Definition

Who are you in an art museum? The one who already has a good amount of information about the artistic pieces there in exhibition or the one who doesn’t know anything about it? If you are The first one, you are more likely to appreciate what you see and take your time to “analyze” every inch of it to have your own experience of interpretation. You might have a “trip”, then, and the art will be all yours, with a message specially made for you. At the same time, you will also think of the biographical aspects of the artist’s life and the historical period in which he/she lived and even want to find out more information to fill out the incomplete pieces of data you should have storage in your brain. If you are the second one, though, the experience won’t be the same as that buddy who we called “The first one”. Don’t worry, not everything is lost for you IF you truly want to enjoy what you see, as the art is free for everyone to take it the way they want in order to have an appreciation at the end.

The same happens with literature, which is another form of art expression. If you read a literary work but don’t understand its meaning, don’t be afraid. When the author writes a story that is not easy to comprehend, he/she is not trying to be mean but create art. And the good thing about it is that once it is published, it is not the author’s “child” anymore. Anybody can read it and take it the way they want. We are allowed to like it, dislike it and give meaning to it through our reading. If you read Metamorphosis by Kafka and want to say the main character became a cockroach, you can do so. Even if he was alive, Kafka would not be right to complain about it. If what you are reading is a good literary piece, you should read it more than once because, believe me, you would have a new story every single time. Remember, the main goal of Oticrature is to give all the necessary support to the interested readers to enjoy a good reading, so even if you are the second buddy at the art museum, you can still enjoy what you read with some help.

We talked a little bit about people at art museums and some other things, but we still have to answer a question that might be popping out of your head. What does literature mean? Well, let’s start with a dictionary definition:

Lit.e.ra.ture

1. books, plays, poems etc that people think are important and good: He has read many of the major works of literature. | Italian literature
2. all the books, articles, etc on a particular subject: [+on] literature on the history science | in the literature Several cases of mercury poisoning have been recorded in the literature.
3. printed information produced by people who want to sell you something or tell you about something: sales literature

It is clear, therefore, that we are talking about the first definition: books, plays, poems etc that people think are important and good […]. However, who are these people who think some books, plays, poems etc. are important and good? And why do they think they are important and good? And why is this definition so generic? Well, we can’t answer the last one, but keep reading, as we are going to answer the other ones.

Let’s say a friend of yours comes to you and says “I just read a beautiful novel. It’s just incredible! You must read it!”. What is your friend’s point of view about the novel? That it is important – “[…] you must read it!” – and good – “It is just incredible!”. According to the first definition we extracted from a dictionary, the book your friend read is a literary work, right? You go on and ask your friend what book is that and he/she says “It’s A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks”. Now, is this novel a literary work?

The answer is no, and it’s not because the novel is not good – “good” is a matter of opinion, that is, very subjective. The reason is that A Walk to Remember doesn’t have literariness, which is the dominant element in a literary work.

To define literature, as we notice, is not an easy job. Lots of people already tried, some dictionaries don’t have enough elements to describe it. That’s probably why most people are confused about this matter.

According to what we have discussed so far, we can infer that literature:

1. is an art;
2. is composed by words, that is, its structure is textual;
3. has literariness as dominant element.

Art comes from the Latin word artem, which means work of art, practical skill, business, craft. Aristoteles was used to say that art is imitation of life. Bergson and Proust saw it as the exacerbation of atypical condition inherent in reality. We know, therefore, that it is a creation of any kind (movies, paintings, sculptures, music…) produced by human’s imagination and has to do with experience of life as it is an expression and interpretation of the world around us. The artist has skills, that is, his/her own aesthetic principles, which will help him/her to express the beauty of the creation in its totality. To achieve the aesthetic principles, the artist has to know his/her material of work, which can be colors (e.g. for paintings), words (e.g. for literature), images (e.g. for movies), sounds (e.g. for music) and much more so the potentialities of all these tools can be extracted and used in an attractive way so the art can be created. A piece of art has more than ordinary significance and intend to impact people’s emotions by a simple or complex combination of elements.

