, that this is a commonplace of literary criticism. It is also the foundation stone of psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud maintaining that he simply followed in the poets’ footsteps. All restraint finally vanishes when Currie mentions a study that claims that most writers suffer from a form of psychopathology. “It is flabbergasting to find so many prejudices, outrageous remarks and simply naïve statements concentrated into two pages,” Marx thunders. Now there’s passion for you.
His book is a sparkling constellation of wit, learning and insight. For example, the contemporary anxiety about teaching certain books for fear of offending students’ sensibilities is a symptom of our reductive view of literature, one in which society only ever finds a flattering image of itself. Marx’s words are worth quoting in full: “To refuse literature the right to shock, provoke and make people uncomfortable is to impose upon it the constantly redefined duty of offering readers only what they expect – what they can accept, understand, and absorb. It is to refuse the power of reading to confront us with alterity.” Absolutely.
You can find similar sentiments in Leavis. Marx offers an original take on his “Two Cultures” dispute with the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, exposing the bias behind Snow’s apparently even-handed approach to the divide between science and the humanities and also identifying a strain of homophobia that he thinks is common to “haters” of literature. He often finds this po-faced breed très amusant because their lack of self-awareness means that they unwittingly use literary techniques to make their anti-literary case. Plato not only relied on dramatic dialogue for his philosophy, he also concluded The Republic – in which he banished poets from his ideal state – with the poetic myth of Er.
Literature is inescapable, narrative is our default mode of communication. This means that literature is so much more than the “remainder” that Marx says it is after it has been stripped of its claims to truth, morality and social glue. Of course Marx recognises this – “Literature exists to fill us with wonder” – but in the end he spends too much time on “hatred” rather than on love and, for that, he doesn’t quite get full marks.
Gary Day is the author of The Story of Drama: Tragedy, Comedy and Sacrifice from the Greeks to the Present (2016).
The Hatred of Literature
By William Marx; translated by Nicholas Elliott
Harvard University Press, 240pp, £23.95
ISBN 9780674976122
Published 26 January 2018
William Marx
The author
William Marx, professor of comparative literature at Paris Nanterre University, was born in the small medieval city of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, in Provence, but grew up in Marseilles – a city “obsessed with its prestigious Greek past”, which he suspects “had some influence on my own fascination with classical antiquity”.
A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his curriculum ranged from the classics to French literature, Marx relished “the intellectual freedom” that he found there and went on to pursue doctoral studies in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University – Paris 4, wanting “to be able to write freely on any literary topic, from any area, from any time, whenever I felt the need”.
Always interested in “the variations and mutations of the status, the function and the very concept of literature throughout centuries and across cultures”, Marx published a book called L’Adieu à la littérature (2005), exploring “the story of those writers who condemned literature and quit writing”. The Hatred of Literature forms a kind of a sequel looking at “the condemnations of literature [that] are not internal, but external, as they come from people outside literature”.
Convinced that literature as an art form will always exist, Marx is delighted whenever “literary works provoke some scandal” because this is a tribute to the “power they have”. Yet he worries about the internet’s impact: “the very proliferation of screens and the ubiquity of social networks make it very difficult, especially for young generations, to find the mental concentration that is required to read literature”. He is equally concerned about developments in literary studies such as “the dilution of literature departments into larger units”, and he believes that “the growing indifference to foreign and/or ancient languages and literatures is also a serious problem if we really want to foster an awareness of humankind in its diversity”.
Matthew Reisz
Book review: 'The Hatred of Literature' by William Marx
Great writing has always invited harsh criticism and made authors mortal enemies, but in the case of William Marx’s critique, more rigour is required
Matthew Adams
Matthew Adams
February 25, 2018
Updated: February 25, 2018 12:28 PM
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Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle debate in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ frieze at the Vatican, painted about 1510. Getty
Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle debate in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ frieze at the Vatican, painted about 1510. Getty
Literature, in this age, is often regarded as an edifying art. For the British academic and critic John Carey, the written word – whether rendered in poetic or novelistic form – is distinguished from other art forms by virtue of its ability to criticise, moralise, and argue against itself. The American scholar Harold Bloom once argued that it was William Shakespeare who was responsible for making us fully human.
