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The Phenomenon Of Literature: Prolegomena To A Literary History

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The Phenomenon Of Literature: Prolegomena To A Literary History

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Content This dlH utitlon has basn microfilmed sxactly as racalvsd g 6— 878 8 GRAY, Jam es M ich ael, 1937— THE PHENOMENON O F LITERATURE: PROLEGOMENA TO A LITERARY HISTORY. U n iv ersity o f Southern C aliforn ia, P h .D ., 1966 Language and L itera tu re, g en era l University Microfilms. Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan ' Copyright by James Michael Gray 1966 THE PHENOMENON OF LITERATURE PROLEGOMENA TO A LITERARY HISTORY by James Michael Gray A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) January 1966 UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCH O O L U NIVERSITY PARK LO S ANGELES. C A L IFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ......... J.ames..Mi9.h35.l..C.ir.ay........... under the direction of hi*.....Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y Date January.,..!. .9.66. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE 'hsirm sn Do you want a fox story or the other kind? — Araucanian storyteller ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY ............... 1 II. THE NATURE OF LITERATURE..................... 38 III. THE FUNCTION OF LITERATURE................... 97 IV. THE MODE OF EXISTENCE OF A LITERARY WORK . . . 129 V. A LITERARY TAXONOMY.......................... 178 VI. THE CRITERIA OF LITERARY IDENTIFICATION . . . 215 APPENDIX: PRIMARY SOURCES ............................ 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY: SECONDARY SOURCES CITED ............... 270 CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY Presuppositions With the publication of I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism in 1925 modern literary theory was born; for the first time the attempt was made to analyze in syste matic detai^L the basic problems confronting the would-be discipline of literary studies. And for all the inadequa cies of Richards' analysis, his critical influence remains the dominant one among those interested in establishing a unified field of study. What, to his great credit, he accomplished was the herculean task of awakening many stu dents of literature to the realities of systematic analysis and exposing some of the inadequate and inconsistent notions which had passed for the basic premises of literary criti cism. What he did not accomplish, in this or any of his later works, was his avowed purpose of offering a more ade quate conception of literature and literary criticism. He saw clearly, especially in his early work, that literary study must be systematic and must be in accord with the facts and premises of scientific knowledge. What sort of systematic conception was most adequate to literature, he 1 came increasingly to see, was still largely a mystery. T. C. Pollock's The Nature of Literature and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature are in many respects more sophisticated examinations of the problem, but they are equally unsuccessful in supplying the rigorous conceptual framework which, it becomes increasingly apparent, is neces sary before literary studies can come of age. Two recent works which are conspicuous for their clear sighted critique of the field are Northrop Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism and Wellek's Con cepts of Criticism. Like Richards, Frye and Wellek are strongly convinced of the value of literary studies, but both contend that we still do not have a clear and consis tent knowledge of what literature is and therefore no agreed upon way or ways to study it. They make the obvious, but still often ignored, point that no systematic, or scien tific, or coherent field of study can exist without an ade quate theory or conceptual framework which defines the sub ject of study and explains the method of studying it. Both Frye and Wellek note that in the absence of a clearly de fined field of distinctly literary studies, literature is in increasing danger of being studied only as a psychological, sociological, linguistic, or economic phenomenon. And they both echo the appeal made earlier in Theory of Literature that "Literary theory, an organon of methods, is the great need of literary scholarship today. The existence of a subject matter alone, without a cor responding method of study, does not constitute a discipline. Zoology is not simply the study of animals but the use of precise, systematic, scientific method upon a clearly de fined class of things or realm of experience. Unless we label every study as scientific, we cannot say that every study of animals is zoology. The pagan priest may have been a student of magic, but his dissection of animals and diag nosing of entrails was not scientific and is not called zoology. Not even responsible empirical study, however, is enough in itself to constitute a scientific discipline in the strictest sense. Physics conceived as the recording and classifying of physical phenomena, biology as the cata loguing of species, were necessary precursors of more ambi tious efforts to structure experience, but they remained necessarily limited because they attempted to classify with out a precise conception of what was being classified and with no systematic and consistent principles of taxonomy. Newton in physics and Darwin and Mendel in biology gave coherence to previously unassimilated data and provided new vantage ground from which to discover previously inconceiv able facts. "It occurs to me," Frye says, that literary criticism is now in such a state of naive induction as we find in a primitive science. Its materi als, the masterpieces of literature, are not yet regarded ^2nd ed. (New York, 1956), p. 7. as phenomena to be explained in terms of a conceptual framework which criticism alone possesses. They are still regarded as somehow constituting the framework or structure of criticism as well.^ This is the thesis of Frye's introduction and one of the central presuppositions of this dissertation. He sug gests that literary research is floundering in a slough of "background" studies which somehow fail to organize the foreground as well. "As soon as it comes to this point, scholarship seems to be dammed by some kind of barrier and washes back into further research projects" {p. 8). The so lution, indeed the only hope, for this impasse in literary studies is a badly needed "coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole" (p. 16). For Frye, this new conception of literature must somehow involve the concept of myth; whether or not we are prepared to accept this tentative solution, however, his analysis of the problem seems the best one to date. He is not, of course, seeking to emulate a narrowly conceived "scientific method" or to borrow from the physical sciences a watered-down version of mathematical analysis and con trolled experimentation. He is calling only for a clearly defined subject matter and a consistent method of literary classification and analysis to replace the current Tower o Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 15-16, 5 of Babel.^ Students of literature, through their inability or refusal to define their study, seem dangerously close to having their discipline go the way of astrology and alchemy. Perhaps no one would be the worse for this. Literature itself could not be legislated out of existence, but liter ary critics and scholars might be. I agree with Frye and Wellek, however, in thinking that the loss would be greater than this. A successful theory or conceptual framework is not arbitrarily imposed upon something for the sake of study. It grows out of a knowledge and understanding of the nature and function of similar phenomena which are not arbitrarily selected but are grouped together because of common characteristics or some essential similarity. The first postulate of the discipline of literature must be, as Frye points out, "the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence" (p. 16). If there is such a thing as essential literariness which is common to all things called literature and if there is a particular liter ary function the fulfillment of which constitutes literary value, then we have failed to understand a part, and perhaps ■*This epithet is a recurring one in modern criticism, especially in Wellek's Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963). Cf. pp. ix, 2, 54. Elder Olson, on the other hand, who as a Neo-Aristotelian denies a basic unity in literature and literary studies, finds no cause for alarm in applying the same epithet to modern criticism. Cf. "An Outline of Poetic Theory," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago, 1952), p. 546. an important part, of human experience when we divide liter ature up among the other and non-literary studies. It is clear to most students of literature that the sum of the psychological, sociological, linguistic, and economic as pects of a work of literature will not tell us what sort of thing the work is, how it functions, and what its value is. But it is also clear "that the absence of systematic criti cism has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring 4 disciplines have moved in." Indeed, it is proper that they should do so. The psychological, the sociological, the lin guistic, the economic conceptions of literature may be erroneous, but the literary scholar needs to be reminded of Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to establishing a unified discipline of literary studies is not the enigmatic nature of literature but its widely acknowledged value. Litera ture, or at least some works of literature, has been recog nized as playing a central role in education. What this role is exactly is still a matter of debate, but that it is, or should be, valuable few have denied. Yet if most stu dents of literature have been content to base their study on moral and educational value, on the value of cultural tradi- 4 Frye, p. 12. 5 Novum Orcranum, Vol. 8 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (New York, 1869), p. 210. 7 tion, or on aesthetic appreciation, non-literary scholars have not. If their contributions have seemed to the liter ary man to have little relevance to literature, the non- literary scholar has usually at least recognized that "value-judgements are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value- g judgements." For the literary scholar— qua scholar, at least— a work of literature is not an end in itself to be appreciated, advocated, justified, defended, but the object of dispassionate analysis aimed only at understanding and unifying an aspect of experience through the acquisition of knowledge about that experience. It is in this kind of study, and not in the use of mathematics and controlled experimentation that the student of literature, the his torian, and the philosopher are "scientists." If, as J. Bronowski persuasively argues, "Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature— 7 or more exactly, in the variety of our experience," rather than a system of laws and predictions, then literary study must be a science or it is no discipline at all. The perennial debate over the nature of science, car ried on primarily by non-scientists and would-be scientists, 6Frye, p. 20. Cf. Moody E. Prior, Science and the Humanities (Evanston, 111., 1962), for the view that the humanities are differentiated from the sciences by their "concern with" values and evaluating. n Science and Human Values (New York, 1956), p. 27. is of little interest to those students who have a clear and agreed upon conception of their own work and the proven ability to derive verifiable results from their study. If and when students of literature have such a conception of their field and have accumulated an organized body of veri fiable information about their subject, then it will be of little concern to them whether they are scientists in the narrow sense, in the broad sense, or in no sense at all. The most common conception of science has been any dis passionate investigation which yields verifiable knowledge that can be subsumed under a series of precise, mathemati cally formulated laws or hypotheses. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, zoology, are the "true" sciences then, and the behavioral and social "sciences" (including history and archeology) are at best quasi-sciences. A few students of the term, particularly logicians and philosophers of science, would drastically reduce science to that dispas sionate investigation which yields verifiable knowledge that can be subsumed under a series of precise, mathematically formulated laws and is true for all times and every place. And physics, then, is the only science; or more accurately, everything which is universally true is so because it can be Q reduced to a physical (or atomistic) formulation. A third g For a thorough-going defense of this position cf. J. J. C. Smart's Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963) and the favorable review by W. V. Quine in The New York Review of Books, July 9, 1964, p. 4. conception, however, is possible and is finding growing sup port from, interestingly enough, physicists and historians of physics. Science, they say, agreeing with Bronowski, is any dispassionate investigation which unifies experience. not iust by reducing it to laws, but also simply bv yielding systematic verifiable knowledge. Not only physical and bio logical studies, but behavioral and cultural studies as well are sciences. Not what is studied but how it is studied is 9 the criterion. If this third and most inclusive conception of science is accepted, then it is safe to say that literary scholar ship may aspire to the condition of science. What prevents such an aspiration from being completely realized is that literary study is, characteristically, {1) not dispassionate and (2) not the study of any agreed upon phenomenon. We have touched on these two points already, and we will return to them repeatedly since they are the basic problems to be solved before literary study can come of age, but before pursuing them further, we need to note an important implica tion of treating literature as the object of scientific or systematic study: It implies that at no point is there any direct learning of literature itself. . . . Art, like nature, has to be 9 For provocative analyses of science as study rather than science as a system of mathematically formulated laws and facts cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962); and Stephen Toulmin Foresight and Understanding: An Inquiry into the Aims of Science (Bloomington, 1961). 10 distinguished from the systematic study of it, . . . ure is not a subject of study, but an object of 0 9 L U U y * A work may be an "interpretation" of experience, but it is not a verifiable statement about experience; it is like life, but it is not about life. Insofar as literature is the data of knowledge it cannot, in the strictest sense, be called knowledge or a field of study. The literary scholar does not study or interpret already formulated knowledge, as does the student reading a textbook. Rather, he studies works of literature which he hopes will be the data of future knowledge. Literary works are not text books or studies nor do they constitute anything comparable to the "literature" of, for instance, biology (i.e. the writings of Linnaeus, Darwin, Mendel, etc.). Writing literature is not at all the same sort of thing as writing about literature, or about any other aspect of experience, because a work of literature is never an objective verifiable account of some thing. A study cannot be the object of another study if their subjects are the same. When we read Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity we are not studying about the book; we are studying what the book is about, that is, about the laws of physical behavior. But on the other hand, when we read Aristotle's Physics we are studying the book and not, despite what Aristotle might have thought, about the laws of physical behavior. Physics is data for the historian of 10 Frye, p. 11. 11 science, but The Meaning of Relativity is not data for con temporary scientists— it is, contemporary science. If works of literature are the objects of literary study, then we are not studying what these works may be "about." Insofar as we are interested in studying some kind of "about," then that, and not literature, is the subject of our investigation. Literary scholarship cannot have its cake and eat it too. It cannot justify its concern with literature by say ing literature is informative, because if non-literary information is what we want, there are far more accurate, verifiable, accounts than any works of literature. There can be no reason for studying something secondhand if it can be studied firsthand. The justification for studying liter ature is the desire to learn about literature— about litera ture as a particular kind of human phenomenon, and not about any of the thousand and one things which can form the sub ject of literature. Works of literature, like Aristotle's Physics,—are not knowledge but data or objects of study. We may say that literature is part of the "wisdom" of the ages, but this only acknowledges that whatever wisdom may be, it is not verifiable, scientific knowledge. The appeal and value of literature is one thing, but the reason for making literature the subject of formal study is quite another. 