August Rubrecht's Research Projects
How do literary texts differ from others?
The special kinds of texts we call literature use language in creative and imaginative--that is, playful--ways.
This definition is implied by the answers to two of the questions we can ask about an artifact:
· What is its composition?
and
· What benefit do people derive from using it?
Q: What is the composition of a literary text?
A: Words, in whole or in part.
Often the word text applies only to a set of written words; when the President delivers an important address, newspapers may “print the text” of the speech the next day. However, I use text in a broader sense, to refer to anything humans devise to communicate meaning. Thus the spoken performance is a text as well. It is an oral text, distinguished from the written text the newspapers publish. Oral texts include both words (normally arranged into meaningful patterns according to linguistic rules) and paralinguistic cues such as gesture and intonation, which people use in storytelling and drama as well as speechmaking. Written texts may consist of words alone, as in speech transcripts, novels, and poems, or of words and images, as in comic books. Film and video texts throw everything--words, paralinguistic cues, visual images, and auditory images as well--into the mix.
Gesture and voice tone may be exaggerated and stylized into dance and music, used to embellish the words of oral texts as in musicals. Think of West Side Story, which you may have seen on video. If you haven’t, try it. Or dance and music may get separated from words and take on independent life of their own, communicating without words. Dancers and mimes communicate with gesture, musicians with sound. Whole stories can be communicated with motion and music without words. You’ve probably seen The Nutcracker either in a theater on TV. Since it was designed by human beings to communicate something, a performance of this ballet is a text. However--although it does include a few incidental lines of dialog--it depends for its effect on music and motion, not words. Text though it is, it is not a literary text. The categories are different.
The boundary between them is fuzzy, though. A mime performs gesture without words, which in the definition I am using here is not literary. I have seen storytellers entertain an audience of deaf persons using American Sign Language (ASL). To anyone fluent in ASL, the performance consists of a grammatically linked set of gestural words which could readily be transcribed as a written text or uttered as an oral one. Since I don’t understand the language, however, such a story looks to me like a mime performance, only more confusing. Clearly, a guitarist playing a folk song without singing the words is doing music and not literature. But what if the guitarist is singing “Hey lolly lolly lolly/ Hey lolly lolly lo”? The nonsense syllables carrying the sung melody constitute words only in a very limited phonological sense. Do they qualify as literature? I don’t think they do. Not knowing Italian, I also hear the cast members of The Marriage of Figaro singing nonsense syllables; to me they are performing only music and dance. For the Italian-speaker in the next row they are doing words as well. Whose standards should we use to decide whether a text includes words or not?
The boundary is not just fuzzy; it draws some arbitrary and unhelpful distinctions. For example, according to the definition I am using here, silent films (at least those that don’t show written dialog on screen) fall outside literature, whereas talkies make it in. Yet on the whole silent films and talkies are more alike than different. They belong in the same category.
I don’t worry much about these questions and quirks because to me stuffing a work into a category is less important than experiencing it.
Bear with me a moment while I explain my bias about classifying things. Figaro audience members who understand Italian enjoy a literary as well as a musical experience but I do not. No use getting upset about whether the opera properly fits in one category or another, because categories are just abstractions people devise so they can organize reality and make sense of it. Inevitably, setting up and defining them causes problems, because categories form a sharp square grid and reality is fuzzy and round. If you set the grid down on reality too hard, you cut off parts of it or mash it out of shape, or both. I recommend holding the grid high enough not to touch reality, so that you just look through it. That way, by shifting your perspective back and forth you can still clearly see things in their original shapes. In other words, use the boundary drawn by my definition gently. Don’t try to make everything fit neatly on one side or the other.
No doubt you noticed that I have shifted by subtle degrees from describing literary texts to discussing literary experiences. I did not make the shift entirely by accident. The two concepts are intimately related. Remember that people construct texts, like other artifacts, on purpose. Their purpose in constructing a literary text is to provoke a literary experience, which requires a response to language. However, people may respond to language in many ways; to find which responses count as literary experiences, we need to explore the answer to the second question.