Clive James and Martin Amis, drawing on a critical tradition that was amplified, if not inaugurated, by F R Leavis, have each built their careers on the principle that inspired writing, along with the critical tradition it engenders, is essential to the health of civilisation. And more recently James Wood has ventured that it is in the 19th century novel that we encounter humanity’s most potent recoil from – and resistance to – the lexis of punishment inscribed in scripture. The conjuring of other worlds, particularly in the form of the novel, is, for Wood, the great medium of human sympathy and forgiveness. It is for this reason that, in obeisance to George Eliot, he titled his latest collection of essays The Nearest Thing to Life (2015).
It is easy to assume that these valuations of language-based art have a short history. And it is true that when the philosopher Thomas Case discovered, late in the 19th century, that the school of English at Oxford had resolved to admit to its curriculum the study of Anglo Saxon letters, he worried that the university was about to foster a culture that – in “nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths” – was “about to reverse the Renaissance”.
Yet even at that time, views such as those exemplified by Case were far from regnant. We sometimes think of the 19th century as an age that was distinguished by its hostility to fictional narrative. There was an epoch for which the novel was frivolous and effeminate, an awakener of pernicious diversion and profane desires. But in roughly the same period, plenty were prepared to describe these creations as a moral force. Charles Dickens considered the art of story to be one of probity and social value, not least because of its potential to alleviate the burden of having to endure life’s daily and great torments. For George Eliot, the linguistic reinvention of life was to be cherished as an enlarger of sympathies.
Even in the 19th century, which saw the great blooming of the English novel, these positions were not wholly new. When John Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 he named the figures he considered to be humanity’s greatest teachers. In doing so, he chose not the theologians Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas – among the 17th century’s usual touchstones for ethical instruction – but the poet Edmund Spenser. The rhetorician George Puttenham and the poet and theorist Sir Philip Sidney made similar arguments about their contemporaries and predecessors. The textually limned world, even in the 16th and 17th centuries, could be viewed as an improving force.
Milton, Puttenham and Sidney knew they were being provocative in adopting this stance. For in tandem, and as a prelude, to their apologies for what we would now term literature (the category was not recognised as discrete in the early modern period), there ran and stood a vision of the pursuit that regarded it with fear and suspicion – or, to use the term adopted by William Marx in his new, derivative and uneven account of the phenomenon, with hatred.
This animus, as Marx laboriously demonstrates, stretched at least as far back as Plato and his predecessor Xenophanes of Colophon (c 570 to 470 BCE). For Xenophanes, poetry inspired by the Muses (as opposed to by the gods) was denigrated as being of “no use” in the quest for virtue. For Plato, it was to be distrusted on the grounds that it posed a threat to the collective cognitive order and social subservience he thought the populace of his ideal city ought to exemplify. It gave, to put it crudely, people ideas about themselves.
Having adduced these critiques, Marx rehearses along familiar lines the arguments that, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to 20th century figures such as C P Snow (he of the “Two Cultures” controversy) and Nicolas Sarkozy, have cast literary endeavour as a threat to truth, rectitude, and social stability. In chronicling their history and interplay, Marx offers a number of objections to their nature and waning tenacity, arguing that invective against literature has paradoxically affirmed the power and the importance of the medium it was attempting to deny. The result is little more than a compendium of overstatement, melodrama and banality so arranged and articulated as to put one in mind of oppressive weather. We open with blustery hysteria: “Literature is a source of scandal … Reader, be warned: if you do not want to be scandalised, throw out this book before it is too late.” Crikey.
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This burst of excitement is then followed by a series of drizzly misreadings (ancient philosophers, we are told, denied literature “any claim to authority” – wrong: they ascribed it too much), damp hypotheses (“If there had been no literature, anti-literature would eventually have invented it”), and a looming cloudscape of wearying fatuity and irritating solecism. We are informed, for example, that there occurs in writing “a change of identity as soon as … one is no longer able to speak in one’s own name but [only by] borrowing someone else’s words”.