12 The Subject of Literary Study If this analysis of the problem of literary study is at all correct, it is not too difficult to see where the liter- . ary scholar must begin if he is to bring at least tentative order to the Tower. Again Frye outlines the course pre cisely; but, ironically enough, his own attempts are not in line with his analysis of what the solution must be like. One proof that a systematic comprehension of a subject actually exists is the ability to write an elementary textbook expounding its fundamental principles. It would be interesting to see what such a book on criticism would contain. It would not [i.e. could not] start with a clear answer to the first question of all: "What is literature?" We have no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary from one that is not, and no idea what to do with the vast penumbra of books that may be claimed for literature because they are written with "style," or are useful as "background," or have simply got into a university course of "great books." (pp. 12-13) This is where we have to begin, with an answer to the question "What is literature?" And here is where I must part company with Frye. The essays in Anatomy of Criticism and those in his latest book^ are attempts, not to define literature by isolating a characteristic common to all works of literature and absent from all other things, but to relate mythology to literature. This may or may not prove illuminating, but it is not the kind of study that can pro vide a definition, because it is a kind of study which Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, 1964). For a penetrating critique see G. S. Fraser's review, "Mythmanship," The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1964. 13 seeks, legitimately enough, to expand its subject, not to contract it. But "Literature and the — " studies are always to be suspected because almost inevitably they end up by 12 subsuming literature as the price for "illuminating" it. Illumination is not definition, and Frye may have to stand convicted by his own standards: To subordinate criticism to an externally derived criti cal attitude is to exaggerate the values in literature that can be related to the external source, whatever it is. It is all too easy to impose on literature an extra- literary schematism, a sort of religio-political color- filter, which makes some poets leap into prominence and others show up as dark and faulty. All that the disin terested critic can do with such a color-filter is to murmur politely that it shows things in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to criticism. (p. 7) When starting to construct a definition of literature, there is little profit in an extended debate about where to begin. Only after a working definition has been formulated can we assess whether too much or too little has been in cluded. I begin, naturally enough, with my knowledge of things which we call literature, primarily English and American, some European works (mostly in translation) and some non-Western works (all in translation). I have read studies and reports of oral and folk literatures and have found that everyone agrees that, whatever it is, literature exists in all societies which we know of. These things which are called literature, for whatever reasons, are the 12 Cf. for instance Simon 0. Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious (New York, 1957) and Wayne Shumaker's Literature and the Irrational (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960). 14 starting point for my analysis. Except for those who would make literature only good literature (a rather large excep tion, however), generations of writers, audiences, and scholars have concerned themselves with it under a variety of names and more often than not have agreed on their sub ject without the aid of precise definition. In this disser tation I hope to show that this heretofore implicit tradi tion is well enough founded to yield an explicit definition. I want to demonstrate that the things we call literature— from Mother Goose to Shakespeare, from True Confession stories to War and Peace— do indeed constitute a unique and definable class. It is a class by virtue of a character istic nature and function which all the works possess and which no thing which is not literature possesses. In short, I want to define literature as literature and not as something else, for it is my contention that this is possible without recourse to the latest extra-literary facts, theories, or insights. A definition of literature has of course waited on the accumulation of sufficient scholarly data— on non-didactic analyses and comparisons of individual works from different cultures. But primarily it has waited on the realization that literature, like the sub ject of any responsible discipline, must be carefully iden tified before it can be systematically studied. Hopefully, it can be demonstrated that a definition of literature arises naturally out of previous literary study and out of 15 an inductive analysis of works called literature. A defini tion should be able to account for previous misconceptions by showing that part has been mistaken for whole or that whole has been conceived of in terms of incompatible parts. Everything I shall say, and even the dozen or so key terms I shall use, has a long history. If this is a radical defini tion of literature, it is so only because it has not been articulated before in exactly these terms and in this detail. If this definition proves to be inadequate, it should at least have the virtue of a rigorously executed experiment with negative results. A later attempt at defi nition should find the results of any consistently worked out definition valuable, if only as a warning. A definition, however, is only half the story. It is, so to speak, a description of the outside of a phenomenon but not of the inside. An analysis of how works and kinds of works differ is essential to understanding how they are ultimately the same sort of thing. Theoretically the stu dent of literature could either define the nature of his subject and then proceed to define the various subdivisions of it, or he could observe and document the various kinds of literature and then analyze them for a common character istic in order to demonstrate their essential similarity. In practice, however, the one approach is impossible without the other, and however it is that one thinks he is proceed ing, he will end up with the same result— a definition 16 completely integrated with a principle of literary taxonomy. If practically all those works called literature can indeed be grouped together in terms of a common characteristic, then it should be possible, and indeed it will be a neces sary test, to distinguish, in terms of variations on this characteristic, different varieties of literature. The literary scholar needs not only to distinguish between literature and non-literature but also to recognize that a variety of different species constitute the class litera ture. I have chosen in this dissertation to develop the definition first and then to test it by using it as the basis for developing a system of literary classification, but the procedure could easily have been reversed. Species imply a genus, and a genus is conceivable only in terms of various species. The Nature of Definition To be of maximum value, a definition must point to a characteristic, a condition, or a relationship which all the members of the class possess and which nothing which is not a member of the class possesses. It must state, in the case of literature, for instance, that all works of litera ture are x or have x, and that nothing else is x or has x. Often, of course, we are not dealing with a single isolable feature but at best only with a series of features which pattern in a characteristic way. Thus, any one feature may be absent in a given case, but the pattern is still identi- 17 fiable. Wittgenstein, spoke of these relationships as family 13 resemblances.- Rarely do we find m practice any particu lar thing which can be placed in one and only one class, and the looseness of our everyday vocabulary reflects this. But in scientific and logical classification the attempt, at least, is made to reduce a shifting collection of family traits and vague and overlapping categories to precise con cepts based on specific characteristics. The ideal class is like "molecule," which is by definition "the smallest por tion of an element or compound which retains its chemical identity," rather than like "negro," where the presence of some of a variety of traits in varying degrees is all the anthropologist has for a definition. Of course, it does no good to have a class "by definition" which does not also fit the facts, but if it is possible to have one that does both with a minimum of arbitrary excluding, this has important advantages. Problems of classification, then, do not present them-- selves as the large question of whether or not the thing at hand is or is not a member of the class, but as the more manageable question of whether or not the defining feature or features is present in the thing. Reducing the problem ^For the best statement of this position cf. J. R. Brambrough's "Universals and Family Resemblances," Proceed ings of the Aristotelian Society, LXI (1960-61), 207-222, rather than Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. See also Chapter II, "Literature and 'Literary Elements,'" pp. 85-96. r' 18 of definition to a search for the common characteristic is not a six-of-one-and-half-dozen-of-the-other device, but a very useful simplification of the problem of classification and abstraction, as the biological sciences, for instance, have demonstrated. If, in the case of literature, the dis tinguishing feature is recognized in a particular work before the work is subjected to classification, this will of necessity place the work in the class "literature." When there is no agreed-upon definition, each person has a slightly different understanding of the class, and he will tend to view a particular thing from the beginning in terms of the kind of thing he conceives it to be. A dispute then over whether some work is or is not literature could not be resolved unless one of the disputants simply conceded that his opponent's view was "right," or at least more ade quate than his own, or unless the two agreed that the work in question was simply relative to individual taste and not subject to any objective classification. What often happens is that the dispute is "resolved" by declaring that it never really existed and that both views are somehow true. On the other hand, if these two critics could agree on a definition of literature based on some feature present in every work, the dispute would be simplified to the extent that the work itself, before being seen as a member of a class, would furnish the necessary evidence to decide the question. If the dispute continued, it would be because the critics could 19 not agree that a specific aspect of the particular work was in fact the feature which both had agreed was the character istic of literature. The more limited the area of dispute, the more likely is a question to yield to solution. Two difficulties confront the critic who would define literature in terms of a characteristic common to all works which are usually designated works of literature. First, he must be as inductive in his approach as possible; that is, he must purge himself of preconceptions and look, one by one, at the individual works— not, however, for the defining feature or essence of a particular work but only for the feature or features which are present in each one, or in a substantial majority, of the works he examines. Obviously the more works he examines, the fewer common features he will be able to retain. The critic who begins his examina tion with "metaphysical" poetry of the seventeenth century might decide that a certain unique "kind" or "style" of lan guage constituted the common feature of all works called literature. But when he broadened his inductive examination to include Victorian novels he would have to concede, I think, that as to language all the poems and novels have in common is that they are linguistic. The second difficulty confronting the critic arises when, and if, he succeeds in isolating a common feature upon which to base a definition of the class. He must then test his still hypothetical definition against the function or functions usually ascribed to works of literature and against the responses or literary experience claimed by readers of literature. In this there are an infinite number of pitfalls, and probably there will never be the precision in testing the definition that one hopes there will be in constructing it. The definition based on a common charac teristic is not likely to recommend itself immediately to everyone who knows and enjoys works of literature. But the definition cannot ignore or invalidate a major source of literary appeal. If it does, the definition is more likely than the appeal to be suspect. For example, if in defining literature a critic relegated many of the most valued works to a category labeled "didactic" and then proceeded to ignore didactic literature as not really literature at all, his definition would be highly suspect, unless he could account for the false appeal which confuses the two differ ent classes. If the critic chooses to deny the name litera ture to much that tradition has so regarded, rather than to modify his definition, we may well suspect the adequacy, though not the truth, of his results. Truth and falsity are not relevant criteria for evalu ating a system of classification. Two contemporary zoologi cal textbooks differ in organizing the animal kingdom, but one of them is not necessarily false. Aristotle's system of biological classification has not been abandoned because it is false nor Linnaeus's adopted because it is true. The world is not populated with men and reptiles and tsetse flies and dandelions but with individual living organisms— any one of which resembles to a greater or less degree any other. Confronted with a multitude of creatures, none of which are identical but all of which are similar, the scien tist tries to make sense out of them by classification. The history of science is marked by an increasing adequacy and accuracy in classifying phenomena. A statement about a phenomenon can be judged true or false in relation to a postulated conception of experience, but the conception itself can be judged only more or less adequate as an expla nation which includes the greatest amount of experience with the greatest—degree of coherence, consistency, and predicta bility. There is no absolute in empirical verification and even less in constructing the conceptual framework within which verification must take place. The scientist does not classify in order to find out what the world really onto- 14 logically is. He does so in order to explain the simi larities and dissimilarities which are intuitively apparent even without classification, to organize experience for further study, and, hopefully, to reveal heretofore un noticed similarities and differences. Classification is not 14 See Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philos ophy. Science and History Since Hegel (New Haven, 1950), trans. William H. Woglon and Charles W. Hendel, for an account of the battle in nineteenth century physics over the o_ntological nature of matter and space. 22 the end of study but the beginning— certainly it must be the starting point for any organized science or field of scholarship. The student of literature should be able to profit from the experience of the cultural anthropologists, who, after a century of field work (everyone agreed that various cultures existed) had become almost totally immersed in their own ill-defined data. Only in the last decade, following the lead of Kroeber, have anthropologists begun to grapple 15 systematically with a definition of the subject itself. In similar fashion, literary scholars have been so immersed in their study that few of them have discussed the need for and the problems of defining literature. Critics heretofore have either stopped short of propounding a definition, like Wellek and Warren or Northrop Frye; or they have pursued a theory as far as they could and, like W. K. Wimsatt, been content with a metaphor, or like Murray Krieger, ended in a paradox. But for the most part, students of literature have not so much failed to define their subject as they have not attempted it. To be sure, no class of artificially grouped phenomena, be it of animals or literature, is likely to arrange itself 15 Cf. Alfred L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago, 1952), with Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), and Philip Bagby, Culture and Historyt Prolegomena to the Com parative Study of Civilizations (Berkeley, 1958). 