Literature Matters Today

"Matters"! This is an odd word when used as a verb. Of course we know what it means. The verbal form of "matter" means "count for something," "have import," "have effects in the real world," "be worth taking seriously." Using the word as a noun, however, someone might speak of "literature matters," meaning the whole realm that involves literature. The Newsletter of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is called Wilderness Matters, punning on the word as a noun and as a verb. We might say, analogously, "Literature Matters," as my title does. In medieval Europe learned people spoke of "the matter of Rome," "the matter of Arthur," "the matter of Greece," meaning the whole set of stories that lay behind Aeneas's story, the Arthurian romances, or Odysseus's, Achilles's, and Oedipus's stories. The verb "matter" resonates with the noun "matter." The latter means sheer unorganized physical substance. Aristotle opposed unformed matter to form. This suggests that if something matters its import is not abstract. What matters is not purely verbal, spiritual, or formal. It has concrete effects on materiality, in the form perhaps of human bodies and their behavior. Does literature matter in that sense today?

It matters quite a bit, however, what we mean by "literature" when we ask whether literature matters today. I am assuming that "literature" in this issue of SubStance means printed books that contain what most people ordinarily think of these days as "literature," that is, poems, plays, and novels. Just what is "literary" about poems, plays, and novels is another matter, to which I shall return. It is often taken for granted that what most matters about literature, if it matters at all, is the accuracy with which it reflects the real world or functions as a guide of conduct for readers living in that world. The 2500-year-old mimetic paradigm—going back to the Greeks—in its multitude of permutations, has had, and still has, great power, at least in the Western world. A little reflection, however, will show that this paradigm is extremely problematic. It is easily contested or easily made more complicated, as I shall later on briefly show.

The reader will recognize that adding "today" to the name of this issue of SubStance, as I have done, is a move that matters. Literature's import differs in different times, places, and societies. My interest is in the question of whether literature matters now, today, in the fall of 2013, here in the United States (since I know that best), but also in the global here-and-now within which all we human beings, Americans and the rest, more and more live from moment to moment today. I note from the outset that this issue of SubStance and dozens of similar books and essays would not be necessary if the mattering of literature today were not in doubt. All who love literature are collectively anxious today about whether literature matters. Surely no such issue of a journal would have seemed necessary in Victorian England (my original field of specialization), for example. To middle- and upper-class literate Victorians, the assumption that literature matters quite a lot was taken for granted, hence almost never a matter for interrogation.

"Literate" and "literature" have the same root, meaning written "letters." You are literate if you can make sense of written letters. You are then "lettered." Literature is made of letters—marks made on paper by some writing technology or other. The primary technology was printing presses, from the seventeenth century to the present. That was the period of what we Westerners generally mean by "literature." Victorian readers took it for granted that printed literature—especially novels—reflected back to them the everyday social world in which they lived. Novels, moreover, taught them how to behave in courtship and marriage, as well as in many other regions of everyday life. That way of assuming that literature matters may explain the continued power of the mimetic, "realist" paradigm.

Literature, however, was also the chief way in which Victorians could enjoy the pleasures of entering into an imaginary world invented...