Literature

Peter Widdowson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134701643
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This introductory volume provides an overview of the history of Literature as a cultural concept, and reflects on the contemporary nature, place and function of what the literary might mean for us today. Literature:
* offers a concise history of the canonic concept of 'literature' from its earliest origins
* illustrates the kinds of theoretical issues which are currently invoked by the term 'literary'
* provides a definition of the 'literary' for the twenty-first century
With Literature Peter Widdowson provides a thought-provoking essay on the contemporary relevance of the 'literary' for students.

1

WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’?

Some (non-)definitions

As I face the part-daunting, part-comical prospect of writing a short book on the vast topic of ‘Literature’, I am reminded of my favourite film-title: Mel Brookes’s A History of the World, Part One. So much literature has been produced world-wide over such a long period of time, and – all the more worrying – so much has been written about it, that knowing where to start, where to end, and what might go in between, could lead to the book never progressing beyond these preliminary musings. A very short book, indeed, then! But a clue is provided here: it is to be a short book, and so, in the nature of things, it can only do certain things and only be of a certain kind. For one thing, it cannot be a big book – with all the promise of authority and definitiveness that big books tend to convey. I would prefer to think of the present study as an essay: at once a composition of limited length and all of a piece, and – as the dictionary also glosses it – an ‘attempt’, a ‘try’, a ‘tentative effort’ – to define, not ‘what literature is’, but what it might mean, provisionally and tentatively, for us on the cusp of the millenium.

So, first of all and according to convention in Introductions, let me say what this essay is not. It does not attempt to survey or engage with the voluminous, aesthetics-driven ‘What is Literature?’ debate. The very formulation of the question suggests a way of conceptualising literature which runs entirely counter to my project here. Neither can it be a history of literature (not even ‘Part One’) of the Homer to Heller variety, nor a literary-critical/theoretical history of its protean definitions over the centuries (Plato to Foucault) – although a succinct historical account of the changing notion of the term ‘literature’ will be offered as part of the overall argument. Rather, the essay is principally conceived as a reflection on the contemporary nature, place and function, within general cultural production, of what, for now, I will go on calling literature, but will prefer to designate the domain of ‘the literary’.

By the late-twentieth century, ‘literature’, as a concept and as a term, has become so problematical – either through ideological contamination as the high cultural ‘Canon’, or, conversely, through demystification and deconstruction by radical critical theory – that it approaches the unuseable, at least without contorted apologetics. Perhaps the only way to represent it, as passé presence or determinate absence, is ‘under erasure’, thus:

. For what has gone on, and continues to go on, in its sullied name, and under its tattered banner, appears to remain such a crucial component of human activity and experience that it suggests the need to be rescued from itself: to be re-accredited – rather than shamefacedly subsumed, as has recently been the case, within general concepts of ‘writing’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘discourse’ or ‘cultural production’. Hence, I agree with Terry Eagleton when he writes: ‘Literature must indeed be re-situated within the field of general cultural production; but each mode of such production demands a semiology of its own, which is not compatible with some universal “cultural” discourse’ (Eagleton [1976] 1978: 166).

Let me begin by looking in some detail, in the contemporary context, at the word ‘literature’ itself. If nothing else, this will offer us what I have awkwardly called ‘Some (non-)definitions’ with which to problematise the heavily naturalised term as it appears in current usage and common parlance. If I offer the reader the following sentence, devoid of any explanatory context, what might s/he understand by it: ‘At the moment, I am reading some interesting literature on this very subject’?

• Would it be fair to assume that I am speaking as a student who is currently reading novels, poems and plays as part of my literature course: ‘I’m doing literature at college’?

• Would I be reading some ‘secondary’ critical literature on those literary texts: ‘I need to cover a bit of the literature on Dickens to write my essay’?

• As the author of this book, might I be speaking about the diverse and gripping theoretical literature on the question, precisely, of ‘What is Literature’?

• Might I be a budding creative writer, who is attempting to enter the profession of literature by reading novels, for example, which focus on how a young person becomes a novelist (‘portraits of the artist as young wo/men’): ‘I’m determined to go in for literature when I grow up’.

• Might I be a commuter (employed in the tourist catering industry) talking about the sort of literature (novels, diaries, autobiographies, say) which they buy at the booksellers on the station to wile away delays on the rail network and which, through preference, tends always to be about the Caribbean: ‘I’ll read any literature about the Caribbean you’ve got’?

• Might I be the same commuter who is perusing the promotional or technical literature on refrigeration: ‘I must familiarise myself with the literature on commercial freezers before we get to Macclesfield’?