23 faultlessly without a few mavericks. The existence of viruses and the duck-billed platypus, however, does not invalidate present biological classification— we simply label them exceptions or borderline cases. However, what precisely it is that makes something an exception and what traits are on which side of- the border can be clearly docu mented. No scientific classification, from the periodic table to sociological stratification, is without conspicuous misfits, but only when a system becomes top-heavy with exceptions or fails to account for important phenomena, do we discard it as inadequate. And as a rule, our standard of adequacy is lower for social phenomena, like literature, than for physical and non-human phenomena. Nature, when left to itself, grinds off most rough edges, but when human will and emotion intervene, patterns are less regular, more difficult to observe and experiment with, and almost impos sible to view without preconceptions. But social phenomena, when we have amassed sufficient information about them, can still be classified, or defined, and the systems of classi fication judged as more or less successful. There are, however, two different activities which fall under the rubric of definition, and before beginning this study it is important to make clear what exactly is being attempted. One kind of defining is primarily lexical: it is the province of those, linguists in the broadest sense, who study words and their use. The second kind is scientific: it is basically a study and classification of space-time events rather than the analysis of linguistic usage. No implication is intended here that the linguist is not "scientific”; rather we are making the distinction between terminology which arises out of a primary interest in studying something and the study of terminology itself. The linguist analyzes usage, but as a linguistic scientist he is more interested in determining what a phoneme is. and in studying specific phonemes than in analyzing the usage of the word "phoneme.” The linguist defines words, and he does so by analyzing instances of their occurrence, describing their uses and abstracting from these uses a pattern or pat terns of usage. The non-linguistic scientist too begins by analyzing particulars— not particular instances of word use, however, but particular phenomena of other sorts. And in stead of abstracting patterns of usage, he abstracts, defines, delimits, constructs a class based on a common characteristic or family of characteristics. Only then does he reach for a label to distinguish his class, and then he often coins one from Latin or Greek rather than pick a word already in use and run the risk of having his usage of the word confused with similar, but different, popular usages. The scientist here j.s defining a class and applying a label rather than defining a word. Only in a few instances is the definition of a word the same thing as, and nothing more than, the definition of a class. The word "paramecium" is 25 such a word? "horse” is not. "Horse" has other uses than to denote or refer to a specific class of four-legged creatures, and even abridged dictionaries list more than a dozen mean ings for the word. On the other hand, all instances of "paramecium" refer to a well-defined genus of ciliate proto zoa and to nothing else. Those interested in the word "literature," its history and various uses, are referred to the work of Thomas 16 17 Pollock and R. Escarpit. What this study is concerned with is demonstrating that no matter what label has been used in other times and societies for the kind of thing which we have now come to call "literature," this thing constitutes a definable and scientifically studiable phe nomenon. Whatever disagreement or confusion may exist as to what exactly works of literature are, such works do exist, and it is an article of scientific faith, at least as old as Aristotle, that anything which exists can be scientifically studied? and what can be studied can, and indeed must be, defined. We are very quickly on dangerous ground if we, like the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians, constantly talk about a ^ The Nature of Literature: Its Relation to Science. Language, and Human Experience (Princeton, 1942), cf. esp. Chap. I and Appendix. 17 "La Definition du Terme 'Literature's Projet d'article pour un dictionnaire international des termes litteraires," in Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association ('s-Graven- hage, 1962). thing, or kind of thing, literature, and yet maintain that there is no consistency of usage or theory which does or can account for such things. We cannot use "literature" or "poetry" as the key word in any responsible discourse and at the same time deny that it is or can be defined. But these Chicago theorists are only the most obvious examples among literary scholars of those who want to have their cake and eat it too. It is impossible to talk consistently about something which is assumed to exist but which cannot be defined— either linguistically or scientifically. This dissertation is an attempt, not to analyze uses of the word "literature" but to analyze those works which everyone, or nearly so, acknowledges to be works of litera ture and to abstract from them a common characteristic. It attempts, as Aristotle advocated, to classify a phenomenon in terms of genus and species. And if successful, it will have accomplished what the Poetics, the one conspicuous attempt to distinguish and classify literary phenomena, did not. For all his discussion of the class of things to which poetry belongs, and of the different kinds of poetry, Aristotle never says what it is that characterizes all poetry and nothing else. He gives us the genus (imitation) and a variety of non-defining characteristics_and subspecies, but he does not define the species. If it is impossible to construct a definition, the Neo-Aristotelians will have been correct in their belief that there is no one thing litera 27 ture, but Aristotle will have been wrong in thinking that there is such a thing as literary or poetic art which can be the subject of systematic study and classification. Knowing what literature is qua literature is a prerequisite for all organized literary scholarship, from history to criticism; and the more determined we are to pursue such scholarship, the more determined we must be to identify and delimit our subject. If we cannot agree on what we are chronicling and criticizing, we must, in good conscience, reconceive the whole of literary studies as a subject of instruction and as a field of scholarship. Art or History Before proceeding with a study which purports to define "literature qua literature," perhaps a clarification of-this shopworn p h r a s e is in order. What is not meant is litera ture qua art, literature qua aesthetic function or quality, literature qua beauty. What I want to do is to define literature— the good, the bad, the indifferent. Only if the other seven or so arts can also be defined, and only if they do in fact share a basic characteristic, will it be possible for the aesthetician to work inductively, though on a higher level of abstraction, with works of the various arts and produce a definition or art. Attempting to define just one of the "arts," however, is far less ambitious, and for that reason a more promising place to begin. Unfortunately, most theoretical studies either confine themselves to kinds of 28 literature or embrace the whole field of art. Rarely do we find even a token attempt to define literature as a pre requisite to discussing its sub-species or as a prerequisite to outlining the larger field of art and the arts. On the one hand, it seems to be assumed that everyone knows what literature is, and, on the other hand, that it is impossible to define. Wellek and Warren recognized this problem fourteen years ago and called for these necessary formulations within the individual arts before either aesthetics or literary history could come of age: The task of art historians in the widest sense, including historians of literature and of.music, is to evolve a set of descriptive terms in each art-. Thus poetry today needs a new poetics, a technique of analysis which cannot be arrived at by a simple transfer or-adaptation of terms from the fine arts. (p. 124) Since the theories of the various arts are still so nebulous and subject to such great disagreement, and since there is even disagreement on what constitutes the various arts, it has been impossible for the aesthetician to work induc tively. The alternative approach is more deductive; it seeks to define some quality in works of art, which is then given the name "beauty" or "aesthetic quality." After this quality has been defined, works of art, and often essen tially non-artistic things (either natural or artificial), are judged in relation to this aesthetic standard and classified accordingly in a wide variety of categories: art/non-art, good art/bad art, beautiful/ugly or non- 29 beautiful, etc. But the point to notice with this second approach to aesthetic study is that evaluation always pre cedes classification. Such an approach can be very fruitful, as it is for instance in Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form. but it is usually inconsistent (deriving ought * s from is * s and is1s from ought's), and it never gains wide acceptance because few can agree on what is best and why. Unless we arbitrarily, and not very revealingly, define literature as literary art, literature and art are two different things. Art and literature are not coextensive unless we say that the characteristic common to all works of literature is also the characteristic common to all works of art or to all things called "beautiful.1 1 This is a frequent assumption but one which results in postulating a particular function or effect as the only common element— not a verifiable, objective feature within the work which functions in a par ticular way but simply a function or effect. This has proven inadequate because an effect when not accompanied by a verifiable element within the work yields hopeless rela tivity and disagreement. And a classification and defini tion is of limited value if it is not acceptable as a work able convention to others in the field. Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature, probably the most fruitful theoretical study we have, suffers from an almost synonymous use of the terms "literary" and "aes thetic." To cite just one example: "It seems, however. 30 best to consider as literature only works in which the 18 aesthetic function is dominant ..." Theory of Litera ture presupposes an aesthetic theory, but such a theory is never furnished, and, as the authors admit, cannot be fur nished until the various arts themselves are first described and defined. Describing and analyzing aspects of particular works of art is not the same as defining in terms of a com mon characteristic. Wellek and Warren have involved them selves in an implicit contradiction when they admit: "We cannot comprehend and analyze any work of art without refer ence to values. The very fact that I recognize a certain structure as a 'work of art' implies a judgment of value" (p. 144). This value is the peculiar aesthetic function which is never defined. But it is not just this lack of precision in terminology which is the root of their troubles but the resulting necessity of evaluating works aestheti cally before classifying them. This is not analyzing the work before classification but judging it in relation to some specified or unspecified aesthetic quality. It should be obvious that a theory which allows the criterion of eval uation to arise out of a study of the essential qualities of a thing will be more adequate than one which imposes the criterion on a work as a condition of studying it. With this premise Wellek and Warren are in complete agreement: 18Page 13. Cf. also Chaps. II, XIV, and XVIII. 31 The nature and the function of literature must, in any coherent discourse, be correlative. The use of poetry follows from its nature: every object or class of ob jects is most efficiently and rationally used for what it is, or is centrally. (p. 17) Unfortunately, their aesthetic approach prevents, even in theory, this kind of deduced standard, and they have mis taken the nature of their own system when they say: "This conception will thus include in it all kinds of fiction, even the worst novel, the worst poem, the worst drama. Classification as an art should be distinguished from evalu ation" (p. 15). Indeed, if the study and classification of literature cannot be distinguished from evaluation, there can be no discipline. But they cannot say that dominance of an aesthetic quality is the distinguishing feature of a work of literature, that the very act of labeling a work as art is a judgment of value, and then claim that their classifi cation of art and literature is distinct from and prior to 19 evaluation. In Concepts of Criticism Wellek continues to equate literary theory and aesthetics and speaks of the work of literature as an "aesthetic fact" and an "aesthetic entity" (pp. 330 and 360). He is right in admitting that we do not yet have a suitable aesthetic theory. But he is wrong, I 19 No more than Frye can claim that "value judgments are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value judgments,1 1 and then say that we need a conceptual framework to explain "the masterpieces of literature" (italics mine). See pp. 3-4 and 6 above. 32 think, in believing that there can be no adequate theory of literature until we do. The point of all this is to indicate what I do not mean by "literature qua literature." What X do mean is that I intend to confine my search for a common characteristic to the works which are traditionally called literature. I pro pose to begin by isolating a particular verifiable feature in these works and from this feature to postulate a charac teristic function of these works. If this can be done, then we have a definition of the class literature which should help explain the reputed values of literature and the liter ary experience. With this in hand, it should be simply a matter of deduction to sketch in some of the implications for literary study, though I disclaim any intention of con structing a full-scale literary theory. Such a theory, if it is to be of positive value, can exist only in the con text of literary history. And what we need now, far more than another theory of literature, is a consistently written literary history. One of the basic assumptions of this study is that it is misleading to speak of knowledge or facts on one hand and theories on the other. A fact is, a theory, and there is no knowledge that is not based on definite presuppositions, either implicit or explicit. There is only confusion ahead for the scholar-scientist who thinks he can record the existence of things in themselves without committing himself to certain conceptions about the world, his subject, human experience, and the possibilities and limitations of knowl edge. But the most prevalent error in "humanistic" studies is not that the scholar attempts to discover the facts of his subject without acknowledging presuppositions but that he is more interested in speculating_and evaluating than in making a systematic presentation of verifiable information. The value of constructing theories and programs for synthe sizing more and more "aspects" of man and his culture is marginal unless such theorizing is part and parcel of a sys tematic presentation of historical fact. Th$ data for humanistic study can only be what men did in fact do, whe ther this is conceived of as case histories of living indi viduals, pottery remains of lost cultures, works of litera ture. The discussion of ideas qua ideas is at best inter esting but not significant. What makes ideas significant is their being applied systematically to human history and the results judged for thoroughness, consistency, relevance, etc. An idea is tested for its significance when we attempt to conceive some aspect of experience in terms of it. A well-done history of ideas is significant when and because it demonstrates that such-and-such an idea did in fact exist, did have these uses, did undergo these changes— in short, that it is both possible and fruitful to conceive of a certain part of history in these terms. The proof that something has existed is the ability to write a consistent, 34 detailed, verifiable account of it— that is, to write a history. What then is the justification for this study, which is avowedly not a history of the idea of literature? Isn't it just another theory, another notion about how people might or ought to conceive of literature? No. It is a prole- 20 gomena. It proposes, as does Kant's Prolegomena. on which the title at least is modeled, to analyze the conditions necessary for a given subject to be conducted in a respon sible, productive, scientific manner. Like Kant's Prole gomena , this one aims (1) to establish the basic prerequi site of a discipline and (2) to demonstrate what, when this prerequisite is met, are the possibilities and limitations of such a study. But also like Kant's, this prolegomena is only an introduction and not the study itself. In the total project of writing a literary history there are four preliminary steps: (1) to establish the need for and the conditions of a definition, (2) to develop such a definition, (3) to organize individual works into a sys tematic taxonomy, and (4) to construct an hypothesis by which to explain the history of literary speculation so as to account for those works which have been called literature but which are not covered by the definition. The last point, however, presents a problem. To qualify as a complete and 20 To Any Future Metaphysics Which will be Able to Come Forth as Science. 