In his essay, What is Literature? that was published in Literary Theory:An Introduction (1983), Terry Eagleton seeks to define literature as he argues that for literary theory to exist, there must also exist a category of literature with some essential characteristics. As 21st century students of Literature, the question that arises on reading the introduction of the essay, is whether literary theory itself is a part of literature or not. The writings of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, though Eagleton makes it clear in this essay, were not generally regarded as literature, are now analysed as any other work of literature though with possibly different methods.
In this essay, Eagleton dismisses, the distinction between fact and fiction, value-judgement, and the process of defamiliarisation of language as the premise of evaluating the literariness of a text.
In early modern London, William Shakespeare’s most sought-after plays were not the tragedies but the histories. According to the database of Early English Playbooks, the two most published plays (and likely the most popular) from the 1590s to the 1630s were Henry IV Part I – published 11 times – and Richard III, which was published ten times. This is probably because in a country where power was centered on the throne, the issues of sovereignty and succession, dramatized in Shakespeare’s history-plays, would have been at the center of society, affecting everyone within it. People were mindful of the uprisings and usurpation that preceded and would follow the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At one point in her reign,the queen allegedly said “I am Richard II” comparing herself to Shakespeare’s most famous deposed king. In the contemporary time, it is quite possible that Shakespeare’s historical plays would rather be valued more for the use of archaic language or because of the reputation of its writer. Thus, Terry Eagleton rightly remarks that the same body of work may be valued for different reasons at different point in time, and so every “reading” of a text is also its “re-writing.”
How historical context affects the reception of drama, or art can be judged by the fact that in a mid-seventeenth century commentary on Hamlet which was first performed in 1600 and arguably Shakespeare’s most famous work in the 21st century, Abraham Wright criticised Hamlet as ‘an indifferent [mediocre] play, the lines but mean [average].’ Wright went so far as to claim that the ‘gravedigger scene’ in Hamlet was “since bettered in he Jealous Lovers,” a play by Thomas Randolph first performed in 1632 that few people today have heard of.
Initial reviews of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights in 1847 were less than spectacular, however, it is now considered one of the greatest literary achievements of all time. Thus, Terry Eagleton rightly points out, “some texts are born literary (because they qualify the standards of the time of their birth), some achieve literariness (texts that are ‘ahead of their time’), and some have literariness thrust upon them (as it is ‘decided’ that it is literature even irrespective of whether its writer wrote it as a work of history or philosophy).”
Women’s Writing
Despite the spread of feminism and multiculturalism, their impact on fields from literature to anthropology, and the efforts of
Feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s to recover forgotten women writers, with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston and Kate Chopin, largely women writers never made it out of academia’s cloistered walls and into the public consciousness. Sometimes these writers eventually break into mainstream, like Jennifer Egan or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; sometimes they’re rediscovered years after their death, like Zora Neale Hurston or Emily Dickinson; and sometimes, they’re never discovered at all like the hundred names we don’t know of, and thus, some texts because of the historical context that they are written and read in never achieve literariness. The 2009 list of the ‘100 Greatest Writers of All Time’ on This Recording included just fourteen women. Out of a hundred, only two of those women — Virginia Woolf (14) and Gertrude Stein (5) — made to the top 25, and the Brontë sisters, probably because they have the same name, and so they count as the same person, got to share the 58th position.
Comics
Comics too have begun to be seen as part of literature, especially since 1980s, with exemplary contribution from Bryan Talbot, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Many universities teach comics as part of literature courses. There are now about 150 comic scholars in the UK alone -university lecturers, PhD students and independent researchers who are exploring how subjects such as gender, feminism, history and mental and physical health are portrayed in comics. Not only was Pulitzer prize awarded to the graphic novel Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980) but also Time Magazine listed Watchmen (1986-1987) as one of the greatest novels of all time.