A 300-line passage from The Iliad is described as “interminable”. Marx then adds to this meteorological gloom by delivering a sequence of rumbling sententiae concerning what he takes to be the special qualities of the imaginatively used word. The reader is here struck with the lightning-bolt observation that “literature is the sleep of reason”.
Oh no it isn’t.
The present volume, on the other hand, is at its worst almost supernaturally soporific. Literature could benefit yet from a crisp, fresh and robust consideration of its uniquely edifying climate. With friends like Marx on its side, one feels it might more fruitfully be grateful for its foes.
LITERATURE IS NOT LITERATURE UNTIL SOMEONE hates it on principle. Homer and Hesiod weren’t poets, in the way we’ve come to understand the word, until Xenophanes and Heraclitus and Plato attacked poetry’s governing credentials, its pipeline to the Gods. The last of these, speaking through Socrates, displaced poetry’s authority, itself drawn from the Muses, by banishing it from the well-ordered city; poetry’s tendency to arouse madness, its toleration of clashing voices, and its foundational place in the educational curriculum made it the enemy of an imagined republic where all positions were accounted for, where all discourse was to be phlegmatically compassed toward the truth. Paradoxically, though, this exile came to define poetry. Until their banishment, Hesiod and Homer were more like perennial Teachers of the Year or cool, dead popes—but universal. We don’t have a contemporary analogue.
This is the thesis, or a thesis, of William Marx’s The Hatred of Literature, another in a line of books, following Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, that defines literature through its strongest negative, hatred of it. Both authors, in this respect, make right with William James’s program in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which bets that the most extreme examples usefully illuminate the commonplace. The hatred of literature, the thinking goes, might tell us a thing or two about our relation to letters in general.
To this effect, Marx points out that the most famous moment in the Western history of hating literature, Plato’s banishment of the poets, is now the least understood. He cites the blindness of his contemporaries, who are
unable to see that they are living in the very world Plato hoped for, conceived, and willed, that is to say a society whose members only ever open a book to experience the purely gratuitous pleasures of the imagination; a world in which literature has lost nearly all power and authority and has become an empty shell merely used to pass the time by a shrinking class increasingly monopolized by many other distractions.
Marx is not bemoaning literature’s curious lack of usefulness or authority in the modern world; he’s rather noting that our own society is more controlled, ordered, and strategically distracted—because we are ruled by technocrats and plutocrats and television—than many bibliophiles would care to acknowledge. The haters of literature, who contribute to a canon of what he calls anti-literature, merely serve to shine a S.A.D. lamp on a still more depressing possibility: the shared indifference to literary art.
________________________________________
Literature’s prosecutors bring four charges: abuse of authority, lack of morality, perversion of truth, and diminished usefulness to society. It is on these terms, Marx argues, that literature is most fervently condemned.
These withering hatreds, backed by the Lord, shade easily into an accusation that literature lacks moral principle.
If Plato furnishes the classical example of despising literature by way of its abuse of authority, this hatred is later carried forward by a procession of Christian writers, a run of Simon-Peters who deny the superior crow of pagan poetry because it lacks the Holy Scripture’s inspiration from God. Pope Gregory, Marx writes, “bogged down by an inexpressible inferiority complex,” goes so far as to defend the Book of Job by describing its total lack of eloquence as a sign of Godly authority. Gregory believed (Marx adds) that “eloquence is a property of lying”—so much for literary style. For his part, St. Augustine, who wanted to read the pagans despite an injunction from the Psalms (“For I have not known literature, I will enter into the power of the Lord.”), argued that the Psalmist merely wanted Christians to avoid the writings of Jews. Maybe that’s why he taught himself to read silently.
