What is literature?
Weeks and weeks ago, I began to write a post about my favorite books – I mean the ones I’ve carted from Memphis to New Orleans to Philadelphia and some even to England; the ones that are re-read every so often although they do not need to be refreshed in my mind, and that I like to have physically present on my cluttered bookshelf. I even started to speculate about why they are so preferred: for example, my description of each book noted “…and it sounds great when read aloud.” I planned to follow my call for succulent prose with an invitation to tell me about your favorites.
However, that post was never finished and now it is languishing on the borrowed laptop, which suffered battery death and has been returned. So instead we will talk about literature, which is a completely different topic.
Literature came up in the books-and-covers post in the form of nearly an apology – as in, I really enjoy this text but you may not consider it literature. The comments that followed assumed or described a range of attributes that literature is meant to have. In summary, literature is or might be that which is:
classic canonical dense detailed transcendent realistic sublime
precise austere socially-relevant imaginative “heightened reality”
It might exclude that which is:
genre-fiction schlock transcendent realistic
I certainly can’t add any clarification to that; it’s part of my job to study and interpret things well outside of the conventional boundaries of literature precisely because they aren’t literary. Process of elimination gains us no ground, though.
Although writing has been going on for millennia, the distinction between literature and regular old texts, or literature and popular texts, is only a couple of centuries old – and frankly, it has frequently been a matter of class as much as craft. The root of the word “popular” gives you a sense of that: consider that as recently as the nineteenth century, there wasn’t much sense in ordinary folk reading and writing. and when the masses demanded a right to literacy, they weren’t expected to appreciate much fine art. That’s still sort of horribly true. . . Brian’s comment about the ghettoization of fantasy and sci-fi reminded me that the same treatment is frequently given to women and African-American writers. (Need proof? Just check out any mainstream bookstore. You’ll find a segregated African-American section for contemporary writers that didn’t make some publisher’s “literary” cut. Collect a stack of female authors from the 3-for-2 table and gawk at the pretty covers, frequently depicting clothes or shoes.)
But it’s the twenty-first century, and people are becoming more and more aware of the social forces that develop things we might otherwise take for granted, like culture and taste. The result, interestingly, is an expectation that literature measures up to the same standards we are learning to live by. Art and literature are supposed to do something. They should make you see, or make you feel, or give you something. For some critics, what makes a text literature is the making: from a book I have on aesthetics, “What makes the literary text an important object of study is no longer its power of transcendence but the fact that it exerts power” (Winfried Fluck). For others, it’s the reaction instigated in the reader/viewer: same book, ”Art should instigate new types of thinking, it should not be a place of rest” (Giles Gunn). The latter concept is reflected in some of your comments, particularly those like “sublime” and “transcendent” that suggest a particular kind of experience that isn’t readily available in daily life.
And that’s about as far as we get in academia. We are very suspicious of books that make us feel, because everyone knows that feeling is the opposite of thinking (wink, nudge). And although there will always be critics that write worshipfully of their subjects, I am being trained not to make distinctions by craft because my job is to analyze meaning, and meaning can be found in the meanest of texts. Besides, “well-crafted” is a value that depends entirely on training and cultural trends. Nonetheless, I still use the word “literature” to honor works of skill . . and sometimes works of passion.
Two anecdotal illustrations:
One, in a course on culture and criticism, which is designed precisely to break down the unacademic assumptions of incoming grad students, a classmate brought up Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones. Without thinking, I responded “Oh, that’s a good book.” “How do you know?” countered the professor – with humor, but I was nonetheless chastised. I meant that the book was imaginative, pretty well written, balanced comedy and tragedy, made me think, made me cry. But I still don’t know if it’s good.
Two, the majority of my Asian-American class really didn’t enjoy the first three or four books on the syllabus, which was arranged largely in chronological order. Let’s take America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan. It’s a horrible read – I confess I didn’t finish it. It’s sloppy and trite. The sentences are not shapely, as Virginia Woolf would say. It jerks impatiently on your pity, and then reassures you with unreassuring messages of hope. But we could never answer whether this judgment was fair – for one thing, our ideas of Good Books are very postmodern American. For another, America is in the Heart is a kind of protest novel: it a book written by an oppressed minority member to prove that he can write, that his mind is individual and very affected by the inequality in 1930s California, and that the inequality does exist and is unjust. That book has to exist and it has to be taught in Asian-American literature classes, even though I hate it.