35 thorough prolegomena, this study should include not simply an explanation for previous misconceptions of literature but a detailed account of the changing conceptions of literary theory and, correlated with it, an analysis of changing vincing, it must be placed in its historical context; it must be a kind of history of ideas project which would not only place my notions of literature in the perspective of a long and evolving tradition but also would interpret pre vious conceptions and fashions of literature in the light of such important historical developments as the rise of print ing, the decline of oral and musical literature, changes in pedagogy, etc. Such a history, however, is a project in its own right and must logically follow rather than precede what is attempted here. Only a clear conception of what litera ture is will make it possible to write a history of literary criticism and taste. One of the important lessons to be learned from Wellek's still unfinished history of criticism is the difficulty of forging a unified study of an undefined subject. What literature exists, whether or not a work is liter ature, when it was created and when read, what it is about and what its implications are, why it is or is not valuable, are historical or a posteriori questions and can only be answered in historical terms and within the context of a history. But what we agree to mean by. "literature" is an If the explanation is to be completely con- 36 a priori question and must be determined before history is possible and ultimately on grounds other than historical. Definitions, whether constructed for a specific purpose or based on usage, are not factual but heuristic considera tions. "Nature must be interrogated," as Kant so aptly phrased the code of the scholar and scientist. But the corollary to this maxim is that nature gives only answers; it does not provide the questions which will elicit these answers. The basic premise of this dissertation is that the crucial question for literary scholarship is "What is liter ature?" Whether or not this contention proves correct will depend on the answer which the question elicits,- on what further questions are then possible, and on the answers which can then be found to these questions. This dissertation then is the first half of a prole gomena to what I conceive to be the main task of literary study— literary history. The contention here has been that literature must be considered as an historical rather than an aesthetic phenomenon and that nothing short of the sys tematic preparation outlined above will make a successful history possible. To be sure, nothing less than a complete and systematic account of the literature of a specific time and place will substantiate the work of the first four steps, but the history can only be written when the four preliminary steps have been accomplished. These preliminary steps are the task of this dissertation and the reason why 37 it can be called only a prolegomena— though perhaps we ought to refer to it yet only as the prolegomena to a prolegomena since step four will be treated here without the projected historical substantiation. CHAPTER II THE NATURE OF LITERATURE Literature has often been considered to be a special kind of language, or at least distinguishable according to a special intensity of linguistic devices. However, no set of linguistic elements has been shown to yield a definitively literary complex which would furnish us with even a degree, much less a kind, of literary discourse. The difficulty can be solved, I think, not by attempting to distinguish between literature and other kinds or uses of language (and correspondingly then between different kinds of psychologi cal responses), but by distinguishing between kinds of statements. Language— considered not as la lanaue (the linguist's abstractions of words, phonemes, morphemes, and sentence patterns) but as la parole (speakers' and writers' unique and meaningful utterances)— yields most importantly not different kinds of linguistic elements or devices but different kinds of meaning. The distinguishing character istic of literature is not a linguistic or a psychological feature but a semantic one. The presence or absence of verse, figures of speech, emotional or subjective presentation, clarity, ambiguity, new ideas made familiar, old ideas presented afresh, "style," 38 is not crucial to this study because none of these factors is both present in things we call literature and absent from things we do not call literature. Some of these are, of course, important historical considerations. No history of literature could be written without treating, for instance, the changing fortunes of verse and prose. But for examining literature as a phenomenon, none of these features is of much use. Old German laws were rendered in verse to facili tate accurate preservation without the help of writing. Lucretius is only one of several philosopher-scientists who wrote in verse, and there is a Chinese tradition of natural science in verse which flourished in a cultural environment where poetry was the accepted mark of refinement and learned accomplishment. "Thirty days hath September" is an example of the innumerable public and private mnemonic devices in verse.^ And, of course, prose stories are undeniably liter ature. There are few extended instances of language which do not employ figures of speech, though there are works of literature from which they are absent. "Stopping by Woods, " "The Man He Killed," and "We are Seven" are just as much literature as the poetry of Donne and the novels of Joyce. As for "expressions of emotion," we have no trouble in *The only person I have known to claim that this is literature is the linguist Archibald A. Hill, who labels as literature every work which has proven to be "permanent." "A Program for the Definition of Literature," University of Texas Studies in English. XXXVII (1958), 52. deciding that "The Killers" is literature and that a letter to the lovelorn column is not— though the opposite is true of a business letter and "0 Western Wind." The poetry of Housman is crystal clear, that of Hopkins ambiguous; but then a good many freshman themes are also ambiguous and some political speeches are intentionally so. New ideas can be explained in only one way, that is in terms of familiar ones. On the other hand, the successful politician is a master of the ancient art of rejuvenating old ideas. As for "style," which, like "ether," has been applied to whatever is felt to exist but cannot be explained, no one has yet 2 been able to isolate or define it. The position of those who, like the Chicago critics, insist that kinds or species of literature are the limit of our abstracting, or like Croce, insist that it is meaningful to speak only of individual works, reflects this failure to find a distinguishing linguistic or psychological character istic. Elder Olson makes the point well for both parties: Now it is impossible to have a single art, science or discipline unless some homogeneity can be found in the subject matter; and criticism was thus faced with the impossible task of finding a common principle among things that have no common principles, and finding a single definition that should state the common nature of things that had no common nature.3 2 For a thorough analysis of the concept “ cf. Barbara B. Gray's unpublished doctoral dissertation An Inquiry into the Problem of Style: A Negative Experiment (Univ. of Southern California, 1964), esp. Chap. VIII, "Style as Language." 3 "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," in Critics and Criticism, p. 37. 41 Olson may be correct; certainly no one has yet demonstrated otherwise. If there is a common characteristic, however, it must surely include the fact that all works called litera ture are instances of language. If we can agree on nothing else but the fact that no literature is non-linguistic, then 4 we have a place to begin our quest. Every work of litera ture is a statement (that is, a linguistically meaningful instance of language, whether propositional or otherwise). What kind of statement it is, and how it differs from all other kinds of statements, is the subject of this chapter. How a literary statement is meaningful, or how it functions, will be treated in Chapter III. Statements about Events A referential proposition is a statement which refers to, or is about, a particular space-time event. A literary statement— that is a work of literature— is like a referen tial proposition in that it "has to do with" a specific event. How a statement "has to do with" an event without referring to it verifiably is the key to defining litera- 5 ture. In this chapter we will, first, delimit the 4 Olson's disapproval of linguistic definitions notwith standing. Cf. his "An Outline of Poetic Theory" (in Critics and Criticism) and my critique, "Aristotle's Poetics and Elder Olson," Comparative Literature. XV (Spring 1963), 164- 175. 5 By space-time event all that is meant is any occur rence or state of affairs which can be verifiably located in or bounded by a specific place and a specific time. The 42 different kinds of statements which are similar to literary statements and, second, demonstrate that there are very definite criteria for distinguishing a non-literary state- * ment from a work of literature— that is, from a statement of an event. A general proposition, though it may be verifiable, does not refer to a single space-time event and as such is outside the scope of this analysis of statements about events. "Water runs downhill." "Water runs uphill." "There are twelve inches in a foot." "There are twenty inches in a foot." "Mammals nurse their young." "Water boils at sea level at 100 degrees centigrade." "All planets move in circular orbits." "God is love." "Killing is evil." Some of these propositions are verifiable; some are true by definition, some are false; to some, the concepts truth and falsity are not strictly applicable. But none of them is referential; that is, none of them is about a spe cific space-time event. A statement about an event can be a single proposition or it can consist of many sentences taken collectively— a history, for instance— whose subject can be located in, bounded by, space and time. But not all extended statements existence of a tree, of a work of literature, of a person, of a group of persons, of smog in the atmosphere today, of Lincoln's address at Gettysburg a hundred years ago is a space-time event. What a man says is an event, but what he thinks, except insofar as it is reflected or embodied in his observable behavior, is not. 43 are referential in this way. A how-to-do-it book, a set of instructions, an argument, a detailed proof or logical demonstration, a discussion— none of these, is a statement about a space-time event. Statements about events, either specific propositions or extended statements, are like literature in that they "have to do. with" single acts, situations, events. Specific propositions can be divided into two kinds: those which claim to refer to an event and can be demonstrated to do so, and those which claim to be referential but which cannot be verified. "William Butler Yeats died in 1939." "Sacramento is the capital of California." "The Empire State Building is 1250 feet tall." These statements are referential be cause they claim the existence of a specific act, condition, or state of affairs, and this claim can be empirically veri fied. The second kind of specific proposition brings us closer to literature. It "has to do with" an event without being strictly referential because it is not verifiable. "William Butler Yeats died in 1950" purports to refer to a specific event but in fact does not. Not only can this statement not be verified, it can be proven false. "There is human life on a planet in the orbit of Sirius" claims the existence of a particular state of affairs now, but this claim is not subject to verification. The first we can term a false statement about an event, the second an unverifiable statement about an event. And literary statements, we will discover, are all either false or unverifiable. They are, however, never single propositions. We have already mentioned that a history, since it is about an event unified or delimited by space and time, is an extended, referential statement. Trevelyan's History of England. Gibbon1s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ernest Jones's biography of Freud are all, as a whole, and despite some omissions, inaccuracies, and biased interpretations, statements about events. Each claims to be referential; that is, it asserts the existence and specific characteristics of a space-time occurrence. The Roman Empire did exist and decay at the time specified by Gibbon and in the place and with the leaders and enemies he describes. The book, as a whole, is a description of what did actually occur, and there is a wide variety of evi dence aside from Gibbon's word attesting to this occurrence. The writer of such histories, or extended statements about events, can make his subject as large or as small as he chooses; he can make it the existence of a world empire, a man's life, or a moment's occurrence, as long as it has an existence in place and time. The only other condition is that there be substantial evidence for such an existence apart from his own statement about it. In short, it must be publicly verifiable. "Verify" is a crucial concept in both science and logic and one of the key terms in this definition. But there 45 continues to be an element of ambiguity in its usage, and we need to clarify our use of the term before employing it in a definition. "Verifiable" can mean (1) that something is capable of being verified or determined to be true, or (2) that something has in fact been verified. It can refer (3) to the statement or (4) to the existence of what the statement is about. In practice there is usually not a problem. "William Butler Yeats died in 1939" is (1) capable of being verified and (2) has in fact been verified as true; (3) the statement is verifiable because it (4) refers to a verifiable space-time event. However, if we say that "Water runs downhill" is verifiable, we cannot mean by it that the existence of some event is verifiable because no event is being referred to. Similarly, "There are exactly five million bricks in the Empire State Building" is veri fiable only in the sense that the statement is capable of being verified, not that it has in fact been proven true. When we say that a work of literature is a statement which "has to do with" an event but is not a statement about an event, we are-going to characterize such works as "unver- ifiable." But since many, if not most, works of literature do not meet even the loosest criteria for referential state ments, it is obviously impossible to mean that these state ments are unverifiable. What is meant is that in one way or another the meaning of every work of literature involves an awareness of an event which cannot be proven to exist. Such 46 a work is not, in the usual parlance of logic, an unveri- fiable statement. Rather, a work of literature is a state ment of an unverifiable event. Statements of Events A work of literature is never structured like a propo sition, that is, in the form of a single sentence which claims the existence of an objectively existing event. A poem may be just one sentence, as for instance Pound's imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro," but the sentence or sentence-length statement is not structured like a propo sition. It makes no predication— not even figuratively like a simile or metaphor. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. "These faces in the crowd are petals on a wet, black bough" is a metaphor but not a work of literature. Pound's poem, however, does not state a metaphor; it presents an event— a unique, a momentary, act of perception. At a specific instant these faces in the crowd are an apparition, that is, are to one person who is in the metro station, the sudden vision of petals on a wet, black bough. The use of the definite "the" rather than indefinite "a/an" and the absence of predication signal the specificity rather than generality of the statement which is Pound's poem. In addition, the preposition "in" and the noun-determiner "the" of the title serve to specify a particular place, rather than just any 47 railway station, as the scene— that is, to make an. appari tion. This poem is not the statement then of a generally appropriate metaphor for crowds in railway stations or a specifically appropriate metaphor for a particular crowd in a particular station. It is the presentation of a uniquely occurring reaction which constitutes a specific situation. A literary work does not predicate something; it creates g something. But as we shall see in Chapter III, it is only "poetically true" to say with MacLeish that "a poem should not mean but be." Admittedly, Pound's poem is so short and so cryptic “ that it is possible to make a convincing case for the event being more the construction of the reader than of the poem. Certainly a work could not demand more interpretation on the part of the reader and still .gain any agreement as to what precisely the event was. And if the interpretation of "In the Metro" which is presented here fails to elicit a sub stantial measure of agreement, then I have failed to demon strate that it is literature. But if it is literature, it is so because there is a created event, and it is difficult to see what that event could be if not the one outlined ^The Japanese haiku, as much as a Westerner can judge from translation, is an event and not a proposition. Furu-ike va kawazu tobi-komu mizu-no-oto Old-pond : frog jump-in water-sound Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku (New York, 1958), p. 19. 