Q: What benefit do people derive from it?
A: Make that benefits, plural. At the most basic level, nobody has ever given a better answer than Aristotle’s: instruction and delight.
Instruction is a feature literature shares with other texts. A grocery list gives instructions for running an errand. The Ten Commandments give instructions for running a life. The instruction does not have to be direct and explicit, though. Take a teenager gossiping about the way her classmates dress. Directly she is commenting--instructing her friends--about clothes, but they learn things indirectly about her as well, such as her likes and dislikes in friends as well as fashion. Or take West Side Story. The text never states directly “Group rivalries can have terrible effects on individual lives,” but most viewers would agree the musical can teach that principle.
Delight is what sets literature apart. Literary experiences are always imbued with a playful spirit. The little booklets that prepare people to take their driver’s license examination do not provide a literary experience. Some TV commercials do. Taster’s Choice instant coffee, for example, ran a series of ads over the course of several months that amounted to one-minute episodes in a romantic story. An attractive woman and an attractive and slightly younger man discovered they shared a taste for Taster’s Choice, and eventually their relationship blossomed into romance. Obviously the writers of the driving booklet do not invite us to get emotionally or imaginatively involved the way the writers of the commercials did. However, writers don’t have to give the invitation. Readers can have a literary experience with a workaday text by approaching in a playful spirit. I read once that an excerpt from an Australian pamphlet about raising soybeans was entered in a poetry contest by some prankster. It won a prize. In this case it was obviously the satisfied expectation of the judges, not the intent of the original writer, that qualified the work as literary.
Q. Wait now. If a playful spirit is necessary to literature, that leaves out Paradise Lost. Nothing light-hearted about that, right?
A. You mean John Milton’s great long ponderously serious pseudoclassical epic about how Satan tricked Adam and Eve into losing the gift of eternal life and Jesus Christ restored it? The one where he set out to do nothing less than “justify the ways of God to man?” Wrong.
I mean right, there’s nothing lighthearted about Paradise Lost, but wrong, it’s not excluded from literature. The way I use the word, playful is not a synonym of lighthearted. Play is any voluntary nonutilitarian activity. Notice I didn’t mention people in that definition; I didn’t say, “. . . nonutilitarian activity that people do voluntarily.” That’s because play is something we share with other warm-blooded animals. Creatures with reasonably complex brains fueled by metabolisms fast enough to give them time and energy left over--time and energy not needed to acquire food, maintain security, and reproduce their kind--these creatures play. As far as I know, all of them do. But most of them do their heavy playing as juveniles. Some give it up early. Woodchucks, for example, settle down as adults and get almost as sober and unimaginative as reptiles. Others, such as dogs and chimpanzees, keep playing at least once in a while on up into their declining years. Nobody, though, plays harder or longer or more variously than human beings. Nobody.
I admit the subject of Paradise Lost is not playful, any more than selling coffee is playful. It’s the form, the way the subject is treated, that counts here. If Milton had been interested only in justifying the ways of God to Man, he could have written another unadorned prose pamphlet like the ones he had busied himself with for the previous several years under Puritan rule. Here’s the difference. After the monarchy was restored, the market for Puritan tracts crashed and he had free time. Lots and lots of free time. Like other brainy warm-blooded animals, he filled it up with something he had been wanting to do all along: play. What we animals do in play is to explore the limits of our capability by exaggerating the behaviors we use in ordinary life. In Milton’s case this meant pushing the limits of writing. Instead of earnest pamphlets, he would tell a grand, glorious story designed to move readers to astonished admiration. As if the story alone weren’t enough, he gussied it up with rhythmical prosody and rhetorical figures to redouble readers’ wonderment. It had a whole different effect from plain expository prose because readers--a few of them, anyway--were attracted to these playful elements. The effect pleased them enough to make them want to read the work even if they didn’t care whether God’s ways were justified or not. Also the poem had no direct, immediate bearing on their food, clothing, shelter, or chances for a date. Somehow it was deeply satisfying just for its own sake. Not a lighthearted passage in it, but it was, pardon the expression, fun.