So ends my rumination on the topic. Do you like how I completely waffled and avoided answering the question that drove this post? Let’s take it as a given that if there was any way to stick a pin in what “literature” is, we won’t figure it out here. I’m still interested to know more about how you all make the distinctions for yourselves. I’d really love see something like a verbal mudfight: everybody roll up your pants and start slinging literary accusations. : D But failing that, maybe we can do an either/or thing. Consider two books that have elicited opposing responses on my blog: The Time Traveler’s Wife and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Literary or not literary? And, judging by those books as a rubric, what else counts as literature and what doesn’t?
I have a response to this… I know exactly what I want to say, but because of full-time work it may take a few days to post. Give me until the weekend, at the latest.
You lose a letter grade every day you’re late.
That’s mean. I only take off a third of a letter grade.
Look forward to it, Ted, and no worries because I think I still owe you an Email.
My GPA would have benefited by such a relaxed attitude towards due dates. All of my best writing was done in cocoon on the night after it was due.
This is a hard question, and though I generally know what I want to say, collecting my thoughts on this matter and forming them into words has always been difficult – it’s been difficult every time that I’ve tried it. As I noted in a previous post, a section of my master’s thesis dealt with this question, and I think my committee’s reaction to those words says a lot about how they view questions of “meaning” versus questions of “craft.” They all agreed that this portion of the thesis came in too late and was underdeveloped… one suggested removing the question altogether. The dilemma was introduced rather late in the text (in the last ten pages), which I guess was my own way of skirting the issue. At the same time, I feel that I was at least successful in articulating my own relationship with literature, as I saw it then, for better or worse.
Here is a paragraph from that essay that they discussed at great length. The “Ngugi” referred to is Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o:
“In a world of intense racial suffering, can any joy be found in the pursuit of art or in the trials of human experience? Ngugi finds value in the redefinition of Christianity by the revolutionary Mau Mau of Kenya, who ‘[t]ook Christian songs; they took even the Bible and gave these meanings and values in harmony with the aspirations of their struggle’ (Ngugi 27). He sees this action as valuable because it defines ‘armed struggle as the highest form of political and economic struggle’ (Ngugi 27), lending abstract theology an immediate and highly functional use. Reading this passage, one begins to wonder if any real difference exists between Blake’s essential human suffering and Ngugi’s determined violence. Accepting the message of either author, the reader might be tempted toward non-involvement, a decision that would negate Ngugi’s push toward political awareness and responsibility. Beyond these pressing concerns, however, another question remains. Historically, why do works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion and “The Little Black Boy” remain popular after so many years, while other literature dealing with similar issues fades from memory? The answer, in this writer’s opinion, lies in the ability of both poems to disrupt the unconscious, to connect with the reader’s thoughts and memories in a way that cannot be fully understood or articulated. These hidden thoughts are often unpleasant, which makes the experience of stirring and unearthing them a difficult but also highly memorable one. The jolting discovery of these recollections may, in part, explain the negative reactions voiced by many of the critics referenced here, myself included. A true portrait of oppression is unsparing in its refusal to comfortably reconcile painful dilemmas, leaving many readers shaken and deeply pensive. Viewing honest and realistic works of art is never easy, which is why the experience is so rare and so unforgettable.”