48 above. "In the Metro" was chosen as the first test case because it represents one of the most difficult kinds of works for the definition to deal with and because the analy sis of it demonstrates as succinctly as possible what sort of thing we are looking for under the rubric of "unveri- fiable event." In a statement about an event there is a corresponding space-time event which exists external to and independent of the statement. In a statement of, an event, however, the event has no demonstrable existence apart from the statement of it. The following is the opening lines of a literary statement: Dans une de ces planetes gui tournent autour de l'6toile nomm6e Sirius il y avait un jeune homme de beaucoup d'es- prit, que j'ai eu l'honneur de connaitre dans le dernier voyage qu'il fit sur notre petite fourmiliere? il s'ap- pelait Microm§gas. . . . Like our sample proposition about human life on a planet in the orbit of Sirius (p. 42), the beginning of this statement concerns an event, the existence of "un jeune homme" "dans une de ces planetes qui tournent autour de l'6toile nomm€e Sirius." And also like the sample proposition, it is un- verifiable according to the canon of inaccessibility. But here similarities end. To be sure, the quotation is just the beginning of a literary statement. A proposition is restricted to a single sentence, but a statement can, like Gibbon's History, consist of a series of related proposi tions. Both Gibbon and Voltaire are claiming to describe 49 the occurrence of unique events. Gibbon1s statement is about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from the ori gins of Christianity to the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in the fifteenth century. It can be judged ade quate or inadequate, complete or incomplete, biased or im partial, by reference to documents, artifacts, and other histories. It is a proven fact that the Roman Empire existed, that Christianity arose within it and survived its “host," that the names, dates, and places are, with few exceptions, accurately stated by Gibbon. Voltaire1s statement concerns the experience of a young man from outer-space on his visit to earth. The entire statement is unverifiable not only because we do not know whether or not there is an inhabited planet in the orbit of Sirius, but also because we have no way of knowing whether there is or ever was such a young man as Microm6gas either in heaven or on earth who experienced the adventures Micro- m£gas experienced and whom Voltaire himself became acquainted with when Microm^gas last visited "notre petite fourmiliere.“ A work of literature may contain some propositions about real events or refer to actual historical figures, as Microm6gas refers to "le docteur Swift" and Maupertuis' expedition. An historical novel like War and Peace contains many verifiable references to Napoleon and Czar Alexander, the Napoleonic Wars, and conditions in early nineteenth 50 century Russia, but the work as a whole is not about an event which can be verified. Rather it is a statement of the lives of several specific people who, it is claimed, lived at that time and had the emotions, feelings, motives, visions, conversations, private monologues, which are de picted. Even when the characters are verifiable historical figures, their lives as presented are by their very nature not verifiable. The extensive use of dialogue— verbatim accounts of conversations— is almost always a sure sign of unverifiability. This is especially true when no attempt is made to account for the recording of such dialogue. Boswell makes a convincing case for the basic accuracy of the con versations in The Life of Johnson, but the anonymous nar rator of War and Peace does nothing to verify the numerous conversations which Napoleon is quoted as having. There are several ways in which we can recognize that a particular work is not a statement about- an event. Most obviously, though rarely, we have a work which is full of names, dates, places, which we can check with official records and demonstrate to be false. The event in Ulysses is the activities of Mr. Leopold Bloom in Dublin on June 16, 1904. But, as a matter of record, no Leopold Bloom (born 1871, Jew, advertising solicitor, husband of opera singer Marion Tweedy) existed as claimed. Furthermore, his reputed residence, 7 Eccles Street, was actually vacant on that day. When essential names, dates, and places contradict available 51 evidence and no new evidence is offered in its place, we have no choice but to call the statement false, or at least, not in accord with the facts. It is important to recognize, however, that it is not the erroneous information in the work which renders it literature. It might, as we shall discuss in Chapter III, be false or erroneous history and not literature. Statements of events are false in the broad sense of not being true, but they are not false because they are demonstrably not true but because they cannot be proven to be true. Ulysses is in principle unverifiable because it is composed in great measure of that kind of thing which cannot be empirically known. The precise details, the very "words" of a man's thoughts, private monologues, "stream- of-consciousness" can be known, if at all, only by the man himself. A far more common kind of literary event is that which claims to be history but which fails to offer any precise information to aid verification. Moll Flanders appears to be documentary without in fact presenting any documentation, and the narrator at once declares that it is necessary to conceal her real identity with a pseudonym. When no cor roboration is offered, we assume that none exists. The in definiteness about names and details in Don Quixote and of those events which happened "once upon a time" in a "certain city" to a "rich merchant" or a "beautiful maiden" leaves us no choice but to label them unverifiable. 52 A statement may be accompanied by or contain incidental signals that it is not subject to verification: labels such as "novel," "play," "tale," differences between the name or sex of the author and that of the ostensible narrator (e.g. Daniel Defoe and Moll Flanders), reminders in the text that one is just reading a story (e.g. the famous "intrusions" of Trollope and Thackeray). Obvious fantasticality in a work will also indicate its unverifiability. Gulliver's Travels appears to be documentary, but Gulliver's "facts," like those in Paradise Lost and "The Invisible Man," resist in corporation into the established body of verifiable human * knowledge. It is not enough that we are furnished with maps and precise data about the lands and peoples and how Gulliver discovered them. We are asked, on the strength of one man's word, to accept a statement which would necessi tate rewriting our entire roster of scientific laws. Simi larly with works set in the future: Brave New World is not verifiable, if for no other reason than it has not yet- happened . Finally, there is a kind of statement which cannot, by the very nature of its being perpetually contemporary, be verified. Such a statement is either (1) like Cary's A Fearful Joy, a present-tense description of an event as it is occurring or (2) like "0 Western Wind," an utterance in the act of being uttered. We could verify a person's present-tense statement about an event that we are in the 53 presence of, but obviously we could not if the statement were written and later published and then read by someone who knows of the event only secondhand or after it has occurred. Even if a present-tense statement about an event is true when first made, it is not verifiable, as it stands, when the event to which it refers has passed into time. What would be verifiable is another statement which said that the first was true when originally stated. Different from this is a statement which does not necessarily refer to an event but only purports to be an utterance in the act of being uttered. Here verification is impossible if we have only the statement and not the act of utterance itself. This last point is complicated but important and must be analyzed in some detail before we can recognize that every literary work consists of an event. Before examining this question, however, we need to conclude our discussion of the ways to distinguish state ments of from statements about. We noted several ways for recognizing that a particular work is not a statement about. but little has been said of how we recognize that a state ment is^ literature. Specifically, is this conception of literature anything more than a negative one which is mean ingful only as the opposite of referential statements? Yes. A work of literature is, negatively, never an historical or a scientific account; a work of literature is, positively, an account which always contains, or presents, or is, the 54 happenings of the moment. An historical account can be, and usually is restricted to, generalizations about an event. That is, the unit of time for history is the century, the year, even the day. It is rarely less than this. But the unit of time for literature is, even when the event covers many years, the moment. The event of War and Peace covers several decades, but the reason why the work is literature and not false or unverifiable history is.that much of it is about what happened and happens moment by moment.. People in the act of speaking, dying, fighting, making love, are pre sented in moment by moment accounts. Statements about what Napoleon did in 1812, in 1815, at Moscow, at Waterloo, are— although accounts of specific space-time events— generaliza tions based on his actual moment by moment activities. They are not accounts of the moment, and therefore, regardless of their truth or falsity, they are not literature. An account of the moment may, of course, be verifiable and would there fore not be literature. But a statement which is not, or does not contain or present, an account of an event as it happened or. happens moment by moment is never literature. A statement of an event is a created event and as such must provide its own data or referent. A work of literature is never simply a generalization— not the summary of a cen tury nor the summary of an hour. And it is never the state ment of a single fact-— that is, it is never a proposition. A statement of an unverifiable event is a moment by moment account, even an account of a single moment (e.g. Pound's "Metro"), but to create or constitute an event more infor mation is needed than any single predication can supply. "In a Station of the Metro" may be a single sentence, but its meaning, if it is a work of literature, would require at least three propositions: (1) I am in a station of the metro. — (2) There are people lined up along the track. (3) For a moment they appear to me as petals on a wet, black bough. These three sentences together constitute a work of literature, and in so far as the meaning of Pound's state ment is the same, it too is a work of literature. We are now in a position to see why the use of direct discourse, while not an essential characteristic of litera ture, is so widely recognized as a "literary" feature, even when it occurs in works which are not as a whole literature (e.g. The Peloponnesian War). A statement may not be liter ature in itself, but it can become literature if a context is created in which someone is uttering it. This notion of direct discourse, that is, of acts of utterance or state ments in the act of being spoken, brings us back to the two basic kinds of events and to the central problem of this dissertation: How can literature be distinguished, on the one hand, from verifiable statements about events and, on the other, from unverifiable statements which do not consti tute or create any event at all? 56 Unmediated Events We will not be concerned with genres in this study, but a distinction between the two major kinds of literary event is necessary in order to comprehend the "eventness" of literature and to ascertain more clearly the event in any given work. Statements of events are either mediated or unmediated: either an account of specific people doing definite things at a certain time and place or a particular person's utterance as it is spoken at a certain time and place or in a specific context. Unmediated events occur in much so-called lyric poetry, in some short stories, and in a few novels. Here the event is the act of presenting or nar- ating or relating. It is not what the imaginary utterance is about but the act of uttering it. It may, like Lardner's "Haircut," include an imaginary action which the narrator is in the act of recounting; or it may, like "0 Western Wind," be only an imaginary utterance from which we must infer the existence of a speaker and the situation of which he is a part. There is, in any case, with this kind of event a particular person relating something (almost always to some one else)— an emotional experience, an occurrence involving himself or others, the immediate response to an object, a scene, an activity. The event which the work is a statement of is not the existence of a flower in a crannied wall but a particular person who is in the act of addressing the flower. 57 In an unmediated event there is no account of an event, rather, the statement is, the event— or, more precisely, from the existence of a statement we are able to infer a particu lar situation which includes someone in the act of making an utterance. In a work of literature which is the statement of an unmediated event, there is no word in the statement which is not part of the event. The entire statement is part of the event and the limits of the event in time are the beginning and end of the statement. With events which are mediated, the reader is told what happens, that is, the work is an account. even when it contains some dialogue. With unmediated events, however, there is no account of what happens; rather, we overhear it directly as it is happening. Accounts of events can be past, present, and even future, but acts of utterance are always present. They are mediated neither by narration nor by time nor by place. And, of course, the utterance is always that of a first-person par ticipant and never third-person or non-participant. Wimsatt's conception of the lyric has much to recommend it: "But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situ- 7 ation (no matter how universalized)." This conception is n The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954), p. 5. Cf. also Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism; A Short History (New York, 1962), pp. 672-678, for a more detailed discus sion and T. S. Eliot's "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry" for one of the earliest (1928) statements of this conception. 58 not, however, specific enough. What is it that will dis tinguish a dramatic response which is a passionate lyric poem from a dramatic response which is a fiery newspaper editorial on the subject of last night's brutal murder? What does Wimsatt mean by "dramatic"? Evidently, only that "we ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference" (p. 5). It is certainly true that equating the dramatic speaker and the author can never be more than an inference, but this may also be true of a newspaper editorial. Though unsigned, and perhaps not even written by the editor, we infer that, since he was responsible for the editorial being in his paper, these are his opinions and represent his response to a particular situationr But an editorial is not confused with literature. The editorial may be "dramatic" in the loose sense of being vivid or moving, but it is not a drama — an instance of a person or persons performing an action which is witnessed. It is a statement rather than an utter ance in the act of being uttered. The writer in the process of composing the editorial constitutes an event— a particu lar person at a particular time doing a particular thing— but is not a statement of an event. The act of composing anything is not the thing itself, and a statement which says that "Editor John Jones composed this editorial the day before it was printed" is either true or false— that is, a 59 proposition about an event. A statement of opinion, with or without reference to a particular situation, is not litera ture because there is no created event; the reader is not hearing an unverifiable act of utterance or the account of an unverifiable action. A drama is not merely a speech but a speech in the act of being uttered. "0 Western Wind" is not a statement about love or about a particular lover. It is part of an act of longing which includes someone addressing someone else on a particular occasion. 