These withering hatreds, backed by the Lord, shade easily into an accusation that literature lacks moral principle. Unsurprisingly, given the subject, it’s in the section on morality that The Hatred of Literature, originally written in French, becomes most French. (Marx is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris Nanterre; the new Harvard University Press edition is translated by Nicholas Elliott.) For the case against moral laxity, Marx turns to Tanneguy Le Févre (son of Tanneguy Le Févre), whose Oedipal hatred of his classicist father—and jealousy of his brilliant sister, the great scholar and translator Madame Dacier—compelled him to crack the whip on an alarming number of poets. In his The Futility of Poetry, Le Févre’s veins pop with high moralism:
If we examine the lives of the poets whose works are presented as the canons of art, we discover that some were drunkards, others debauched, others adulterers, and others yet were infected with execrable vices that are in our parts rightly punishable by death: Aeschylus wrote his tragedies under the influence of alcohol; Homer and Hesiod suffer the torments of Hell, one hanging from a column, the other being bitten by snakes for eternity . . . Horace and Sophocles, immersed in the pleasures of the body, were guilty of abominable passions; suffering from the same disorder, Virgil sang his own desire through the figure of Corydon in the second Eclogue; similarly, Pindar breathed his last on the lap of the boy he cherished . . . Euripides hated women and was among those whom Apocalypse calls dogs, which is exactly why God wanted to have him torn apart by dogs, soiled as he was by crimes to which nature is loath to give a name.
Of course, Marx points out, this megachurch sermonizing can be found throughout anti-literary history, often in the form of a thinly disguised homophobia. This pose extends to Rousseau, whose championing of virility mixes overexcitedly with his pronouncement, “I hate books.” Rousseau, it has to be said, wrote books, and he was here merely attempting to privilege experiential learning, but statements like this are nonetheless emblematic of anti-literature: ambivalence often lurks beneath its proud moral conviction.
Another project of this anti-literary moralism, also worried over by Rousseau, is the proper education of children. To this end, Marx is drawn inevitably to the recent scuffles over trigger warnings. The imposition of such warnings, which would alert the reader in advance of a work’s potentially disturbing “content,” would, Marx writes, “promote an art of language that would no longer be literature such as we know it, as an autonomous and independent art . . . . To refuse literature the right to shock, provoke, and make people uncomfortable . . . is to turn every reader into an eternal minor.” To front a piece of literature with a trigger warning “is to ask [it to be] a perfect, irreproachable, unchallengeable sacred text, that is to say, precisely what it is not.” In the end, this anti-literary moralism arraigns literature on the charge that it “deprives the reader of moral autonomy,” which is why the moralists think “readers should be emancipated from literary custody.” The problem with this claim is obvious: literature lost its capacity to determine a reader’s moral commitments when it was banished from the Republic and displaced from its authority by the Word of God.
Yet The Hatred of Literature is not a chronological or even historical survey: Marx is not outlining the evolution of anti-literature; he’s describing its most persistent traits. Among these is the argument that literature—unlike religion, philosophy, or more familiarly today, science—cannot deliver the truth. Wisely, Marx’s strategy is not to argue that literature offers a liberating truthiness. Instead, he draws attention to the absurd and ad hominem aggression of partisans of science. One such guy, the philosopher Gregory Currie, wrote a piece for the TLS in 2011 that Marx loathes at length. Currie’s idea, that novelists do not provide the understanding of human psychology found and tested in laboratories, is ridiculous enough, but he extends it to a flaw in the minds of writers themselves, who are riddled with psychopathologies and therefore incapable of understanding the world and its truths. Writers as a group, Currie explains, “[contain] the highest proportion of individuals with severe pathology (nearly fifty percent), compared with scientists, artists and composers.” Marx is right to find Currie’s tactic insane: “it is no longer worth examining literary works in detail to see if they deserve their despicable reputation,” he writes, “one need only discredit the authors themselves, and the game is over.”
“It is no longer worth examining literary works in detail . . . one need only discredit the authors themselves, and the game is over.”
The game against literature may not be over, but it is certainly rigged. In its final two sections, The Hatred of Literature turns to more contemporary matters. Namely, Marx deals with the charge that literature is useless to society, an argument enhanced by literature’s perceived lack of authority, morality, or ability to convey the truth. Actually, the situation is much worse. To be sure, literature is useless, but it also fails to honor the one trait ascribed to it by Plato: its ability to imitate things in the world. “The moral of the story is that literature does not adequately reflect the whole of society,” Marx admits, half caving to the arguments of its prosecutors. “When the regime is aristocratic, literature is criticized for not being aristocratic enough and not belonging to the clan of the powerful; when it is democratic, it is accused of being elitist and contributing to the system’s flaws.”