The genre of comics, though originally meant for pure entertainment and amusement is not just “creative” and “imaginative” body of work but is now being used by artists to convey a political point. Reportage is a rising genre in comics, helped by the fact that a sketch book may be tolerated in places and under conditions where a camera would be smashed. The American journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco’s collections of dispatches and colour pieces from Palestine and Bosnia, published as The Fixer (1966), Palestine (1994), Safe Area Gorazde (2000) have won him an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the comics world’s most reputable prize, the Eisner Award. The Canadian cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle has published three collections, from China, North Korea, and Burma,that give a personal, peculiar and hilarious picture of life as a Westerner under the most repressive of regimes. Spain Rodriguez’s graphic biography of Che Guevara, an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader, skillfully gives a picture of the blaze of his life. Thus, some comics are more factual than some inauthentic news-reports published in newspapers under the influence of strong political pressures. Terry Eagleton argues that despite being fictional, Superman comics are not regarded as literature. Is it not possible to read Superman comics as depicting what heroism and courage means to a society, and the aspirations it has for a better world?
Also, the distinction between fact and fiction used as a qualification to distinguish between literature and non-literature assumes that there exists ‘pure facts’ and ‘pure fiction’. As Edward Said has explicated, ‘pure knowledge’ does not exist, there is no truth that is not political, since truths too are constructed by a social system.
Songs
“Songwriters are not poets,” wrote Simon Armitage, a British poet, in 2008 in The Guardian. The question that then arises is that is poetry alone literature. But, if the use of literary devices and literary mode is the qualification for literature, some of Bob Dylan’s work does qualify on this parameter. In his masterpiece “Not Dark Yet,” a song about facing mortality, Dylan writes, “[I] Feel like my soul has turned into steel / I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.” A steel soul is a powerful metaphor for the deadness that comes with age and loss. The cold, unreflecting “steel” here is an objective correlative, an object that signifies an emotion. Dylan himself avoided taking on the mantle of ‘poet’. He once described himself as a “song ‘n’ dance man”. But the form of poetry and song is such that poetry can be sung and a song can be read aloud as poetry. It is only music that separates the two, but the text of a poetry or song does not itself stand for its genre. Thus, the formalists who analyse the words on the page,just by assessing the text on paper cannot possibly distinguish between song lyrics, whose qualification as literature is debated, and poetry, which was traditionally considered to be purely literary.
Oral-Literature
Many great works of the past that we read today as the classics of literature, such as Homer‘s Iliad and Ved Vyas‘s Mahabharata were documented in writing much later from the alleged point of their inception, but were passed on from generation to generation in the form of oral-poetry. This, then challenges the notion of literature as that which is quintessentially the written-word.
Free-verse Poetry
The formalists applied linguists to the study of language, and regarded literature as merely an “organisation of language.” The central principle of art, according to them, was ‘defamiliarisation’, making strange the ordinary language. The proposal proposed in A Modest Proposal (1729) by Jonathan Swift would then not be indicative of the grim reality of the Irish in the eighteenth century but the oppression of Ireland by the English would be an opportunity for the construction of a proposal in the form of a pamphlet.
Also, the formalists assumed the existence of a “single normal language”. The text of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1476), though written in the ‘normal’ language of its time, is anything but a writing in the ‘standard’ form of English of 21st century. While the formalists regarded literature as the writing that draws attention to itself, literariness for some readers could rather mean the “laconic plainess” or “low-key sobriety” in language.
With the introduction and development of the free verse in poetry, poetry in the modern age sounds less lyrical than earlier forms. The changed use of language, and the emphasis on the inadequacy of language to express (like in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock (1920) “This is not what I meant at all,/This is not it, at all.”) has led to a form of poetry that doesn’t sound poetic like the rhyme of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. The form of prose-poetry has led to a rupture in boundary between prose and poetry. The question to be asked is that does metre and rhyme and verse determine the literary value accorded to poetry, and does its conception as literature change with the changed way the words appear in lines on the page. Is Walt Whitman’s poetry less poetic when he writes in To Think of Death which was published in Leaves of Grass in 1855:
“To think the thought of Death, merged in the thought of materials!
To think that the rivers will flow, and the snow fall, and fruits ripen, and act upon
others as
upon us now—yet not act upon us!
To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking great interest in
them—and we taking no interest in them!”
In determining literary value, is form prior to the thought that literature has the potential to inspire?
According to Eagleton, literature as an “objective, descriptive” category cannot exist because value-judgements are historically variable and have a close relation to social ideologies. This hints at ‘antagonism’, an approach that argues that though there may be real distinctions in literary value, our subjective value systems prevent us from knowing about the real value.
Literature, then seems to be an ever-evolving category, an art that cannot be confined within any domains. So, keep reading, keep writing, and keep relishing the beauty of the experience, the balm, the sentiment, that is literature.
saumyagairola011 