This Thing Called Literature

Reading, Thinking, Writing

Andrew Bennett, Nicholas Royle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317698289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is this thing called literature? Why should we study it? And how?

Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, this beautifully written book establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Bennett and Royle delicately weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and what sort of questions and ideas they provoke.

The book's three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful, familiar examples throughout, offering rich reflections on the question 'What is literature?' and on what they term 'creative reading'.

Bennett and Royle's lucid and friendly style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This book is not only an essential guide to the study of literature, but an eloquent defence of the discipline.

1 Studying literature

DOI: 10.4324/9781315779041-1

In this book we hope to give a sense of why and how literature might be an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Our primary concern is with a love of literature, with what literary texts do, with how they work and what sorts of questions and ideas they provoke. Our aim is to be concise, to give pleasure, and to provide a clear and stimulating account of studying literature.

This book is primarily written for people who are starting, or who are thinking about starting, literary studies at college or university. We begin at the beginning, with the questions: ‘What is literature?’ and ‘Why study it?’ We then have a series of chapters on the three basic activities involved in studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. Part One comprises short chapters on reading a poem, reading a novel, reading a story, and reading a play. Part Two considers the question ‘What is thinking?’ – especially as regards thinking in and about literature, and thinking critically. Part Three turns to questions of writing. There are chapters on how to write an essay, on creative writing, and on writing fiction.

What is this thing called literature?

This is a question to which no one has yet provided an entirely satisfactory or convincing answer. As the critic Raymond Williams observes, in a discussion of this question in his book Keywords: ‘Literature is a difficult word, in part because its conventional contemporary meaning appears, at first sight, so simple’ (Williams 1983, 183). The hedging precision of Williams’s phrasing (‘in part’, ‘appears’, ‘at first sight’) points towards the complexity of the question. It is possible to provide numerous cogent but ultimately unsatisfactory answers to the question ‘What is literature?’. We might start with a couple of dictionary definitions, along with an observation about the recent historical and institutional significance of the term ‘literature’. Chambers dictionary, for example, gives (1) ‘the art of composition in prose and verse’ and (2) ‘literary matter’ as two senses of the word ‘literature’. And since the late nineteenth century, ‘literature’ has been understood to mean a subject of study in schools and universities, involving certain kinds of imaginative or creative writing, including fiction, poetry and drama.

As we hope to make clear in this book, however, ‘literature’ is a peculiarly elusive word. It has, in a sense, no essence. With a bit of effort and imagination, we would suggest, any text can be read as poetic – the list of ingredients on a box of breakfast cereal, for example, or even the most inane language of bureaucracy. Anything at all that happens, in the world or in your head, can be imagined as ‘drama’. And fiction (or storytelling) has a funny and perhaps irresistible way of getting mixed up with its alleged opposite (‘real life’, ‘the real world’). While we attempt, in the pages ahead, to clarify what may seem enigmatic and perplexing about the nature of our subject (the study of ‘literature’), we are also concerned to stay true to it – in other words, to foreground and keep in mind what is slippery and strange about literature. Rather than strive for definitive answers and a final sense of certainty in this context, we want to suggest that there is value in the very experiences of uncertainty to which the question ‘What is this thing called literature?’ gives rise.

Uncertainty is, moreover, a consistent and powerful factor in literary texts themselves: literary works – especially those most valued or considered most ‘classic’ or canonical – are themselves full of difficult, even impossible questions. We might consider just three memorable and enduring questions that occur in literary works. First, there is what is perhaps the most famous line in all of Shakespeare’s writings, Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’ (3.1.58). Second, in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), the young Oliver, desperately hungry, asks his master for more gruel: ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ (Dickens 2003, 15). Finally, there is the marvellously odd (funny-strange and funny-amusing) poem by Emily Dickinson, written in about 1861, which begins: ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you – Nobody – Too?’ (Dickinson 1975, Poem 288). None of these is a simple question or, indeed, simply a question. Let us expand briefly on each of these examples.

