What is Literature?

 

 

What follows is an attempt to distill my own theory of literature, portions of which are expressed in dozens of critical essays on individual works.  Doubtless my formulations may preserve traces of the vocabularies of critical schools from New Criticism to Deconstruction, but my own categories have, I think, taken shape a posteriori.   

 

     When I was an undergraduate in the middle sixties in a Midwestern state university, a professor asked his American Literature class to prepare a succinct definition of literature, and the exercise had the desired initial effect. Many of us, like Socrates’ interlocutors, were quite surprised to find that we were less sure of a definition than we had thought. Though many of us were English majors, we had neglected theoretical consideration of the object of our study. Most literary critics took a nearer view, focusing on individual works or authors; with a few exceptions, most notably Northrup Frye, the speculations of philosophers seemed distant from critics’ concerns.  Casebooks for students might include a contribution from a Freudian or Marxist or a hunter after archetypes, but these were understood by most readers as incomplete readings, even if revealing. 

     During the early eighties, my graduate Comparative Literature program might most conveniently be described as Post-Structuralist.  People wrote criticism of criticisms of critics and, in contrast to my earlier experience, rarely descended sufficiently from the airy heights to comment on a specific poem.  It seemed as though the focus had gone in the interval from too close to too distant. 

     While academia may be susceptible to (sometimes salutary) vogues, it is consistently true that every critic operates in certain recurring ways that might be formulated as theoretical assumptions.  Those who claim to have no “theory” are like historians who pretend to an unachievable “objectivity” rather than candidly acknowledging and defending the bases for their judgments.  

     After fifty-five years, I am better prepared to offer an answer to my professor’s question, though I am afraid that the eminent scholar who posed it has departed.  Literature is the symbolic representation of reality, but this description is in itself insufficient, since other writings -- scientific studies, for example -- do the same, and all language is symbolic.  The composer of aesthetic texts explicitly aims to record patterns of consciousness, however, while those who were once called natural philosophers seek to record the phenomena of nature.  The inadequacy of language to represent lived experience and the gap between subjective human experience and some sort of Truth would be defects for other discourses.  However, semantic slippage, imprecision, ambiguity, and reader’s misprision all of which would weaken a laboratory report, become for literature the source of not only beauty, but the only way to capture the play of consciousness in every mind. 

     One of the commonest cliches in criticism is useful to further define literature: good poetry will “delight and instruct,” a goal most identified with Horace, though shared in varying degrees with Aristotle and Boileau and countless others.  As literature is far from alone in these goals, further definition is required. 

     Many things might delight – a good dinner, a sexual experience, or a nap.  Sometimes one derives pleasure from non-literary verbal sources: a pleasing work evaluation, for instance, or a loving letter, yet these are not ordinarily poetry.  

     Unlike the reinforcement of social support signaled by supportive words, the pleasure of art arises from the contemplation of the object in isolation and not from any source outside the page.  People’s minds naturally seek to perceive patterns whether of sound or form or meaning and everyone relishes certain patterns as pure forms without regard for realism or truth.  This is most evident in such genres as instrumental music and abstract painting, but it is present in all reception of art.

     In poetry and, to a lesser extent, in prose, literature employs musical sound patterns based on syllabic stress or vowel quantity or pitch accent, while other devices — among them alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition — fill out the music like the elements of a symphony orchestra.

     Meanwhile, aesthetic texts typically add verbal play resembling riddles and puns and the creation of readers’ expectations which may then be satisfied or not, as well as a rich substratum of allusion and association. All these rhetorical figures are specifically designed to delight and surprise.

     Such symbolic play amuses people.  Surely the most distinctive characteristic of our species is our facility in the manipulation of symbols. A person composing or consuming literature is then to the highest degree realizing human potential in the same way a soaring skylark is enacting a specific bird essence. One derives a certain exhilaration from doing what one does well, what one’s species does well.  Whatever else it may be, reading a poem is glorying in being human to the fullest extent, free from functional ends, enjoying one’s own nature like a happy dog.

     Unlike a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bach fugue, though, poetry virtually always refers to lived experience. Yet words are not capable of a direct reflection of reality. They always mediate and refract or include wish fulfillment or in some way convey no universal and objective vision but rather an individual and personal one. Though for science this imperfect representation would be an obstacle, for art it allows the expression of the irrational, the appetitive, the mysterious, the ambiguous, and the ambivalent. Though most of psychic life occurs in these realms, they are rarely explicit in people’s daily transactions, which are consciously felt by many to be largely rational.