Literature is art made by words. The author who is creating it knows what can be done with them and resulted by them: rimes can bring musicality to a poem, metaphor can express implicit emotions… The result of the “stoning” of the word are the artist’s aesthetic principles, which will bring to the art a special touch. Let’s take this beautiful sonnet by Luís Vaz de Camões, one of the most important classic authors from Portugal, as an example:      

Love is a fire that burns unseen, 
a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,
an always discontent contentment,
a pain that rages without hurting,

a longing for nothing but to long,
a loneliness in the midst of people, 
a never feeling pleased when pleased, 
a passion that gains when lost in thought.

It’s being enslaved of your own free will;
it’s counting your defeat a victory;
it’s staying loyal to your killer. 

But if it’s so self-contradictory,
how can Love, when Love chooses,
bring human hearts into sympathy?¹

What is love? Everybody can try to explain it, but it won’t be an easy job. Camões is trying to do so in his sonnet and uses lots of metaphors to explain what has no exact explanation. Love burns like a fire, makes us suffer, but at the same time it can bring us joy.

Finally, we must say that the most important element of a literary work is its literariness. About that, Nöth says:   

From a pragmatic perspective, literariness is analyzed with reference to the author’s intention and the reader’s way of interpreting the text. […] Accordingly, the literary text is polyfunctional and permits reference to several extratextual contexts. […] A positive characterization of the pragmatics of literature is given by Segre: Literature “maintains its communicative potential also outside of its pragmatic context: in the literary text an introjection of contextual referents occurs, so that the reader can derive these from the text itself” (1979b:35) (Nöth, 1990, p. 350).

Literariness is, then, the structure of meanings, a special language which gives the status of polysemy to literature. We already discussed some of these elements (rime, figure of languages…) and what they can mean in the context of the literary work. In other words, anybody can write a story, but not everybody will get the reader’s attention, that would depend on how we tell the story. If we use literariness, then we have more than a simple story: we have art.

It is important to have in mind that the status of literature can change with the pass of the time, as Nöth points out:

Literature is not a static category. The predicate of literariness characterizes aesthetic evaluation, and such evaluations may change with cultures and times. Originally nonliterary (e.g., religious) texts have after centuries been evaluated as literary, and originally literary texts may lose their literariness with time (Lotman 1970: 287-88). Especially radical changes of literary evaluation have been demonstrated by the modern literary avant-garde, where among other texts, cooking recipes have been raised to the status of literariness (cf. Nöth 1977a; 1978a) […] (p. 353).

We learned that it is not easy to explain the meaning of literature. We do know for sure that it is one of the most important things for most of people. Sutherland has wise words about it:

For most thoughtful people, literature will play a big part in their lives. We learn a lot of things at home, at school, from friends, and from the mouths of people wiser and cleverer than ourselves. But many of the most valuable things we know come from the literature we have read. If we read well, we find ourselves in a conversational relationship with the most creative minds of our own time and of the past. Time spent reading literature is always time well spent. Let no one tell you otherwise (Sutherland, 2013, p. 2).

Let’s go back to those two questions from the beginning: who are the people who think some books, plays, poems etc. are important and good? And why do they think they are important and good? Well, if we are talking generally, anybody can say they are important and good – as we said before, that is a fact of opinion. However, when we talk about literature, we all can also do so as long as we have some literary theories to support our opinions, like semiotics, as we must have a reason to say that specific work is, in fact, literature. We must find the literariness, and literary theories will help us find it.

We hope this little “chat” about the art of word was for you helpful and clear. Our next post will discuss elements of literature, as well as its origins, periods, aesthetic principles and so on. Before that, could you tell us a lesson for life you learn through literature?   

Notes:

1. translation from http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/8436/auto/Luis-Vaz-de-Camoes/Love-is-a-fire-that-burns-unseen-.-.-

Bibliography:

Nöth, Winfried. (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis.

Quirk, Lord. (2006). Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2006). Pearson Longman: England.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1988). What is Literature? And Other Essays. Harvard University Press.

Sutherland, John. (2013). A Little History About Literature. Yale University Press.