For Marx, this state of affairs exposes an essence of literature: it is powerless. Not only that, it is relatively valueless: “its status as an unprofitable activity in the republic expose it to every accusation and every proscription.” Yet Marx finds solace, not to mention his many negative definitions of literature (“Literature is what remains when everything has been removed”), in its hatred. “Far worse indeed than the hatred of literature would be indifference: may the gods prevent that day from ever arriving.”
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There’s reason to fear that the dreaded Day of Indifference is nearer than Marx believes. In some quarters, it has already arrived. This is not so much a matter of the quality of contemporary fiction or poetry, or the state of criticism, or even current book sales—anyway, we’re not talking about books but literature.
One problem is that the hatred of literature, found across the political spectrum, now conforms to the dimmest clichés of anti-literature without harboring any of its intensity. As far as I can tell, the usual suspects of today’s anti-literature comprise a short list: evangelical Christians, who occasionally aim to ban books on the basis that they are Godless; Enlightenment-core scientists, like Richard Dawkins, who admonishliterature because it can’t access the Real promised and delivered by science; and, occasionally, well-intentioned progressives and leftists who want to correct literature by eliminating certain authors rather than undertaking the more difficult work of challenging their writings—their style, form, or content—through literary criticism.
It’s not an inspiring collective of hatred—it’s more an anti-literature of indifference. Literature, for these parties, is only an occasional target, one met with waning fierceness. In attacking literature, it often seems that today’s anti-literature is merely jockeying for social and financial capital and taking advantage of a marketplace where literature possesses limited value. What’s worse, literary discourse—not just literary marketing and publicity—has become strangely compensatory and promotional in turn; it, too, jockeys for position in the marketplace not by defending literature, but by celebrating books—the thing to be bought. There has always been book promotion, but it didn’t always dominate so much of the circulation of literary writing, and it never seeped so thickly into book reviews and literary prose. This promotional language, which celebrates books in the abstract, is itself a form of anti-literature (because it replaces literature with books), but one that pitches itself against a widespread indifference to literature, not a sophisticated hatred of it.
This circumambience of indifference has spread to factions both liberal and conservative. How else to explain the irony that has befallen the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds literary presses—especially independent and translation publishers—throughout the country? Trump now plans to eliminate it, but it’s not as if he’s sanctioning a culture war against literary writing—again: its style, content, or form—it’s more that he and the Republicans just don’t care. (Nor is the NEA’s demise a serious concern of budget hawks on the right: it would cost more money to shut it down than to keep it running.) To illustrate this point: consider that Trump originally wanted to hire Sylvester Stallone to head the organization. Had Stallone agreed, the NEA would likely be safe from budget cuts. Which is to say that each time you binge watch a popular show that you don’t even like, at the expense of reading a decent novel, you’re enacting a Trumpian indifference to literature: entertainment over letters.
It’s not just conservatives. The dominance of streaming video in the marketplace has revealed an indifference to literature in liberal discourse. This turn of events, it has to be said, is not all that sad or surprising; being powerless, literature didn’t even put up a fight. But to add insult to injury, liberal commentators everywhere flaunt the vigor of television against its punier rival. Take the case of the cultural jingoist and editor of The New Yorker David Remnick, who noted in his letter nominating TV critic Emily Nussbaum for a Pulitzer Prize (which she won in 2016), that “television has become the dominant cultural product of our age—it reaches us everywhere, and has replaced movies and books as the thing we talk about with our friends, families and colleagues.” Remnick did not stop there; to emphasize the untrammeled authority of TV, and literature’s ongoing uselessness, he casts it in military terms as a feeble enemy, now defeated. “Those of us who love TV,” he writes, “have won the war.” Unlike literature, “the best scripted shows are regarded as significant art—debated, revered, denounced.” Remnick, the editor of a literary magazine, here side-eyes literature, which, he implies, should no longer be considered a significant art.
Jonathon Sturgeon is senior editor of The Baffler. He was previously deputy editor of artnet News, literary editor at Flavorwire, and senior editor at The American Reader. He has contributed essays on literature, visual art, cinema, and politics to the Guardian, Frieze, ArtNews, and The Paris Review, among other outlets.
