The writer of
this passage emphasises the distinction between writing
of didactic purpose and literary writing which has that
other, aesthetic, dimension. In fundamental terms
literature is 'an expression of life through the medium
of language' [2], but language used more profoundly
than when used simply to convey information.
The following two extracts, for example, both describing
one partner's response to marital problems, are different
in both their form and their intent:
Many critics date the
crumbling of their marriage back to that unfortunate
episode, but David was delighted when he heard that
Lynne had produced a daughter from her marriage to an
American doctor.
And
Her writing hand
stopped. She sat still for a moment; then she slowly
turned in her chair and rested her elbow on its
curved back. Her face, disfigured by her emotion, was
not a pretty sight as she stared at my legs and said
. . [3]
The first piece, from a
newspaper, gives a typical tabloid account of a broken
marriage. It plainly states the position of the two
parties involved, (but with an attitude akin to 'gossip').
The tone of the second piece is less factual and more
descriptive. Here the writer is sets out to depict a
particular scene, that of a woman distressed by the
discovery of some unsavoury information concerning her
husband, and employs such devices as the use of emotive
words, such as 'disfigured', the gradual increase of
dramatic tension, 'slowly turned in her chair', and then
in the last line a humorous deflation of this tension, 'her
face . . . was not a pretty sight'. The author shows a
mixture of intentions here, the structure and the use of
language showing a different approach and purpose to the
first piece's straightforward account of the everyday
world. In contrast to such a plain factual account -
Literature is a vital
record of what men have seen in life; what they have
experienced of it, what they have thought and felt
about those aspects of it which have the most
immediate and enduring interest for all of us. [4]
So literary writing,
having creative and artistic intent, is more carefully
structured and uses words for the rhetorical effect of
their flow, their sound, and their emotive and
descriptive qualities. Literary writers can also employ
tone, rhyme, rhythm, irony, dialogue and its variations
such as dialects and slang, and a host of other devices
in the construction of a particular prose work, poem, or
play.
All fiction is a kind
of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to
make people believe something is true that isn't. And
the novelist, in a particular, is trying to convince
the reader that he is seeing society as a whole. [5]
Literary writing is, in
essence, a 'response', a subjective personal view which
the writer expresses through his themes, ideas, thoughts,
reminiscences, using his armoury of words to try to evoke,
or provoke, a response in his reader.
. . . it is not only a
question of the artist looking into himself but also
the of his looking into others with the experience he
has of himself. He writes with sympathy because he
feels that the other man is like him. [6]
In Welsh Hill Country,
R. S. Thomas conveys his response to a landscape:
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone. [7]
Here the powerful
evocation of desolation, of the stark brutality, even
indifference, of the countryside is captured by Thomas
through a pointed use of language which also conveys his
grim mood.
In contrast, Keat's To Autumn conveys a soft,
sensuous depiction of this season which captured his
imagination:
Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
[8]
Both these extracts show a
creative, imaginative response to a particular scene, and
show contrasting ways in which a poet can use diction to
capture his mood and provoke a reaction in the reader.
Devices such as rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and
assonance combine to form a structure of mood, a
structure recognisably literary.
. . . apart from the
precise mixture of certainty and hesitation in the
poet's mind, one of the sovereign gestures of art is
to make the ideal real, and to project a dim
impersonal awareness onto a structure of definite
invention. [9]
Literature is a process of
communication, it 'helps us to understand life'. [10]
Perhaps we should also consider the motivation of the
writer as a factor which distinguishes literary from
other forms of writing. The writer's motivation is the
energy that pulls together the strands of his creativity
in the shaping of the finished work.
Ernest Hemingway gives his reasons for writing:
From things that had
happened and from things as they exist and from all
things that you know and all those you cannot know,
you make something through your invention that is not
a representation but a whole new thing truer than
anything true and alive, and if you make it well
enough, you give it immortality. That is why you
write and for no other reason that you know of. [11]
Georges Simenon puts
forward the idea of therapeutic value, a search for self:
I think that if a man
has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs
to find himself. Every writer has to find himself
through his characters, through all his writing. [12]
Philip Larkin gives his
reasons for writing poems as a need 'to preserve things I
have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite
and complex experience) both for myself and for others'.
Here, in The Whitsun Weddings, his motive was to
capture his response to a view seen from a train:
As if out on the end
of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, [13]
The main impetus behind
Edward Thomas's No One So Much as You, is to
describe his experience of love:
No one so much as you
Loves this my clay,
Or would lament as you
Its dying day [14]
While the motive behind
Andrew Young's, On the Prospect of Death, is
self-evident.