0 Western wind, when wilt thou blow, That the small rain down can rain? Christ, that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again! We do not know the name of the speaker, nor the age or sex, but we do know that the person is in love and that "his" love is away. The west wind is not blowing, and since the speaker wants it to, as a necessary condition for rain and seemingly for the return of the lover, he addresses a ques tion to it. Coupled with this question is a cry of longing which helps to clarify the intention of the question. To make sense out of the statement called "O Western Wind," we need to recognize the signs that it is a statement of an unverifiable event. The first three words, coupled with the "thou" in line one, reveal that someone or something is being addressed and very possibly by someone who is uttering a cry of passion. The expletive beginning the third line tends to confirm this, as does the lack of a verb in the second sentence. The nature of this address is a question, and the thing addressed is the personified west wind. The subject of the question seems initially to be the possibil ity of rain— a reasonable subject to ask the west wind once we grant the legitimacy of questioning it. at all. But the last two lines make it clear that the possibility of rain is strictly a secondary consideration to the possibility of the lover's return. The question is thus seen to be rhetorical. No one really expects an answer from the wind, and in this particular case what the speaker really wants to know, al though it is not what he is in fact asking, is when will the lover return. And ultimately, what the statement as a whole means is not the desire for an answer at all, which is the central meaning of most questions, but a feeling of longing for the lover and "his" presence in bed. This longing is so strong that it bursts forth as an exclamation ("0 . . . Christ ...!"). If we do not recognize that "0 Western Wind" is a statement of an event and that the event includes (although the poem as a statement strictly speaking does not) a speaker, a situation, and someone who is addressed, then we have failed to understand the meaning of the state ment— the single most adequate, most inclusive, most con sistent interpretation of it. The presence in many lyrics of the authorial "I" is a device which helps to establish the nature of the event; it 61 does not necessarily establish the work as autobiography or 8 as expressive of the author's emotions. It is not really a question of whether or not the work was in fact expressive but only that the work is no evidence in itself for estab lishing this. The student of biography will of necessity be much interested in the works of his subject, and if the sub ject is a lyric poet, then there might be a good deal of extra-literary evidence to indicate that some personal ex periences have been extensively used in his poetry. But, in any case, the event which is the poem is not the poet in the act of composition. It can only purport to be. All it g is is a statement he has offered to the world. Expressive behavior, that is, behavior which reveals For a detailed critique of literature as expression cf. Barbara B. Gray, An Inquiry into the Problem of Style, esp. Chap. Ill, "Style as Behavior." g "In May 1773 Goethe sent to Kestner, the bridegroom of Lotte Buff in Wetzlar, his great poem Per Wanderer with the words: 'In the allegory you will recognize Lotte and me and what I have felt a hundred thousand times about her.1 Con sequently, the poem was read primarily as a reflection of the Lotte-experience, as a 'lyrical' Werther without the tragic conflict, and seemed to be resolved in this interpre tation. Especially for the 'biographical' method everything seemed settled in the best possible way: the import of the thoughts and feelings, the reference of the figures to real prototypes, the origin from a concrete, biographical occa sion. The poem substantiated precisely the thesis of the stimulus of experience because of the biographical confes sion nature of the poetry. It turned out very surprisingly, however, that Goethe had already written the poem and read it aloud before he ever went to Wetzlar and got to know Lotte!" Translated from Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk (Berne, 7th ed., 1961), pp. 46-47. something about a person without stating it, requires an actor, an act, and a witness to whom it expresses something about the actor. The term "express" not only relates an expresser to a statement but also to a second party to whom the statement must be expressive of the expresser. Thus, no statement, literary or otherwise, can properly be said to be expressive unless an individual states it in the presence of another, unless, in short, there is a real rather than a purported act of utterance. A statement exists in and of itself and is not expressive unless it occurs in an act of utterance. If we read any statement divorced from such an act, that statement is not, strictly speaking, expressive. Of course it may refer directly to the author, but in that case the statement is not expressive of him but about him. In order to interpret as expressive a statement which is divorced from an act of utterance we have to postulate a speaker; that speaker must be the actual person who wrote the statement; and we have to know something about him and the situation— act of composition— in which he made the statement. That is, we would have to determine whom the statement was expressive of so that we could determine what it expressed. In addition, we would have to postulate our selves, the readers, as the individuals in whose presence the act became an expression. Yet, even if we found out everything we possibly could about the author, still we would never be able to actually verify what he was doing, 63 feeling, or thinking in the act of utterance, of composi tion. The only evidence we have that there ever was such an act is the work itself and that was only one third of such an act. The reader of the statement or even of the literary work cannot be considered the witness in whose presence the statement was made because he is not, quite literally (and that is what is crucial for a definition) in the presence of the act but only of a statement which purports to be an utterance. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address could be literature, but it is not. Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802" could have been part of a publicly verifiable act of utterance, but it was not. If Lincoln had been not a president but a poet musing alone on a silent morning in the newly created Civil War cemetery, he might have written "Composed at Gettysburg National Cemetery, Nov. 19, 1863." And this statement would have been an event: . . . our fathers . . . this continent . . . now we are engaged . . . we are met on a great battle field . . . we have come to dedicate . . . those who here gave their lives . . . etc. And it would have been a statement of an event because, no matter how expressive it might have been of the poet's emo tions, we would have had only his word for being where he was and uttering the poem in response to the cemetery. In short, the act of utterance would not be verifiable; we would have only a statement which purported to be an 64 utterance. Wordsworth's sonnet is exactly what Lincoln's verifiable act of utterance is not. The poem may have been composed on the bridge as claimed; it may have been an emo tion recollected in the tranquility of his study; it may have been simply a fictional convention for creating an event. There is no audience for this utterance as we have it, and no official records were made of the event. All we have is again one man's claim. If a man got up before an audience and presented a story, this would be literature. But he cannot get up before an audience and present a work of literature simply by opening his mouth and making an utterance. There is an act of utterance here, to be sure— a speaker, something spoken, a listener— but there is no unverifiable event unless the utterance happens to create one. If Lincoln had recited Wordsworth's poem, or if Wordsworth had gotten up and recited his own, these statements would have been liter ature— not because someone was in fact making an utterance, but because the utterance was in fact a statement of an event. An event as utterance is not an act of utterance complete with speaker, statement, and context, but only a statement which cannot be fully understood unless we imagine it to be in the act of being spoken. When a statement of an event is complete with the essentials for an act of utter ance, the event does not purport to be an utterance but is an account of an action. In this section on unmediated events we have discussed mainly that kind of literature which is in verse, which has no event other than a statement in the act of being uttered, and is usually referred to as "lyric." Lyric poetry, how ever, by no means exhausts the category. A statement of an' event which purports to be an utterance may also contain or be about an action and can be in prose as well as verse (e.g. Lardner's "Haircut"). Indeed, almost all prose utter ances do.contain an action, and some of these works, like Camus' short novel, The Fall, rather complicated ones. But before we can analyze such examples, we need to examine the nature of event as action. Mediated Events A literary work in which the event is the account of an action is often a statement in the third-person or omniscient mode of narration: for instance An American Tragedy, where the event is not an utterance but the social rise and fall of one Clyde Griffith. "Mr. Flood's Party," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and "Sir Patrick Spens" are also of this kind. It may be a first-person account, that is, be told by a character who either participated in the action he narrates (Huckleberry Finn) or who is retell ing a story he heard or read about (Conrad's "Amy Foster"). Sometimes the event is made up almost entirely of dialogue as is the typical Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. Some poetry, especially folk and literary ballads, consist entirely of dialogue— e.g. "Edward" and "Lord Randal." Mediated works may also, like The Waves, be written as "objective" stream- of-consciousness. Here the action "takes place" in the minds of various characters, but the work itself, the event, is not an utterance. Even if the action is confined en tirely to the mind of one character, as in Pilgrimage, it is probably more accurate to say that the work purports to be one person's actions rather than his psychical or subcon scious utterance, and that "stream-of-consciousness" is a narrative technique. The event in Pound's "Metro" is the occurrence of a person having a vision in the station, not the unvocalized uttering of a comparison. A consistent point of view does not then necessarily constitute an event. Robbe-Grillet's novels do not present a new kind of psychical event but rather employ a narrative technique which allows a more consistent, more thorough, and more intimate point of view. The very traditional event of a man's jealousy-ridden marriage is presented in Jealousy bv means of a rigorously circumscribed focus of attention which we infer to be the portagonist's. Specifically, the event is the activities during several days on a banana plantation involving Franck, "A," and her unnamed husband and including a day's trip to town by Franck and "A" and their overnight stay because of an alleged auto breakdown. This is narrated from the husband's point of view but not by him. Except for some dialogue, set in quotation marks, the story is in the present tense. Like Thomas Mann's "Disorder and Early Sor row" and Joyce Cary's A Fearful Jov, and perhaps more like them than some Robbe-Grillet enthusiasts have acknowledged, Jealousy is an account of an action as it occurs. And also like them, Jealousy is focused on the activities of a single person. But unlike them, there is a central ambiguity re sulting from the unusual mode of narration. Part of the action in Jealousy clearly takes place outside the presence of the husband, yet he seems to know about it, and it is described as if he were witnessing it. This may be an in consistency in the narrative or it may be an intentional device to blur the distinctions between what actually hap pens and what the increasingly neurotic husband is imagin ing. It seems clear that the narration is third-perSon, but it is not clear whether the narrator is omniscient. There is much evidence, such as the long and labored descriptions of things exactly as they are seen from where the husband stands, to suggest that there is a self-imposed limitation on the narration. But if this is true, then we have some difficulty in accounting for our knowledge of what happens, and presumably as it happens, outside the vision of the husband. In any case, the event in Jealousy can only be an action because what goes on in a man's mind is not a deter minable, or a presentable, space-time event except insofar as what he thinks about is such an event. 68 What we gain by the concept of narrative technique for events which are mediated is the ability to distinguish clearly the event without ignoring aspects of the work which are part of the statement as a whole but not of the event. This is a crucial factor in classifying different kinds of literature and will be discussed in Chapters V and VI with a variety of examples. For now, we need only to note that although every statement either refers to or implies a speaker simply by virtue of being a statement, not all literary statements are an event which is an utterance. Moll Flanders, the third-person narrator of War and Peace. Christopher Isherwood in Down There on a Visit, are all telling about something, and that something is an action and the event of the work. Different from this is the anonymous speaker of "0 Western Wind," who is implied by the nature of the statement and whose existence is a necessary inference in order for the statement to be completely meaningful. The mode of narration in Conrad's "Youth” is first- person, but the event is not an utterance— someone telling about Marlow's telling of his youthful adventure. The par ticular occasion of this man's recounting of Marlow's re counting of his adventure is not given, and he can be identified only as a man who had been present when Marlow told his story. The event is five men, including Marlow-- "(at least I think that is how he spelt his name)"— and the unnamed narrator sitting around a mahogany table somewhere in England drinking claret and listening to Harlow tell a story. The narrator is thus a participant, however minor, in the story he tells, but because there are no indications of a particular occasion for his telling of the story, the event can only be the subject of that narrative and not the narration itself. The first half page of "Youth" estab lishes the event and then, except for an occasional "pass the bottle" by Marlow and a concluding paragraph, the re mainder of the work is Marlow's narrative. The event is not, on the one hand, what happens to young Marlow on board the Judea bound for Bankok; and it is not, on the other hand, an unnamed person in the act of telling someone, some where, about hearing Marlow tell a story. The event of "Youth" is not the story Marlow is telling but the story the unnamed narrator is telling; therefore, the event is not the narrator's act of telling a story— it is Marlow's. And such an event is narrated and not overheard. An event as utter ance is a statement which we infer to be part of an act of utterance. An event which is presented as a complete act of utterance is an action. In Lord Jim there is again a group of men sitting around drinking and listening to Marlow tell a story. Here again the subject of Marlow's story (in this case the adven tures of Jim, which Marlow was a minor participant in) con stitutes the greater part of the work, but is not the event. But unlike "Youth," the narrator is not a character who is a 70 participant in the story he tells. Lord Jim is like War and Peace in having a third-person narrator. The first five chapters, for instance, are not Marlow speaking but are in the third-person. Therefore, the event cannot be Marlow telling a story (as it was in "Youth") but must be the sub ject of the story he tells— that is, the life and adventures of Jim. Part of this event is narrated directly in the third person, but the greater part of it is a third-person account of Marlow telling about Jim and about the part he (Marlow) played in Jim's life. Hopkins' poem "Felix Randal" resembles "Youth" and Lord Jim in being both an account and an utterance. But whereas Conrad makes the utterance part of a larger actipn, Hopkins very clearly subordinates the account to the utterance. The event in "Felix Randal" is an utterance, presumably a priest's, spoken in response to the news that his parish ioner, Felix Randal, the Farrier, is dead. Felix Randal the farrier, 0 he is dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mold of man, big-bon'ed and hardy- handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended! 