Now, fully exploring this twist in my argument would have probably required readings of Freud, or Jung, or some knowledge of psychology, but I didn’t want to turn this into a psychology paper. Part of what I’m trying to say in this paragraph is that literature is non-reductive… the best literature exists at a level that defies words, thought, or easy motives. As uncomfortable as it is for academics to grapple with, art isn’t about ideas as much as it’s about a state of being or feeling. Sara mentions America is in the Heart, which I haven’t read, as an example of a socially-relevant text that she couldn’t connect with… yet it probably generated very interesting discussion and helped to teach the concepts of her class. Along these same lines, I remember reading a novel called Erasure in grad school that dealt with many pertinent racial issues but that ultimately failed to hold my interest as a story. The book describes an African-American literary critic who struggles with being viewed as a “black writer” rather than just a writer… I could write an entire post on this book. Suffice to say that the story offers many clever and sardonic scenarios yet never really holds together as a novel… the non-linear narrative is all over the map, the language is thin and imprecise, the characters are two dimensional and unlikable. Erasure makes many fine points, and I’m glad that I had the opportunity to read and discuss it with others, but it isn’t great literature… it felt like a supplement to the more substantial texts we were reading by Morrison, Ellison, Hurston, Baldwin, etc.
So if ideology and like-minded ideas aren’t what draw us to a text (at least not entirely), what does, exactly? Rereading Sara’s original post, my thoughts keep returning to something that Zizek said in one of his books (I can’t remember which one, though it might have been The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime). In one section of the book, Zizek critiques modern culture and the infinite possibilities that it seems to offer us. Television, video, the internet, computer games, chat rooms, and virtual reality all promise us immediate pleasure or gratification without loose ends. A recurring metaphor that he uses for this way of life is the video game… when you play a video game, you’re usually confronted with a series of obstacles that you must overcome. When you successfully counter these obstacles, you win the game. However, when you are defeated and “die” over the course of gameplay, there is still no finality… the player often has more than one life and can even reset the game to start all over again. The player thinks, plays, struggles, wins, loses, even dies, but death itself becomes abstract because the game promises continual renewal from death. For Zizek, this results in a hollow experience that leaves the individual numb to the fact that he/she will one day face true, immutable, real world death. True art, in his view, offers the exact opposite of this empty state of game playing… while it offers the reader/viewer a similar array of possibilities, each possibility leads to death rather than life. The objective of genuine art or literature, in other words, is to confront the individual with his/her own mortality, and to make that mortality inescapable.
I think I was driving at this, or something like it, when I wrote that great literature shouldn’t “reconcile painful dilemmas”… instead, it should confront us with these dilemmas in a way that we can’t escape or turn away from. Literature is better at exposing problems than offering solutions, and I think the best literature uncovers matters that we would rather not talk about. When I look at Blake’s engravings of suffering African slaves, for example, the first thing that I notice is how unadorned the drawings are… other engravers frame the scene in a more traditional way, with background detail, proper perspective, etc. Blake allows the pain of the slave to take the forefront, enlarged and often set against a white backdrop. The image stares at you, vulnerable, naked, and free from any distraction.
I think that even the most detailed literature should have this quality of bareness, and of a direct confrontation between author and reader. Distractions should be stripped away in favor of creating an artistic state of unease… to provide relief from this unease is to potentially undercut the piece’s impact. This doesn’t mean that all literature is unpleasant, but even when it amuses us or makes us laugh, there should be a point (this point) behind it. What’s weird is that, for Zizek, political ideology constitutes another distraction from this goal, another source of relief. In some cases, I have a hard time disagreeing. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, for example, gives a wrenching account of U.S. poverty in the early 20th century, then shifts to a more polemical tone in the last section. I understand why Sinclair concludes the novel in this way, and I even sympathize with his call for stronger labor unions, but for me this conclusion doesn’t fit with what came before. The majority of the book shows us the complete hopelessness of poverty, without reservation… when the author suddenly tries to explain it away, it seems false.
I know I’ve been talking in absolutes a lot, and I realize that there are exceptions to every rule. But in my opinion, the best literature presents the reader with difficulties. Some of these difficulties can be resolved, and many can’t. But the goal of the writer is to present these problems in an engaging way… it’s then up to the reader to respond as he or she sees fit.
I would like to add that I hope more people post on this thread. Discussions like this are no good without dissenting opinions.
Well, I’ll comment. I’ll even condense what you said into a less articulate but portable package in case would-be commenters go “Gah! Long post!”