If it should come to
this
You cannot wake me with a kiss
Think I but sleep too late
Or once again keep a cold angry state [15]
Personal motivation is an
essential characteristic of literary writing. It is the
engine behind creativity, and the last two extracts
provide examples of some of the great themes which occur
again and again, not only in literary writing, but in all
the arts; love, death, war, and peace. Such themes, it
seems, provide perennial inspiration for artists.
So perhaps an inventory of literary writers' motives
should include the overflowing of their passions, their
desire for self-expression, an abiding fascination with
humanity in all its variety, the need to come to grips
with relationships as they really are in the world as it
really is, the striving after an ideal world which can
exist only in the imagination, and, perhaps at the heart
of it all, the need to form, shape, things of beauty.
The artist needs to resolve conflicts within himself, to
reach an understanding, to search for some credible
meaning of to life, to death, to everything. He is always
reaching, fumbling toward some sort of truth; an artistic
creative truth, a truth that resides in the individual
artist and needs to be grasped, made real, made
understandable.
Perhaps in some cases the artist's motivation could be
seen as a need to create other worlds, in the way that
Milton and Tolkien created other worlds, in order that
they can project real conflicts onto another plane.
The many different genres of the novel constitute a
particular challenge to the concept of 'literary writing'.
Detective novels, and science fiction novels, for example,
are creative, imaginative, depictions of life. We might
question their seriousness as literature, or whether they
can achieve the high ideals of art, but then we might
equally well question the meaning of 'seriousness', and 'the
high ideals of art'. Popular novels may not deal with
life's great conflicts, or search for truth and beauty,
and they may deal with the seamier side of life, or
escape into the fantastic, but can they still be
considered 'literature'? Do they still make an important
contribution to our understanding of the world, as 'real'
literature does?
Obviously 'literary' works such as Tolstoy's War and
Peace and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
take as a nucleus an event, an aspect of life and
construct a world around that core. They are works about
real people, engaged in the real business of living. They
convey knowledge, understanding, experience and are hence
considered important. Yet they have in common with the
detective and science fiction novel that they are books,
consisting of words that have been used to express
something, words that may or may not be read, and may or
may not succeed in conveying an understanding of the
world they depict.
In my view it comes down to subjective value judgements.
I believe literature is a 'broad church' which ought to
be able to deal with any subject, and that ultimately it
is individual readers, or readers en masse, who decide on
the value of any particular work and on whether or not it
deserves a place in the annals of literary history.
Writers aim to show us 'the world', but no single writer
can do this, and 'literature' should encompass numerous
different kinds of writer because each is trying to show
us something which cannot be shown as a whole. Each,
whether a Tolstoy or a Raymond Chandler, can only give us
his own small fragment of understanding. Ultimately it is
those works which endure that should be considered 'literature',
those which have succeeded in holding firm a fragment of
life, to be seen, to be read, to be understood.
Perhaps we should let a writer have the last word on
summing up the writers' art:
The aim of every
artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by
artificial means and hold it fixed, so that a hundred
years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves
again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only
immortality possible for him is to leave something
behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was
here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable
oblivion through which he must someday pass. [16]
In conclusion, literary
writing does embody certain distinguishing
characteristics. It is a self-conscious, imaginative mode
of writing which uses words not just to convey
information, but as an art form. Ultimately it is a
response to life.
Personally, passages of outstanding literary writing such
as the following, convince me that words are the highest
form of expression available to mankind:
CLAUDIO: Ay, but to
die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; [17]
References
1. Hudson, W. H. p.10
2. Hudson, W. H. p. 10
3. Nabokov, V. p.95
4. Hudson p.10
5. Angus Wilson, in Dick, K.
6. Geroges Simenon, in Dick, K.
7. Thomas, R.S. Poems
8. Hayward, J. p. 296
9. John Middleton Murray. Preface to the poems of Walter
de la Mare
10. Reeves, J. p.16
11. Dick, K. p. 196
12. Dick, K. p.38
13. Allot, K.
14. Allot, K. p. 63
15. Allot, K. p. 83
16. Faulkner, William, in Dick, K. p.33
17. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Bibliography
Allot, Kenneth (Ed) The Penguin Book of Contemporary
Verse. Penguin 1980
Dick, Kay. (Ed) Interviews from 'Paris Review'. Penguin
1972
Hayward, John. (Ed) Penguin Book of Verse. Penguin 1981
Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the Study of
Literature. Harrap 1963
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Penguin 1982
Reeves, James. The Critical Sense. Heinemann 1957
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure
© John Oldcastle, October
2000
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