In his newly translated book, The Hatred of Literature, critic William Marx argues that celebrated minds like Heraclitus and Rousseau became utter lightweights when reading literature. Their insults, like all insults against the art form, were largely unoriginal and wouldn’t change much. “Real innovation is rare in anti-literature,” Marx writes. Presumably, this is why Marx was able to structure his investigation by four categories that sweep across Western history. These are the great “trials” of literature: authority; truth; morality; society. Hatred reads like an overblown victimology of literature in that its assailants have never presented a lethal threat. Belied, banned, or burned, stories and poems find a way of transcending their plight. For Marx, the true annihilator of literature is simply “indifference.” Against the coming wave of mass indifference, we can do nothing but join him in a helpless prayer: “May the gods prevent that day from ever arriving.”
Marx is a professor of comparative literature at the Paris Nanterre University, and he has a titanic sense of sarcasm. Hatred contains entire paragraphs meaning their literal opposite (kudos to its translator, Nicholas Elliott.) Like many French intellects, Marx relishes in the enigmatic gems created by the friction between two discourses that “share a medium.” Yet he remains hostile to the opposing discourse, which, over and over, has conducted the same dumb interrogations: Literature comes from the Muse, and who the hell is that? (Authority.) Literature is a mere ornament and has no claim to the truth of the universe. (Truth.) Literature, like video games, defiles the minds of wholesome children. (Morality.) Literature speaks on behalf of a society that gave it no such permission—and it’s useless. (Society.) That is basically all anti-litterateurs have ever had to say.
It might seem the historical gesture of Hatred is that literature and anti-literature uphold a dialectic in which they imperfectly police each other’s borders. But Marx suggests something more metaphysical. According to him, Western literature did not truly exist until it was besieged by Ancient Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and especially Plato. Marx explains, “[Literature] does not start with Homer, with Gilgamesh, or with the romantic period, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, just as God drove our first forebears out of Eden. That is literature’s genesis, and this genesis is a historical fact.”
I don’t see how this achieves ironclad factuality, but regardless, the idea leads Marx to this book’s dictum: “There is no literature without anti-literature.” And Marx really means this. Which is odd because he handily shows that anti-literature is always rooted in painful ignorance, as its “most general form is a plain refusal to read.” So you wonder why anti-literature, a reactionary movement that lives for the blood of a host it cannot see or understand, would be responsible for the “genesis” of anything. But for Marx literature is a special “enterprise that is continually renewed by dispossession,” and paradoxically, because it has shifted identity throughout history, literature has accumulated a wealth of thrilling, albeit transient, definitions. Literature: “brings forward an absent reality”; “is nostalgia for a fallen power”; “considers…ultimate purpose”; “is a place of reference, exchange, discussion and debate”; “is…a place where beauty, good, and truth come together”; “is precisely not the Law”; “is an ideal victim, and an ideal culprit too”; “[is how a nation] becomes aware of its destiny”; “is the ultimate illegitimate discourse”; “is what remains when everything has been removed”; “does not know the conditions under which it was produced.”
These definitions were articulated only because literature was perpetually forced to relocate its kingdom. Indeed, anti-litterateurs are the world’s useful idiots for preserving literature’s variability and religious allure. So in a sense we owe thanks to the enemies Marx brings to light: Thanks to Plato for living up to his reputation as a bit of a fascist, by using the state to banish all poets from Kallipolis; thanks to C. P. Snow for delivering a speech poisoned by its duplicity—“The Two Cultures”— which deemed the tone of the scientific culture, in comparison to the literary one, “steadily heterosexual”; thanks to poet Francesco Berni for writing a dialogue that would have poets and Jews wear special hats to mark them “as despicable and odious people”; and thanks to those contemporary schools so scandalized by racist language in Huckleberry Finn they published censored versions of the novel.
Literature welcomes your hatred.