Ted sez:
Good art/literature isn’t easy (possibly in part because it is irreducible, and can’t be broken down into the parts that make it good).
Real literature moves.
Literature is probably socially relevant, but socially relevant texts aren’t necessarily literary.
Zizek writes that true art confronts the subject with his/her mortality, whereas entertainment distracts and satiates the subject with false invincibility. Literature can confront the subject with an array of suffering and human cruelty that we would rather not see.
Literature should be purposeful, not polemical.
Bottom line: literature should engage, not assuage.
Ooh, I started having fun summarizing your argument as catchy slogans, Ted. : ) That doesn’t lessen the persuasiveness of it, though. I’m glad you commented with such depth and thought, and I apologize for playing devil’s advocate for a few minutes for the sake of argument.
For one, I think I could have intuited that you were an academic even without the explicit reference to your thesis: your position, even with the acknowledged difficulty in defining it, resembles the Fluck and Gunn bits I quoted more than the other blog comments I culled. You want literature to do something. Literature should exert force on the reader, both demanding that the reader read and creating stumbling blocks for the reader’s thought. I quite agree with you – it’s a very sexy idea – but then, we’re coming this whole lineage of litcrit, and I worry at times that the “books must do” thought is in part a justification for our profession. The book I quoted above blames American pragmatism, but you see it in the Frankfurt School and the French thinkers too: books must do, art must act, because if they do not then why are we writing about them while the world goes to shit?
But though literature must move, it must not push too hard. That’s why it’s particularly relevant that your thesis and your comment spend so much time on racialized writers. Underclassed writers are historically pressured to write experience over art, and substance over style, because (like America is in the Heart) they are forced to defend their existence to the overclass, who after all do most of the publishing. The novel of protest almost cannot help straying into “polemic” territory, which attempts to exert so much force that (paraphrasing you) it may just fail as a literary piece. Yet, when even the act of writing (i.e. professing a self to a country that doesn’t acknowledge the value of your raced or classed or gendered selfhood) is necessarily a political move, who has time for literature? Catch-22.
You do mention a number of minority writers that I love and consider literary… but I’d have to point out that, although popular in her time, Hurston was never picked up for literary study until after the Black Arts movement. Similar instance with Nella Larsen, whose work I love to read and analyze… she more or less disappeared until the eighties, when an ambitious litcritic rescued her and repackaged her as a possible queer text. Now she’s considered literary and meets quite a few of your criteria – she moves me, she confronts me with ugliness (but also presents me with beauty), etc. – but she didn’t engage much of anyone for nearly a century.
Race in particular but underclass in general will always complicate the literary question for me.
But since I mentioned beauty, I want to run with that… I suppose we could easily expand your “direct confrontation” to include beauty and comedy as well as ugliness and tragedy… or can we? I could name a lot of critics who’d argue that beauty soothes and comedy frequently masks, the opposites of confrontation. That’s a very old argument, actually, and your friend Blake’s contemporaries probably threw around the word “sublime” a lot when they were deciding whether it’s okay to love something beautiful. But I very much want art and literature – whatever those things are – to be sometimes beautiful and joyful, so I’d want more of a bone than the moments of amusement you allowed me. : )
Wow, it’s REALLY hard to be brief in this discussion.
I’m kinda bad about hit-and-run commenting, mostly because by the time I think about others’ responses, the thread is dead. So at the risk of speaking into the empty air, I’d like to push on the notion that literature “does” in a certain way.
My genuine impulse is to say that the best texts urge the reader to see the human condition anew. They present a challenge to the works that came previously and to the reader’s current world view (oh, how very TSE). I too love texts that defy easy interpretation and summary: They “must resist the intelligence almost successfully” (Wallace Stevens). A literary work challenges the status quo, even if only by articulating it.
As an academic, though, one interrogates one’s impulses. What’s wrong with being entertained by a text? Why should literary works also be memento mori? It seems that Zizek (whom I dislike) and scholars like him see the human condition as necessarily bounded by mortality–and morality. Somehow it is dissolute to enjoy a text. An example: I love a good manifesto, and the Futurist Manifesto is an absolute delight for me as a reader, despite its advocacy of fascism. The progressive in me feels naughty about it, but what can a reader do?