Of course, out of context, I could be speaking about any of these things, so it becomes apparent that the word ‘literature’ in itself can be used in a number of ways. However, in normal usage, a distinction tends to be drawn and signalled by the fact that when we are speaking of critical, theoretical or promotional literature, for example, we tend to put the definite article in front of the word: ‘I’m reading the literature on …’. Whereas, when we are referring to ‘literary’ writings, we leave it out, hence denoting that some (unexplained) generic distinction has already been made: ‘I love reading literature in my spare time’/‘I’m studying Literature at the university’. But notice that I have made a further generic distinction in passing here: by using a lower-case ‘l’ in the first instance and an upper-case ‘L’ in the second. The significance of that tiny typographical shift will constitute much of the content of this book, but I am willing to wager that it is the sense with the capital ‘L’ that is uppermost in the minds of the vast majority of you in understanding what is now normally implied by the word ‘literature’.

‘Literature’ with an upper-case ‘L’ and inverted commas round it signifies here the conception of that global body of literary writing which has been accredited with being – pointedly to borrow Matthew Arnold’s famous utterance – ‘the best that has been known and said in the world’ (Arnold [1869] 1971: 6).¹ It has been ascribed the highest achievement of aesthetic and moral merit, and has acquired the status of a kind of universal resource of formal and ethical models for humankind: as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, it is ‘not of an age, but for all time’; and as Ezra Pound defined it, it is ‘news that STAYS news’.² In the case of national literatures, writers and works may be included that might not make it into the ‘World’ category, and there will be some marginal argument as to who or what should be included, but, by and large, the same received principles of evaluation will obtain. We will also recognise collocations of such authors and texts as constituting ‘The Classics’, ‘The (Great) Tradition’, ‘The Canon’, and the standard ‘Set Authors/Books’ on all secondary and tertiary education syllabuses. On the other hand, ‘literature’ with a small ‘l’ and no inverted commas is used either when I am employing the word in a neutral discursive capacity, or to represent the undifferentiated corpus of writing which is ‘literary’ in the sense – more fully explained later – that it identifies itself quite self-consciously as belonging to the artificial (i.e. pertaining to ‘artifice’) discursive realm of ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing as opposed to other, more quotidian forms of written communication.

If we turn now to the dictionary and other reference works, we will find that they confirm and expand the various definitions identified by my glossing of the made-up sentence given earlier. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a series of meanings for the word literature, and I will have occasion to return to them – and to their etymological implications – within their historical location in Chapter 2. The first meaning given is:

1. Acquaintance with ‘letters’ or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture. Now rare and obsolescent.

Because of the rider, this is not a usage we have encountered above, but its longevity as the principal meaning of the word will be of great significance when we come to see how – and when – our principal understanding of it developed. (This should be held in conjunction with the OED’s note on its 3a. definition as adduced below.) The second sense is:

2. Literary work or production; the activity or profession of a man of letters; the realm of letters.

We noted this meaning as still active in our everyday usages above, but it is perhaps worth clarifying that ‘work’ here means the business of producing a literary ‘work’ (not the ‘work’ itself, which belongs with a subsequent meaning: ‘a work of literature’), and that this is again not the principal meaning I assume most of you will have in mind at the moment. The latter is, in fact, part 3a. of the third sense the OED presents, but I want to leave this until after I have noted parts 3b. and 3c., so that it will lead us more conveniently into a fuller exposition of the nature of the problem which lies at the heart of the matter in this book. Sub-sections 3b. and 3c., then, are respectively as follows: ‘The body of books and writing that treat of a particular subject’ (as in our critical, theoretical, technical usage above: ‘the literature on …’); and ‘colloq. Printed matter of any kind’ (I did not give an instance of this earlier, but it is clearly a colloquial variant of 3b. – as in: ‘a great pile of advertising literature fell though my letter-box this morning’).

Although both of the above definitions, but particularly 3b., are in wide current usage, it is the OED’s sense 3a. – without the direct article – which is arguably the primary and prioritised sense in our culture:

3a. Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect….

… This sense is of very recent emergence both in Eng. and Fr.