It is worth inquiring deeper into the nature of this peculiar hatred, however impoverished the haters’ idea of literature, however senseless their criticism. By definition, reactionary movements are never self-determined; they react not to the actual object but to what it threatens in them. And look who, by Marx’s account, despises literature: theologians, philosophers, scientists, politicians, teachers, even poets and writers themselves. People who are fully committed to the life of thought and inquiry are most likely to see literature, in the general sense, as an unhealthy illusion. In Hatred, this point is most powerfully made in the case of Immanuel Kant, who criticized literature for “disrupting the unity of understanding (Verstandeseinheit)”:
Kant’s criticism…[emerged from] the world of the critic of pure reason, arranged in its carefully labeled boxes, just like the critic himself, an obsessive man with excessively hygienic habits, from sunup to sundown, taking meals and walking at fixed times. This world and this critic both so set in their ways had difficulty coming to terms with texts that disturbed such a fine orderly existence and promoted the scattering of the mind. The memory lapse feared by Kant is the loss of self-control and the failure to control the world, or else the wind blowing through the open windows into a neat and tidy Prussian home: yet how beautiful it can be when literature blows your papers all over the place.
Marx says that the obsessive need to control was specific to Kant, but this must mean only that the desire “to control the world” manifested in Kant’s ordinary life. The impulses to know and to control are tightly wound together, so I don’t think it’s much coincidence that the cerebral among us feel perturbed by an art form that so patently demonstrates the hopelessness of completely understanding the human condition, that keeps such fidelity to the chaos and strangeness of our lives.
Those who wish to understand human subjectivity are as doomed as those who desire perfect knowledge of literature. Marx lifts a dubious eye over argot like “poetic function, literality and formalism” because he knows that these will never reduce literature “to any kind of essence.” Only hatred serves to infer its existence; as strong gravity infers that of a collapsed star.
Skepticism at the quasi-scientific attempts to schematize the study of literature is warranted. But Marx does not satisfactorily demonstrate why hatred is somehow the only emotion able to detect what we call “literature.” The destructive sentiment may have clumsily aided in the articulation of the defining literary features of the age, as Marx convincingly argues, but it could not have created them.
I wonder, then, how Marx’s understanding of literature is ultimately justified. If literature is confirmed by hatred, it’s confirmed by a very distinct kind of hatred from a very distinct group of people: especially because that group refuses to genuinely engage with it and insists on unbearably stupid caricatures. Hatred contains a passage that put my jaw on the floor, wherein Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract, reads a children’s fable literally, word for word, while lampooning it for not accurately representing the physical world of time and space.
Defining literature through its detractors seems both strange and convenient, as if literature only need scout beyond its borders for possible invaders, never searching for the treachery within. Marx is himself an intellectual, so maybe it’s not surprising he finds no definition in how literature related to non-eggheads. Didn’t Greeks listen to orations of Homer? Didn’t the middle classes of Victorian England love Shakespeare? Didn’t entrenched WWI soldiers read Jane Austen to escape the unprecedented carnage? Didn’t despondent seventies high-schoolers read The Catcher in the Rye? Sure, these people may not have read literature the way they were “supposed” to—non-literary people rarely do. But these are examples of people who were seriously engaged with fiction, poetry, and theater, rather than deeply incurious cynics who couldn’t be bothered. If intellectuals hew the shifting boundaries of literature with blind hatred, why is it impossible for common readers to assign its fleeting domain with fascination and love?
Maybe Marx never intended to address this possibility, for lack of historical evidence or scope of project. Though, it’s not as if he is ignorant of the diminished status of literature in certain Western cultures. If the English reviews of his untranslated work are accurate, Marx knows how the European and American literary communities sabotaged the cultural relevance of literature by fixating on the “autonomous” nature of great fiction, which codified a few valid interpretative techniques, of which only MFA students, English PhDs, and literary critics were even aware. Coincidentally, perhaps, this disconnected literature from the real world where charges from authority, truth, morality, and social utility had meaning.
I suspect Marx didn’t give any power of definition to “ordinary” people because they tend to read literature in irredeemably bad ways, as means of entertainment or relaxation, for example. It appears that Marx would rather necessitate the degradation of literature than relinquish it to those who know little of the marvelous worlds that literature, when read properly, can suggest.
But any attempts to conserve canonical modes of literature are as futile as they were for the actual Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, arguably when popular hermeneutics was born. We cannot hide this gift forever. The future of literature—if there is one—might just be sustained by those who love it for reasons we cannot yet imagine.