     The fact is that we know nothing beyond our own subjectivity. Thus literature, or rather, art is general, is the closest we can approach to truth. The fact that every individual’s experience differs from every other’s, while it complicates matters considerably, in fact renders the view of literature as a whole more comprehensive, more precise, more accurate than other discourses such as history or science. The artist has no special purchase on truth, though claims of inspiration direct from the gods or muses are common. The reader of a broad variety of texts will, however, find in their combination enlightenment absent from any in isolation. In a process like an increasingly sophisticated triangulation the reader who knows several visions will have a view enriched beyond the one who knows but one.  In this way literature exponentially increases experience, allowing access to visions ancient and modern from the myriad cultures of this teeming planet.

     The genres of literature are universal, though not all occur in every setting, and each has a role. Proverbs preserve the prudential wisdom of the group, made memorable by turn of phrase or figure of speech. Folk stories provide nightly amusement as well as reinforcing (and sometimes questioning) social norms. Epics allow for an encyclopedic inclusion of history, religion, and social codes in the course of a stirring tale. Theater presents stories with characters drawn from myth or from familiar society for the reception of the entire community. Meanwhile, all these forms are used by religion to establish itself as a unique source of guidance and by leaders to consolidate and authenticate power. Lyric poetry typically voices the subjectivity of passionate individuals.

     The criteria of literature may be consciously present in a work’s production or its consumption, but neither is necessary. Many works written with other goals in mind have been appreciated as art: Herodotus, St. John of the Cross, Marx, and Freud, to cite a few random examples. On the other hand scholars have utilized literary texts as a source of data to investigate history, philology, comparative botany, or countless other fields. A witty turn of phrase by a physics professor delivering a scientific paper creates a moment of literature, while a linguist searching Homer for a rare grammatical form may see no poetry at all.

     In making such distinctions the only probative elements are found within the work itself, not in any intention of the creator. Some works are directed primarily at their audience, often with didactic aims. A paraliterary example is advertising which uses all the devices of literature with sales as the sole goal. Other works arise from their makers’ interest in self-expression. Such solipsism is extreme in outsider artists, but is present to one degree or another in all. Some writing is directed at the artifact itself, for instance, for those who espouse art for art’s sake.

     Thus determining value must be grounded in the success of individual works as well as genres in achieving specific goals. One poem may foreground description as in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” while for another psychology assumes greatest importance as in the Spoon River Anthology.  Narrative is central to epic and lapidary craft to Symbolism. Paradise Lost aims to instruct perhaps and Canterbury Tales to entertain, though each, of course, does both. Swinburne does his best to get by on sound while early Bly is all about images.

     In fact nearly every poem is a complex structure of a good many of these considerations, each weighted precisely to the requirements of the specific project. Thus in Hopkins melody will take the lead, with theme following behind, and images in third position.

     Then there is the imponderable element of beauty. One can prescribe symmetry and harmony and yet an asymmetrical and discordant work may prove to have many admirers. Taste may be explained but not proven. One may praise the taste of oysters without persuading a reluctant diner to share your plate, and in the same way, I may think Keats a greater poet than Shelley and make enlightening comments on both, but I will not convince Shelley’s partisans of my preference. 

     The moment of a reader’s reception provides the measure of every work.  An unprepared student may scan the lines of Shakespeare in vain, while a skilled critic may find much fascinating meaning and considerable symbolic imagery in a television game show.  Those works which have been read and reread accumulate significance.  Scriptures such as the Vedas and the Hebrew Testament illustrate this principle, but so, in a different way, does Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.  There is no way to prove the greatness of a poem or a novel, but the critic who has experienced literary beauty can seek to characterize the experience with sufficient clarity to convey to others the source and character of that experience, much as the poet or novelist has sought to do.     

     Literature is sufficiently essential to human life that it is found in every society and likely has been at least since the development of language. People with the most limited material culture invariably possess rich stores of verbal technology, useful for encoding their world, providing entertainment as well as preserving knowledge and constructing avenues of spiritual access, all while sitting around a glowing campfire or perhaps a glowing iPad, passing the time.