In the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600–1), we only know that ‘to be or not to be’ is supposed to be heard as a question, rather than understood as the specification of an alternative (either ‘to be’, to live, to carry on being, or to stop, to commit suicide, to not be), because Hamlet tells us so. We think of Hamlet as a word-man, associating him for instance with the celebrated phrase ‘words, words, words’ (his equivocal answer to Polonius’s deceptively straightforward question ‘What do you read, my lord?’: 2.2.193–94). But when Hamlet says ‘To be, or not to be’, he is not merely playing with words. Rather he is posing a question that is a matter literally of life or death. And this question is about the desire to die. It is ‘a consummation’, as Hamlet goes on to say, ‘[d]evoutly to be wished’ (3.1.65–66). The question resonates throughout the play and indeed continues to resonate today. What is this desire for self-destruction? Is it in some strange way peculiarly human? Or is it, as Sigmund Freud seems to suppose in his discussion of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), inherent in all life forms? How does literature illuminate these questions and help us to think critically about self-destruction, not only in the context of the life of an individual (the self-destructiveness of drug addiction or self-harm, for example, or other damaging, obsessive behaviour), but also with regard to the behaviour of communities, societies or states more generally (the apparent blind determination to destroy the environment, for instance, to maintain the alleged purity of some ethnic, racial or nationalist identity, or to seek revenge even or perhaps especially to one’s own detriment).

There is something similarly urgent and real at stake in Oliver’s request for more food. ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ is, strictly speaking, not formulated as a question, with an interrogative tone or question mark at the end, but it is certainly understood as asking for something. Mr Bumble, his master, ‘a fat, healthy man’, responds by exclaiming ‘What!’ in ‘stupified astonishment’, then hitting the little boy on the head with a copper ladle, and reporting the matter to Mr Limbkins and other members of the Board: ‘“Oliver Twist has asked for more.” There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance’ (Dickens 2003, 15). The eight-year-old’s request is shocking and ironic in ways that ramify across Dickens’s text and continue to provoke questions. What does it mean, how is it possible, for a beneficiary of charity to ask for more? How does this request disturb the relationship between donor and donee? If Dickens lets a sort of grim humour play over the scene it is principally in order to underscore the sense of outrage. For Bumble himself, the little boy’s question is evidence for his prediction that ‘that boy will be hung’, and the very next morning he has a bill ‘pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish’ (15). The boy’s question, in other words, has disturbingly physical and violent consequences. At the same time, we are made aware of the force of a question that resounds down the years and is still with us: Why should any child be ‘desperate with hunger and reckless with misery’ (15)? Why should any child, in England or anywhere else in the world, be forced to beg and be punished for doing so?

Finally, Emily Dickinson’s lines involve not one but a sort of double question that also entails an enigmatic and unsettling affirmation (‘I’m Nobody!’). Moreover, the poet plays with capitalization and punctuation in ways that make questions proliferate within each question. We are prompted to wonder, for example: is ‘Nobody’ a proper name? Is Dickinson, in capitalizing the ‘too’, suggesting that ‘Too’ is a proper name too? What is a name in fact? Would you be someone if you didn’t have a name? Are we justified in supposing that it is truly the poet who is addressing us? In what sense is the poet, any poet, a ‘nobody’? Is there a wry allusion here to John Keats’s celebrated remark that a poet is like a ‘cameleon’ and has ‘no self’ (see Keats 2005, 60)? Who is the poet addressing here? Is it me? Am I nobody, too? And how do the dashes affect our sense of where Dickinson’s questions start – or stop?

One of the strange things about a literary work is its very uncertainty. And literature can always be read otherwise. At issue is an experience of uncertainty that goes to the heart of the law, entailing issues of property and identity. Many contemporary novels carry a cautionary note or disclaimer on the verso of the title-page. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), for example, specifies: ‘This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.’ How seriously are we supposed to take this? DeLillo’s novel makes reference to Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), to Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, to New York City and to the Pentagon, as well as to the enormity of so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’. Is ‘the Pentagon’ in DeLillo’s book nothing to do with the Pentagon that we all know about, the US military headquarters in Washington, DC? Are the Anthony Perkins or Janet Leigh to which the book alludes completely different from the actors who appear in Hitchcock’s world-famous movie? Is the precise, rather chilling discussion of the word ‘rendition’ in the book just ‘fictitious’, even when it is informing the reader about ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and the history of the word (‘rendition – a giving up or giving back … Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy’) (DeLillo 2010, 33)? And, anyway, what does ‘entirely coincidental’ mean? Coincidence is a compelling and decisive element in fictional writing, whether this is construed as ‘true chance’ or ‘fate masquerading as chance’ (Jordan 2010, xiii), but the ‘entirely’ here seems to over-egg the pudding. To borrow the words of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the author’s disclaimer ‘protests too much, methinks’ (Hamlet, 3.2.219).