What I’m driving at is that a determination of what is literary necessarily involves an ethical position. Can something be evil and literary at the same time? If my answer is “yes,” then I have to revise my impulsive definition. Ignore the nexus of aesthetics and ethics at great risk, not because literature must be aimed at taking apart inequality but because one’s own underlying ideological priorities challenges any definition of art.
I’ve been wanting to comment on this thread for ages, and I think I lost a post I started a week or two ago, but here’s something I’ll toss out, and we can decide collectively whether it’s true, useful, both or neither… We keep referring to entire works (myself included) and our conflicting desires and feelings about which are and aren’t literary, but doesn’t this sort of miss the point? Sure we can say it’s subjective, and a spectrum, and there are different kinds of literature etc, but I think one key is to stop trying to label or think of entire *books* as literary or not literary, and in some respects think about individual sentences, or story elements, or some slightly more fine grained view than +/- 100,000 words at a time…
This relates a bit to Kmc’s question, “Can something be evil and literary at the same time?,” because it’s probably true from the bird’s eye view of the futurist manifestos or, jumping to film and whatever the cinematographic equivalent of “literary” is for film (I think we’re sort of debating here “what is art?”, and have just restricted ourselves to texts until now, in which literature is the name we give “art” in text form, much like sculpture or painting are the terms for other mediums, though this would imply that somehow a bad painting should not be called a painting at all, which seems a bit far fetched) for D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, a cinematic milestone and masterpiece, but one which attempts to portray as heroic the founding of the Ku Klux Klan.
We can releive this cognitive dissonance by simply accepting that even great art is still flawed, and sometimes those flaws are difficult or impossible to distinguish from what’s good in it, but sometimes, as with the fascism and racism in the Futurist Manifesto and Birth of a Nation respectively, it’s glaringly apparent. We can’t censor the art and somehow try to reconstruct it without these elements though, so we just have to try to be conscious of how an author’s (or director’s or painter’s, etc) biases and beleifs may crop up in their work, and be careful not to swallow the bathwater with the baby, to wrangle an awkward (and I suppose canibalistic?) metaphor.
Oh, Kmc, I totally get you on Futurists. My guilty pleasure used to be Vorticists, who weren’t that much different but are much more forgotten and therefore more ridiculous. I love arrogance. I don’t think enjoyment of manifestos is at odds with your previous statement about reviewing the human condition – the reasons that you love such pieces is partly because they exist at such odd angles with your own convictions. Maybe.
“Human condition” gets stuck in my throat, though. I have to put a “some aspect of” in front of it.
Also, upon reflection, I think my own personal litloves are often for texts that do the opposite of making me see anew – I love the ones that articulate (and perhaps expand) the way I already think. Like Margaret Atwood, a writer who hangs pretty precariously on that literary/not literary balance. I love the way she thinks, though, because it’s a more developed version of the way I think – and I want to call her literary.
Brian, am I reading that you want to consider disregarding “literature” as another sort of genre word for books, and replace it with literary elements? Or that it’s okay to deem certain books as “literature” only if we accept the condition of flaws? I could roll with either, or both, let’s try out some.
Birth of a Nation, under Ted’s terms, is polemic and not art… but under yours, it’s masterful in its craft, so it is art despite or including its flawed.
You and I think Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is literary, mostly because it is masterful in its hybrid craft of fantasy/period fiction. But it doesn’t do *any* of the other things we’ve assigned to the literary: it doesn’t really comment on the human condition or provide insight. It entertains, but not in the way a Futurist manifesto does. Is that its artistic flaw? Or do we say that it is a book of literary aspirations or with literary elements?
Does America in the Heart act as a literary piece by virtue of its vintage reflection of immigrant life in a America, despite its tragic flaw of being poorly written?
Hm… even I don’t think I’m making a lot of sense here, I’m having a hard time keeping ahold of all the threads of thought introduced in these comments. They make for fun ideaplaying, though.