71 This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal; How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years, When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! A poem can, of course, be written about the life and death of a man without being, as a whole, an utterance. The event of "Sir Patrick Spens" is an action which only con tains utterances, that is, the exact words of a person as he speaks them. We know this because, among other signs, the convention of quotation marks is used. Quotation marks are employed to separate within a statement as a whole the utterance from the rest of the statement which is not an utterance or which is someone else's utterance. It is clear enough that "Felix Randal" is about, or is an account of,^ a blacksmith by that name who, in his prime, was an admirable physical specimen and the inferior of no man during his boisterous years at the forge. Then sickness set in and corresponding mental depression, brought on, partly at least, by his cursing of his fate. Solace resulted from the ministrations of the priest and then, after some months, Felix Randal at last died. What makes the poem ^Though not sufficiently particularized to constitute a discrete unverifiable event in its own right. 72 an utterance and not an action is the presence of those signs, which, as in "O Western Wind," indicate the existence of a speaker, a particular situation, and someone addressed. Prom the first line we infer, by the inverted sentence pat tern and the use of "0" and "then,1 1 that someone has just entered the presence of someone else and announced the death of one Felix Randal, farrier, a person known previously and whose death comes as no surprise. In the eight lines which follow, the priest reminisces, half to the messenger, half to himself, about the deceased. Beginning, however, with line ten, the priest's utterance ceases entirely to be directed at the messenger and instead is spoken to the dead man. This is clearly indicated by the thee1s, thy's. and thou1s, and by the direct address "Thy tears that touch my heart, child, Felix Randal." In this poem the speaker, the situation, and the subject remain constant, but unlike many lyric poems there are two different people to whom the utterance is addressed. The poem, nonetheless, is a single utterance, spoken at one time and place, and if we fail to understand this, there are parts of the statement which we cannot account for. All utterances are in the first person and the present tense, but not all first-person, present-tense works of literature are utterances. The question of dialogue litera ture is treated below, but we need to note here that much * "lyric" poetry is present-tense accounts and not present- 73 tense utterances. Such a work is "Stopping by Woods." Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer _To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. The two points to note are; (1) there is no indication of anyone being addressed, nor indeed of any actual vocalizing, and (2) there is clearly an event here which is not an utterance. To be sure, the speaker or narrator is a par ticipant in the event he narrates, and his narration occurs contemporaneously with the event. But his narrating is not the event, nor part of the event; rather, the event is the subject of the narration. There are a multitude of ways, plausible ai)d implausible for getting stories told, and a thorough examination of these techniques will form part of the taxonomy. For now it is necessary only to recognize that while an event is never someone's thoughts, a narrative technique often is. And such is the case with "Stopping by Woods." 74 Prose utterances are not common but they are not a rarity, at least not as short stories. Lardner's “Haircut" is an undisputed example of a story whose event is a par ticular person's sustained and uninterrupted statement in the act of being uttered. The utterance, of Whitey the barber, begins as a stranger gets into the chair and con cludes with the sentence "Comb it wet or dry?" As with a poem which is the utterance of a single person, there are no quotation marks around the statement as a whole. The only ones used are those within the utterance when someone's statement is quoted verbatim. In "Youth" almost every para graph in the story begins with quotation marks because almost every paragraph is a verbatim account of what Marlow said as he sat at the mahogany table. But in "Haircut" every paragraph is part of the barber's utterance and thus only those which the barber is quoting have quotation marks. The event in "Haircut" is an unmediated utterance, but the subject of that utterance, and of most prose utterances, is an action— in this case the life and death of Jim Kendall, local jokester— which is narrated as a part of the utterance. It is even possible for an event to be an utterance without purporting to occur at just one time and place. This is only one of several respects in which Camus' short novel, The Fall, is unusual. The event in The Fall is a man meeting someone and telling him his life story. The signs are abundant and clear that an unnamed person is addressing 75 another unnamed person: they meet in a bar in Amsterdam, they converse, but we are given only one side of the conver sation and thus only the talk and responses of the narrator from which to reconstruct the complete situation. As in Browning's dramatic monologues, all the information about time, place, setting, identification of characters is in cluded within the utterance. All utterances are dramatic monologues, and one would be tempted to use a work like "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxeds' Church" as the touchstone, except for the fact that The Fall is clearly an utterance, and yet the utterance also clearly is divided into six different sections which occur on six different days. The person addressed is the same, the location is always Amsterdam (though in different sections), the subject is the same, and each day's utterance is a continuation of the previous day's. It is as if Camus were attempting to improve on Lord Jim, where Marlow tells, in one sitting, a story that runs to over a hundred pages. Conrad has been much criticized for the improbability of this narrative device (and has defended himself by claiming that the story could be told comfortably in one sitting). Marlow's utter ance goes on uninterrupted, chapter after chapter, but the speaker in The Fall breaks off his utterance at the chapter divisions and goes home to bed, only to resume his utterance another day. Nothing else intervenes, and there is not a word in the novel which is not spoken by the man whose story 76 it is and to the man from Paris whom he meets in the bar in Mexico City. When a statement consists of more than the utterance of a single person but nothing which is not the direct words of a person in the act of speaking, then the event is still unmediated— an utterance, or utterances, in the act of being uttered. Such a work is the ballad "Edward," where a mother and son are conversing but where the conversation is not narrated but presented. We are simply given the utterances, and from these we infer an act, or acts, of utterance. Depending on the version, the individual speeches of mother- son-mother-son ... . may be inclosed in quotation marks, but these do not separate utterance from non-utterance but only utterance from utterance. This leads us into the problem of dialogue literature in general, which, as we shall see is not all alike, although the differences tend to cut across the traditional distinctions of ballad, dialogue story, drama, closet drama. Works which consist entirely of dialogue ("Edward," "Lord Randal") are by definition unmediated. Works which consist in large part but not entirely of dialogue are of necessity mediated. Such works are of two kinds: (1) stor ies where dialogue is included within a narrative framework but set off from it, usually by quotation marks, and (2) present-tense accounts which introduce the dialogue with labels naming the speaker and which can serve as scripts for 77 production. No story that I know of consists entirely of dialogue, and those (like Ivy Compton-Burnett's) which are ninety-nine per cent dialogue are no different in kind from those which are one per cent. The actual words of a charac ter in the act of being spoken are mediated; they are intro duced, commented upon, identified, by narration which is not itself part of the event. The most important point to make about the second kind of dialogue literature is that we are talking about litera ture in dialogue form, not about dialogue as part of an actual dramatization. Our concern is not with productions but with the scripts of productions which, whatever their primary functions, are statements of unverifiable events. And so, for this purpose, there is no distinction between a script and a closet drama. As literature, each is "labeled dialogue," and thus, as we shall see, is a third-person, present-tense account. Just as I can think of no pure dialogue stories, I can think of no plays which do not at least include character labels. In addition, of course, most plays resort to vari ous captions, subtitles, directions, giving the time and place of the event. If a statement of an event has any words which are not those of a character in an act of utter ance then it cannot be unmediated. Even the names of char acters to identify speeches are sufficient to render a work an account rather than an utterance. In this respect there 78 is no difference between the chapter epigraphs in Middle- march (e.g. to Chapter IV) 1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. 2nd Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world That brings the iron. and Man and Superman with its pages of narrative commentary. In applying the criterion of unverifiabiiity to plays, there are two major characteristics to bear in mind: first, all plays are in the present, that is, the “events purport to be occurring contemporaneously with the reading of them; and second, the event in many plays is not what the work is ostensibly "about” but the production of a play. It makes no difference whether the subject of the play is Julius Caesar or Willie Loman: the setting can be the year 65 in Rome or 1965 in New York City, but it is always "today," always this minute. And it is for this reason that a play (as literature) is never confused with fact. Arthur Miller's After the Fall may be excruciatingly autobiographi cal, but neither what is read between the boards nor what is played upon them is a verifiable account of anything which did or could happen. As literature After the Fall is "about” a drama which purports to be playing on a three- level stage— a drama which is built around the one-sided "conversation" of Quentin with an unseen, unnamed friend beyond the footlights. As drama After the Fall is "about" a conversation which periodically "dissolves" into a recre ation of the activities which are the subject of the 79 conversation. Miller's play, like all plays in which the event is a stage production, is, as literature, one degree removed from the action which is the subject of the produc tion. But all plays, when read as literature, are in the present tense, and all of them purport to be occurring in the present, that is, at the moment they are being read. And likewise, whether the event is what the actors are doing (the subject of the play) or what the characters are doing (the production of the play), all productions purport to be an event as it is happening. It is interesting to note that while in the West the story, in its various forms, has become more realistic, more given to disguising the fictional character of its events, drama seems to have become less so. The plays of Thornton Wilder are examples of this. In Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker, the characters refer to their activi ties as being part of a play: STAGE MANAGER: "This play is called 'Our Town. ' It was written by Thornton Wilder; produced by . . ." SABINA: "I can't invent any words for this play, and I'm glad I can't. I hate this play and every word in it." MRS. LEVI: "I think the youngest person here ought to tell us what the moral of the play is." To be sure, this kind of dramatic convention goes back to, and beyond, Shakespeare, and perhaps we should characterize the works of Wilder, Brecht, Gelber, as a revival of a dor mant tradition. The event in Shakespeare's King Henry V. among others of his and his contemporaries' plays, is a 80 stage production by virtue of the Prologue. This is rather a common convention. Much less common, but more like radi cal contemporary practice, is Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which not only admits to being a play, but also makes much capital out of the fact. But though it may be debatable that plays are becoming more unrealistic (as fact, but more realistic as theater), it is certain that scripts are becoming more like litera ture. Wilder not only follows Shaw in his extensive use of narrative commentary, he integrates the commentary with the dialogue to such an extent that he needs to employ the most untraditional device of quotation marks to distinguish the words of the characters from the words of the narration. But perhaps the most extreme example to date of this evolu tion of scripts to novels is After the Fall. So detailed have the "stage directions" become that they amount to detailed psychological analyses of the characters. And one of the results of this is an ambiguity as to what exactly purports to be happening on the stage. The opening sentence of Act One is not very convincing. "The action takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin." Indeed there is a rather glaring contradiction in terms. What "takes- place" in one's mind is in no ordinary sense of the words an "action," and in addition Quentin's external actions are very much a part of the play. Nor is there any satisfactory explanation for his repeated movement back and forth between 81 being a participant in scenes from his past and being a participant in a present conversation. The potentials and limitations of the two genres (novel and play) are very much in evidence in Miller's attempted hybrid, but the ambiguity of the play as production does not result in any corresponding ambiguity in the play as litera ture. Throughout the script and integral to the total statement of event, there are repeated present-tense refer ences to a stage, a production, and characters. Like the plays of Wilder noted above, After the Fall is a third- person account of a production as it is occurring, although unlike them the characters make no reference to their activ ities as being part of a play. This difference may very well be an important one in classifying various kinds of plays, but when the script is considered as literature it is not a factor in deciding what the event is. Any script which, as a statement of an unverifiable event, contains repeated and obvious references to a stage, to a production, to actors or characters on the stage or in the production, is a work of literature whose event is a stage production. In attempting to discern the event in older drama there is one pitfall which is important to note: that is the intrusion, sometimes unacknowledged, of editors' stage directions to supplement the meager narration of many sur viving texts. The event of Dryden's The Conquest of Granada. as literature, is what happens in Granada in the fifteenth 82 century. All of his "stage" directions refer to events in Granada and not to a stage. However, as George Saintsbury edits the text (fortunately with the use of brackets), the event .is a stage production. For example, in Act IV, Scene 3, he breaks into a dialogue between Almanzor and the ghost to inform us that " [The Ghost comes on softly after the conjuration; and ALMANZOR retires to the middle of the stage.]More serious than this is the inconsistency and misrepresentation which regularly occurs in the editing of Greek drama. More often than not the editor fails to decide whether he is offering a text of the original or a produc tion script merely based upon the original. When both are attempted, as in the Grene and Lattimore edition, not only are we left in the dark as to what the original manuscripts actually say, we are presented with a work whose event we are unable to ascertain because of inconsistent stage direc- ' tions. And furthermore, these directions are not even in accord with the Greek stage but with a proscenium arch. The opening of Agamemnon reads: SCENE: Argos, before the palace of King Agamemnon. The Watchman, who speaks the opening lines, is posted on the roof of the palace. Clytaemestra1s en trances are made from a door in the center of the stage; all others, from the wings.*2 ^John Drvden: Three Plays, edited with an Introduction and Notes by George Saintsbury (New York, 1957), p. 135. 12 The Complete Greek Tragedies: Volume I. Aeschylus, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1959), p. 35. 