So that’s the essence of the literary experience: the transmission and reception of verbal messages in a playful spirit. Instruction and delight.
Important Notice
Some of my friends who almost invariably show keen literary insight and impeccable literary taste think many of the things I said above about John Milton and Paradise Lost are not merely wrong, but (to quote one of them) “reprehensible.” I mention this fact so you will realize, in case you didn’t already, that the world has people in it who hold very strange opinions.
Q: You mean any text that provides a literary experience is a work of literature?
A: Well, no, not exactly. Most people think of literature as something special.
For one thing, we reserve that term for texts with a long shelf life. Teenagers gossiping about clothes nearly always try to speak in artful, stylish--that is, playful--ways, so they are enjoying a literary experience. The texts they utter do not last, though. A particular folk tale performance also disappears as soon as the echoes die out, but in this case the essence of the tale has been preserved in memory for a long time, often for many generations. Most people reject gossip as literature but accept folk tales.
For another thing, we classify as literature only those texts which the author and the audience both approach in a playful spirit. Fluent English speakers can take delight in product instructions written by foreign engineers. You know, like this: “If your Brandex be found having the defect, please direct to attention of the distributive center most nearby.” No one calls the instructions literature, though. Those judges who awarded a literary prize to an excerpt from a technical soybean pamphlet would have eliminated the entry if the prankster had not retyped the lines like free verse to imply a playfulness that the original author left out. Now look at the other end of the communication transaction. Authors of erotic stories approach their subject playfully, but readers whose disapproval keeps them from sharing the playfulness call such stories pornography and refuse to dignify them with the term literature.
The most important way authors play with the audience is to construct texts which leave some things unsaid, so that readers are expected to bridge the gaps. Flannery O’Connor, in the preface to her novel Wise Blood, used the word mystery for the gap she invited readers to try to fill. Speaking of free will, the novel’s major theme, she wrote, “Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” In order to solve such mysteries and bridge the gaps, readers (including, of course, listeners and viewers) must supplement an author’s flights of imagination with imaginative acts of their own. Thus they share the act of creation. Now here is an important point: no two readers will fill the gaps in exactly the same way. They have different stores of knowledge to draw from and different points of view in applying that knowledge. Naturally, they are going to disagree about literary texts. Many think discussing these disagreements is just about as enjoyable as experiencing the works themselves. This feeling lies at the heart of literary criticism.
A final thing. We consider literature to include only texts in which the playfulness--the artfulness--constitutes a significant element, not just an incidental feature. By that I simply mean the instruction part must not overwhelm the delight part. The commercial purpose of Taster’s Choice ads is so obvious that most people don’t call them literature in spite of their literary elements. Newspapers are staffed by skillful writers who by and large enjoy their work. Otherwise they would look for jobs that pay better. They often put very stylish touches into headlines, editorials, and even straight news stories. As long as the news is fresh, though, the information overpowers the artfulness and we say the material is journalism, not literature. Years later, after perspective has shifted and the events reported loom small, readers may notice the artfulness more and decide the writing qualifies as literature after all.
As I said before, I don’t worry too much about the fine points in defining the category, and you can simplify your life by adopting the same attitude. Look at it this way:
If the way something is spoken or written gives you goosebumps, makes you laugh or cry, or say “Hot damn!” or “I wonder?” it is giving you a literary experience.
If your English teacher likes it too, you’re pretty safe to call it literature.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to The Writers’ Roundtable, a circle of friends who get together from time to time to help one another improve their writing. Their suggestions and encouragement have improved this piece in many ways, in many places. I especially want to thank
Ralph Schneider and Nadine St. Louis.