Now, we may feel, we are getting to it, and indeed we are: ‘English Literature’, ‘French Literature’, ‘eighteenth-century Literature’, ‘Contemporary Literature’, ‘World Literature’ – our familiar bearings are established: ‘Literature’, the great generic category of written creativity which we can all recognise. Much fuller analysis of this meaning will follow later; but, for now, let us just register two points about the OED’s definition. First, it becomes problematical as soon as it ceases to be merely descriptive and shifts to being evaluative, i.e. in its second sentence. ‘In a more restricted sense’ is ambiguous anyway, since it is intended to mean here that the scope of the word literature is restricted if it only applies to the kind described by the dictionary entry’s following clauses, whereas we might think literature so described is the least ‘restricted’ sense of the word and the one with the greatest currency. But the problems really start to emerge in the designation of the qualities such literature may be supposed to have: what does ‘on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’ mean? What, for example, is ‘beauty’: how do we define it; how do we recognise it; is it the same to all people; is a sense of it innate or is it learnt? What, for that matter, is ‘form’? Given the range of possible meanings any dictionary will give for that word, it is difficult to be even remotely precise: but ‘mode of being’, ‘mode of arrangement’, ‘structural unity in music, literature, etc.’, ‘that in which the essence of a thing consists’ may, inter alia, be apposite, while still leaving us with imponderable problems. Is form separable from content, then; if a piece of writing lacks ‘unity’ can it not be literature; if a work of literature cannot exist without form, how do we discern some form as beautiful and some as not – a short-circuit back to the problems we registered with the notion of ‘beauty’? Is the creation of ‘emotional effect’ special only to the ‘restricted sense’ of literature (consider ‘tear-jerkers’, ‘thrillers’ and pornography); or does the OED mean ‘beauty of … emotional effect’? In which case, how do we discriminate between those effects that are and those that aren’t? And so on.

What we see here are attributions to the notion of ‘Literature’ (with the capital letter) which are subliminally assumptive, partial and imprecise, but so heavily naturalised that they are, indeed, an inescapable aspect of its definition – at least its relatively recent definition. For the second point to notice in the dictionary’s entry is the subscript note appended: ‘This sense is of very recent emergence …’. It will be the business of the following chapter to sketch in the moment of this emergence, and the implications of it, but we may note in passing here that it belongs roughly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is, therefore, a historically constructed – rather than an ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ – category, so, while a notion of ‘the literary’ (i.e. writings which in some way distinguish themselves from common communicative discourses) has been around since ancient times, the concept of ‘Literature’ in that ‘restricted sense’ has not. In other words, while the thing is recognisable in all cultural periods, the concept and term has not been: Shakespeare, perhaps, had a sense of what I mean by ‘the literary’ (although, like other contemporaries, he might have thought of it as ‘Poesie/Poetrie’ – see Chapter 2, pp. 26–7, 33–4), but not of ‘Literature’. Richard Terry, in arguing that it is a mistake to conflate ‘the history of the word [with] a history of the concept that has come to be associated with that word’ (Terry 1997: 84), goes on to propose that not only was there a recognisable notion of literature in existence by the end of the sixteenth century in England, but also a clear process of constructing an English ‘canon’ of literary works – albeit one which could not then have been graced by our term ‘Literature’ (ibid, 94-8).

To reinforce our sense of the dizzying problematics at the heart of this naturalised word, we can turn briefly to other standard modern reference works. The entry in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, for example, reads: ‘a body of written works. The name is often applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the excellence of their execution’.³ This seems to imply that drama is not literature (pace Shakespeare); introduces the notion of ‘imagination’ as the defining characteristic of literary writing (see pp. 17-18); and discriminates in favour of those writings ‘distinguished by the intentions of their authors’. Leaving aside its apparent dismissal of the unresolved ‘Intentional Fallacy’ debate which has been going on for the last 50 years, it is unclear here how an author’s intention ‘distinguishes’ a work as literature (does having a clearly perceptible one automatically qualify a work as literature – or is it the quality of the intention which makes the work ‘distinguished’ and hence literature?). Finally, it falls back on ‘excellence of their [the works themselves or the authors’ ‘intentions’?] execution’, an evaluative judgement which has all the definitional problems of the OED’s ‘beauty of form’ writ large. What we may register for later discussion, however, is the way (usually vague and unexamined) criteria of judgement and evaluation are structurally built in to the very definition of literature.

As its title suggests, the essay on ‘The Art of Literature’, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia, is an even more partial and partisan affair. While fumbling for definitions of ‘Literature’ which it can never deliver, the essay notes that individual examples of ‘certain forms of writing [unspecified] are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognise’ (my emphases).⁴ The self-fulfilling question-begging here is astonishing: ‘artistic merit’ is passed off as ‘something’ which unequivocally exists and happens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is ‘Literature’?: Some (non-)definitions
• 2 What has ‘Literature’ been?: A history of the concept, Part One: Origins to Orthodoxies
• 3 What has happened to ‘Literature’?: A history of the concept, Part Two: After the 1960s
• 4 What is ‘the literary’?
• 5 The uses of ‘the literary’: Newstories
• 6 Watch this space
• Notes
• References