Other contemporary novelists have noticed the strangeness of the so-called ‘copyright page’. In the ‘Author’s Foreword’ to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), for example, the speaker (allegedly Wallace himself) resolutely denies that the book is ‘fiction at all’, arguing that it is ‘more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story’ and that therefore the ‘only bona fide “fiction” here is the copyright page’s disclaimer’ (Wallace 2011, 67–68). The only purpose of the disclaimer, Wallace adds, is as a ‘legal device’ to ‘protect me, the book’s publisher, and the publisher’s assigned distributors from legal liability’ (68). The disclaimer, in other words, is ‘a lie’ (69). But is it a lie? How can we tell? Is this David Foster Wallace the ‘real’ David Foster Wallace, or is he a character in a book?

The seemingly dull back of the title-page of a novel, then, becomes a good deal less certain than one might have supposed. ‘This book’, we are told, ‘is a work of fiction’. But this part of the book (the information on the back of the title-page) is not part of the book. If this sounds slightly unhinged, that’s because it is. Various bits of the text, including the title and the name of the author, are crucial to the novel’s being legally designated as a novel, ‘a work of fiction’, without themselves being part of the novel as such. Is the title of a novel part or not part of the novel it entitles? The answer is less straightforward than one might hope. It is both and neither.

As these reflections might suggest, even a disclaimer about a novel not, in effect, having anything to do with the real world, has serious implications and effects for what we think the real world is, for how we think about where the literary nature of a text begins or stops or, conversely, about where law (legal claims of property and copyright, the determination of who or what is ‘real’ and ‘actual’, and so on) separates from fiction. Even (or perhaps especially) when people try to make declarations or stipulations about what is not literature, the question with which we began (‘What is this thing called literature?’) comes back to haunt.

What’s the point of studying literature?

The world is in an absolutely terrible state and people want to talk about poems and novels and plays? If I am going to study something, aren’t there more pressing or more practical subjects, such as physics or medicine or law or politics? Where does studying literature take me? What can I do with it?

You have perhaps asked these questions yourself or heard others ask them. In this book we attempt to provide some answers. Some of our answers take the form of one-liners. Others involve a more patient and detailed elaboration. Either way, we will see that answers also raise further questions and indeed that developing the art of questioning is one of the rewards or special effects of literary study.

If we were to play the role of devil’s advocate, we might say: there is no obvious point in studying literature. It seems to serve no purpose. It leads directly to no career or vocation, unless you want to become a teacher or researcher in literary studies who teaches and researches something that has no obvious point, seems to serve no purpose, and so on, round in a circle. In fact, for a budding poet or novelist it is not even clear that studying literature is more helpful than studying medicine, say, or mechanical engineering. From the perspective of professional training or practical knowledge, literary studies is a dead-end. It’s a non-starter.

However – or contrariwise, as Tweedledee might say (see Carroll 1992, 146) – it is precisely this apparent purposelessness that makes the study of literature interesting. Unlike more or less every other thing you have to do in life that is connected with studying or working for a living, the study of literature doesn’t tie you down to anything. It frees you up. It opens up remarkable possibilities.

Literary studies is often seen as lacking the intellectual rigour of a subject like philosophy, where you are at least supposed to expand your mind and learn about the limits of knowledge, about philosophical systems, about the meaning of existence, about formal logic, and so on. And literary studies is also often seen as lacking the seriousness and dignity of history, from the study of which you are supposed to acquire a sound understanding of the past based on careful and empirically based investigation of manuscripts, artefacts, and other records and documents. As a university subject, literature is the odd one out, the weird one: it often seems that governments and university managers alike don’t really know what to do with it. But precisely because it has no obvious point, it is for some the most alluring of all subjects for study: more than any other discipline, literary studies is a space of intellectual freedom, open to imagination, experimentation and exploration.

The exploration is focused, first of all, on language itself. What does ‘space’ mean here, and ‘freedom’? Are these terms literal or figurative? Is this about ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘physical freedom’ or something else? What is this ‘space of literature’ (to use Maurice Blanchot’s compelling phrase (Blanchot 1982))? Literature can be about anything and can therefore teach us anything – its possibilities and potential are endless.

The sky is not the limit

We might think about this in terms of the sky. If the study of literature is concerned with what people call blue sky thinking, it is also concerned with red sky, black sky and no sky thinking. ‘Red sky’ conventionally connotes a beautiful day to come (‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’) or a sense of impending danger such as a storm (‘Red sky at morning, shepherds take warning’): literary studies is concerned with aesthetic beauty (‘shepherd’s delight’), but also with what is threatening or dangerous. Literature is a place not only for fine language, lovely images and pos...