A Literature Worth Loathing: What Makes Bad Readers Good

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...