Eagleton, Terry;
Literary theory: an introduction
Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1996, 234 pages
ISBN 0631201882
topics: | literature | critic | theory
A superbly argued text, though a bit verbose in parts. Opens with a brilliant essay on how the concept of "literature" cannot be objecively defined. Yet there is some consensus on what it may or may not be. This definition reminds me of the Kantian concept of "beauty" - and aesthetics is of course, is also part of the notion of literature. However, even categories such as "insect" (see last paragraph of his essay, below) may be more subjective than we give credit for. Otherwise why do species keep changing category after every shift in biology, such as the recent DNA-based re-classification? The second chapter considers the ways in which the meaning of "literature" changes over different periods of English history. Then comes the modern age.
meaning is not simply something 'expressed' or 'reflected' in
language: it is actually produced by it.
Husserl, like his philosopher predecessor Rene Descartes, started out on
his hunt for certainty by provisionally rejecting what he called the
'natural attitude' - the commonsensical person-in-the-street belief that
objects existed independently of ourselves in the external world, and
that our information about them was generally reliable. Such an attitude
merely took the possibility of knowledge for granted, whereas it was
this, precisely, which was in question. What then can we be clear about
and certain of? Although we cannot be sure of the independent existence
of things, Husserl argues, we can be certain of how they appear to us
immediately in consciousness, whether the actual thing we are
experiencing is an illusion or not. - p.48-9
meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is functional, the result of its difference from other signs. [In structuralism images in a text only have meaning in relation to each other, not to external things. The content is much less relevant than the form; items in the text could be changed and it would still be structurally the same. - http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2007/05/07/literary_theory.php] Frye: literary works are made out of other literary works, not out of any material external to the literary system itself. Thinkers who have argued that the apparent meaning is not necessarily the real one have usually been met with scorn: Copernicus was followed by Marx, who claimed that the true significance of social processes went on 'behind the backs' of individual agents, and after Marx Freud argued that the real meanings of our words and actions were quite imperceptible to the conscious mind. 94
If structuralism divided the sign from the referent, this kind of thinking often known as 'post-structuralism' goes a step further: it divides the signifier from the signified. 110 every sign is what it is because it is not all the other signs ... The signifier "boat" gives the signified [boat] because it divides itself from [moat] Meaning is the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers, rather than a concept tied firmly to the tail of a particular signifier. 110 Meaning is not immediately present in a sign. 111
for a demonstration that the upper case letter conveys a semantic
distinction, we can turn to Terry Eagleton's minimal pair-ish instance
Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally
regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. p.2
(see whole essay at scribd)
There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it,
for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction - writing which
is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly
include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do.
Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster,
Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the
sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it
was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to
encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.
French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and
Racine, La Rochefoucauld's maxims, Bossuet's funeral speeches, Boileau's
treatise on poetry, Madame de Sevigne's letters to her daughter and the
philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature
usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx),
Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us
very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It
has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between 'historical'
and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic sagas.1 In the
English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel'
seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news
reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were
neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations
between these categories simply did not apply.2 Gibbon no doubt thought
that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of
Genesis, but they are now read as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by others;
Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but they
are now for many readers 'literature'. Moreover, if 'literature' includes
much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic
and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as literature,
and certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginative'
writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are
uncreative and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature
is definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but
because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a
kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman ]akobson,
represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature
transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from
everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still
unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the
presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and
resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning - or, as
the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between
the signifiers and the signifieds. Your language draws attention to itself,
flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers
are on strike?' do not.
This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the Russian
formalists, who included in their ranks Viktor Shklovsky, Roman ]akobson, Osip
Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky.
The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution, and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively
silenced by Stalinism. A militant, polemical group of critics, they rejected
the quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines which had influenced literary
criticism before them, and in a practical, scientific spirit shifted attention to
the material reality of the literary text itself. Criticism should dissociate art
from mystery and concern itself with how literary texts actually worked:
literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular
organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and
devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to
something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection
of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a
material fact, whose functioning could be analysed rather as one could
examine a machine. It was made of words, not of objects or feelings, and it
was a mistake to see it as the expression of an author's mind. Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written
even if Pushkin had not lived.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of
literature; and because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind,
concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might
actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content'
(where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the
study of literary form.
[Literature] was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement,
the everyday world was also suddenly made unfamiliar. In the routines of
everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale,
blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, 'automatized'. Literature, by
forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual
responses and renders objects more 'perceptible'.
But to spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it
swerves. ... The idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common
currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion.
It is not that the Russian Formalists did not realize all this. They recognized
that norms and deviations shifted around from one social or historical
context to another - that 'poetry' in this sense depends on where you happen
to be standing at the time.
what if I were to hear someone at the next pub table remark 'This is awfully
squiggly handwriting!' Is this 'literary' or 'non-literary' language? As a
matter of fact it is 'literary' language, because it comes from Knut Hamsun's
novel Hunger. But how do I know that it is literary? It doesn't, after all, focus
any particular attention on itself as a verbal performance. One answer to the
question of how I know that this is literary is that it comes from Knut
Hamsun's novel Hunger.
But literature is usually judged to ... include,
for example, realist or naturalistic writing which is not linguistically
self-conscious or self exhibiting in any striking way. People sometimes call
writing 'fine' precisely because it doesn't draw undue attention to itself:
they admire its laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety. And what about
jokes, football chants and slogans, newspaper headlines, advertisements,
which are often verbally flamboyant but not generally classified as
literature? p.5-6
many normal sentences are ambiguous:
'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.'
'Refuse to be put in this basket,'
but the former could surely be read as literature. One could let oneself be
arrested by the abrupt, minatory staccato of the first ponderous
monosyllables; find one's mind drifting, by the time it had reached the rich
allusiveness of 'carried', to suggestive resonances of helping lame dogs
through life; and perhaps even detect in the very lilt and inflection of the
word 'escalator' a miming of the rolling, up-and-down motion of the thing
itself.
When the poet tells us that his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that he puts this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask whether he actually had a lover who for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is telling us something about women and love in general. Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language... In much that is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is considered important to the overall effect. But even if treating discourse 'nonpragmatically' is part of what is meant by 'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be 'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. I might well read Gibbon's account of the Roman empire not because I am misguided enough to believe that it will be reliably informative about ancient Rome but because I enjoy Gibbon's prose style, or revel in images of human corruption whatever their historical source. But I might read Robert Burns's poem because it is not clear to me, as a Japanese horticulturalist, whether or not the red rose flourished in eighteenth-century Britain. A piece of writing may start offlife as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them.
It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read 'poetically'. If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature. John M. Ellis has argued that the term 'literature' operates rather like the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around.' Perhaps 'literature' means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, 'literature' and 'weed' are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the ways it behaves, the purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it. 'Literature' is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition. We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good. ... Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn't.
the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one... [but with a] devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature Shakespeare, for example can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. But even statements of fact are value judgements - e.g. telling a visitor that 'This cathedral was built in 1612,' - may induce questions as to why telling me the dates of every building is important to you. Why this obsession with origins? Nobody will penalize me heavily if I dislike a particular Donne poem, but if I argue that Donne is not literature at all then in certain circumstances I might risk losing my job.
[AM: a great example; but this still means "Donne = literature" is a shared subjectivity rather than an objective fact.] In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a set of poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking them to evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable: time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated. To my mind, however, much the most interesting aspect of this project, and one apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of opinion. Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works, one is struck by the habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share what they expect literature to be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what fulfilments they anticipate they will derive from it. If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature' in England.