83 Is this part of the statement of event or a detachable edi torial commentary? Is the event occurring at Agamemnon's palace in Greece or on a stage? These are crucial questions for analyzing the work as literature. In the same edition we are told of Prometheus Bound both that the members of the Chorus are "wearing some formalized representation of wings, so that their general appearance is birdlike" (p. 316) and that Oceanos enters "riding on a hippocamp, or sea-monster" (p. 321). Either there are make-believe daughters of Oceanos and a make-believe sea-monster or the actual daughters of Oceanos and a real hippocamp. Either the w.ork is about a stage production or about "A bare and desolate crag in the Caucasus" (p. 311). But if this opening commen tary sets the scene for the play, then "Enter Io, a girl wearing horns like an ox" (p. 331) is inconsistent. Aeschylus may or may not have written inconsistent plays, but most modern editions of his plays are of little help in determining this. A final word on verification is in order. Present- tense works, that is, those which purport to be an account of an event as it is occurring, are not verifiable unless the event as depicted is. occurring contemporaneously with the statement. Shakespeare's "history" plays, even aside from their conspicuous inaccuracies and omissions, and even aside from the fact that extensive verbatim conversation is rarely verifiable, do not pass muster as fact because they 84 are not written as fact. King Henry V is not an account of what happened in fifteenth century France, nor is it a con temporary account handed down to us from the fifteenth cen tury. It is an account of what is happening now in fif teenth century France. And as such, it is literature. There is only one way a present-tense play can be veri fiable. Certain kinds of literature are not only dramatic but also thereby potentially verifiable because when they are spoken, or pronounced, or acted, they are then not an unverifiable created event but the actual event itself. For them, to be dramatized is to be actualized. Plays in which the event is a stage production (Our Town. After the Fall. King Henry V) when read contemporaneously with an actual production are not literature but accounts of verifiable - events. This is hardly a crucial point in a discussion of literature, but it does serve to point up the fact that the intention or essence or primary function of many plays is not to tell a story but to be a production— that is, to be like a ritual or ceremony rather than like a motion picture. Lyric poetry, having had its origin in song, and specifi cally in songs addressed by a singer to a listener, is simi lar to plays whose event is a stage production. To the extent that a recital, for example, of "0 Western Wind'* is actually addressed to the wind, the poem ceases to be liter ature. The evolution of drama and of lyric poetry offers one of the most fruitful subjects for the scholar interested in delimiting literature as a phenomenon and in tracing its roots into areas where events are real rather than unveri fiable. These are historical questions, however, and we can do no more than mention them here. It does seem to follow, however, both from our conception of the two kinds of liter ary event and from a growing body of historical scholarship that what we now recognize as literature (imaginative, fic tional, unverifiable statements) has developed not only from false or unreliable or unverifiable accounts but also from actual, present, occurrences which are witnessed as they occur.- Prom the former we derive stories and from the lat ter drama and lyric poetry. Literature and "Literary Elements1 1 In the past few years an interesting discussion has occurred among British and American philosophers which has important implications for any attempt to define literature. This discussion has centered around the ancient problem of universals and the claim of some contemporary linguistic philosophers to having disposed of it. Wittgenstein and 13 Brambrough, for instance, maintain that what universals are and how we can know them is adequately explained by recognizing that they are nothing more than family resem blances. What constitutes a universal is not a common char acteristic possessed by all members of a class (except of ■^Cf. p. 17 above. 86 course the word itself) but a pattern of several character istics. One of Wittgenstein's examples is "game." Nothing, he says, is common to all the various kinds of card, board, Olympic games except the label. All games have something in common with some other games, but not all games share a characteristic with all other games. So it is with a family. Not all members of a family look like all the other members, but each member resembles in some way, to some ex tent, some other member. Wittgenstein says: 67. I can think of no better expression to character ize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family.^ It may well be that games have nothing in common but an overlap and criss-cross of characteristics; certain it is that families resemble each other physically and tempera mentally only in this way. But as H. J. McCloskey points 15 out, the concept of family resemblances only pushes the problem one step back. It assumes the existence of a uni versal ("family") in order to demonstrate that they share a pattern of resemblances. What is a family? How do we know it? What do we mean when we talk about a family, or class, or universal? Certainly we have many words (perhaps "game," 14 Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1953). 15 "The Philosophy of Linguistic Analysis," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. XXIV (March 1964), 329-338. 87 like "negro," is one of them) which can be defined only in terms of a pattern of usage and not a common characteristic, but there are also many which (like "molecule." and hopefully "literature") are definable in terms of a common character istic. And as far as "family" is concerned, there is an obvious defining feature which all members of a family pos sess and which no non-members possess— that is, common ancestry or parentage. A woman "marries into" a family not her own; an illegitimate child may be "legitimized." These concepts are meaningful only because we have a basic notion of what constitutes a family— documented biological kinship. A class whose members share a common characteristic will very likely also share a pattern of family resemblances, but as far as the definition of the class is concerned, the various traits of this resemblance are nonessential. They may be the most conspicuous traits of specific individuals; they may be crucial for his very existence; they may qualify him for membership in another class; but they are not what constitutes membership in this particular class. If we define birds as feathered egg-laying bipeds, it is irrele vant for this classification whether or not they can fly. A description of birds in general would certainly include tlie obvious and crucial fact that most birds have wings and spend much of their lives flying, but as far as "birdness" is concerned, this is only a family resemblance. The class "flying animals" would include some birds, some mammals, 88 some insects; and egg-laying, feathers, two legs, would be at best only family resemblances shared by some members of the family. The concept "bird" is an important one in zoology only because it can be defined without recourse to family resem blances. The concept "negro" is not important in anthro- 16 pology or genetics because it cannot be so defined. There is a discipline "ornithology" based on a rigorous definition of its subject matter; but there is not, and cannot be, a discipline based upon the study of negroes because they do not form a definable class. By the same token, there can be no discipline "literature" unless there is a rigorous defi nition, not one which is only a set of family resemblances, but one based on a common characteristic or characteristics. I would contend, however, that we do recognize a class "literature" in our thought and usage, although we often do not keep it distinct in our study. The problem arises, it seems to me, when we fail to maintain a distinction between a work of literature and a work with literary elements, even though we have little trouble distinguishing between the two when forced to do so. ^And the reason why it cannot be defined is genetic and not semantic. Races, whether you conceive of five or five hundred, are genetically open classes and at best ex hibit only family resemblances. Only species, which are genetically closed systems, can be defined. Cf. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven, 1962). Chapter X, "Race." 89 This is what Weilek has to say about the nature of literature when talking about its basic characteristics and not about literary or aesthetic elements and functions: But the nature of literature emerges most clearly under the referential aspect. The center of literary art is obviously to be found in the traditional genres of the lyric, the epic, the drama, in all of them, the refer ence is to a world of fiction, or imagination. The state ments in a novel, in a poem, or a drama are not literally true; they are not logical propositions. There is a cen tral and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey "information" about actual happenings, and the same information appearing in a book of history or soci ology. Even in the subjective lyric, the "I" of the poet is a fictional, dramatic "I."*? In short, works of literature are statements of events. Certainly it would seem that non-academic usage consistently equates literature with stories, poems, and plays, and I think Wellek's statement is more typical than atypical of scholarly thinking. To quote just one more example, this time from Curtius: Our survey of the modern historical method has led us to the concept of poetry in the sense of a narrative pro duced by the imagination ("fiction"). This is an elas tic formula which comprehends the antique epic, the drama, and the novel of ancient and modern times. These are the kinds of things which are called literature, but what is studied and written about under the rubric "literature" is often much different. "Literature" becomes 17 Theory of Literature, p. 14. 18 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 8. 90 an evaluative concept; it comes to include everything writ ten at the time or place under study; it includes everything written by a man considered to be a writer of literature; it is applied to all writing considered to have an "aesthetic function." Depending on the student's interests, literature comes to include everything which has anything in common with statements of events. What is traditionally called literature are stories, poems, plays. What is studied be cause they have literary elements is essays, histories, biographies, manuals of conduct, speeches, letters, sermons, compositions in verse, compositions in prose which contain "noble" sentiments or euphuistic constructions— that is, anything which one decides for whatever reason has "style" or is "literary." Perhaps the basic weakness of Theory of Literature is that the authors, when confronted by the disparity between literature and literary scholarship, chose to subordinate an examination of the nature of literature to an examination of literary scholarship. Not what works of literature are, but what scholars have studied under the label and the termin ology they have employed is the focal point of the book. Nowhere is Wellek's conception of the nature of literature consistently applied, and we find him saying that . . . we must realize that the distinction between art and non-art, between literature and the non-literary lin guistic utterance, is fluid. The aesthetic function may extend to linguistic pronouncements of the most various sort. It would be a narrow conception of literature to exclude all propaganda art or didactic and satirical 91 poetry. We have to recognize transitional forms like the essay, biography, and much rhetorical literature. In different periods of history the realm of the aesthetic function seems to extend or to contract: the personal letter, at times, was an art form, as was the sermon. . . . (p. 13) And Curtius, who is more interested in the Western cultural and rhetorical tradition than in literature, proceeds, after carefully defining his key term, to treat as literature a wide variety of works which obviously have little in common with his definition. Discussing Augustine he says: His Confessions is, on all counts, one of the great books of the West. Its style--antique artistic prose. The methods of antique rhetoric are made to serve the new spiritual world of Christianity. . . . No modern prose can reproduce these solemn parallelisms and assonances. Here rhetoric becomes poetry— as so often in the Roman liturgy. (p. 74) This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the reasons for this scholarly confusion, except to note that European literary study arose out of, and in Europe for the most part still is, philology. That is, it is the histori cal analysis of cultures in terms of written documents. The collecting, editing, and analysis of texts as linguistic data is not necessarily the analysis of literary works, and when it is, it is usually not a literary analysis but an interpretation of cultural data. The older meaning of "literature" as the writings of a culture or society is of course legitimate, but what usually happens is that after the initial effort of collecting the literature of a people, the term comes to mean just those works which, for some rea son or another, are considered "worthy of study." And this leads to the second source of confusion— -literature con sidered as a part of a living cultural tradition and thus, like religious doctrine, to be revered and perpetuated. Literature is then the "great books" by which the intellec tual and spiritual life of each generation is sustained. It is the collected and proven wisdom of society. Some statements of events are included, but not because they are literature but because they are linguistic, or ethical, or historical, or religious, or philosophical "landmarks" or "cornerstones." The fact that all of Chicago's Great Books t have at one time or another been called literature does not constitute a persuasive reason for attempting to cover them with a definition which,claims to work inductively from those works which are traditionally called literature.' Though some of them are also statements of unverifiable events, they are the "literature of the Western World" in quite a different sense than that which refers to stories, poems, and plays. This has been the central problem of literary scholar- ship--the failure to recognize that what has been studied as literature is not a unified class but two different, though overlapping, classes, in Chapters V and VI we shall see how it is possible to replace a primary concern with evaluating, interpreting, advocating, and condemning works, with a scientist's basic concern for studying his subject in terms of a clearly defined system of classification. The justifi 93 cation for .doing this is that only when literary study ceases to be a national or ethical cult can it become a sub ject for unbiased historical investigation. History as a discipline and historians of nations, periods, religions, philosophies, science, had to pass through this same ordeal of disengagement now badly overdue in literature. Insofar as a history proselytizes or champions its subject, it is not scientific, responsible scholarship, but at best history as ethics. Literature cannot be defined in terms of "great books" because greatness cannot be defined— evaluation can not form the basis of a discipline. You can't get an is. out of an ought, even if you think you can get .an ought from an is. The only one of the two overlapping conceptions of literature which can be defined, and thus can serve as a basis for study, is that of stories— of fiction as opposed to fact. An inevitable confusion arises in those adjectival disciplines— English, French, German, Latin, Greek, etc.— ■ because of the uncertainty in deciding what it is one is supposed to be doing. What precisely do these adjectives modify? Are we studying a culture? a language? a litera ture? a language in terms of its literature? a culture in terms of its literature? And what exactly is culture or a culture? What usually happens, of course, is that every thing is attempted and lumped together under the label "literature." The implicit justification for this is that 94 works "worthy" of study have literary elements, or are im portant because they have literary elements, or at least can be studied as literature. What this amounts to is that any work one might want to study has something in common with some other work which is.also undeniably literature— that is, a story, poem, play, a statement of an event. The following is an attempt to list the characteristics most frequently cited as qualifying a work for inclusion in a literary study. These are not necessarily traits which have been used as the basis for literary theories or defini tions, but "literary elements" which are used-to justify considering a work as literature. Each of these elements is shared by some works of literature, but not all works which share them are statements of events. A work may be said to have a family resemblance to works of literature if it: 1. Is non-utilitarian 2. Is well-written, written with "style," or makes extensive use of rhetorical elements 3. Has proven to be permanent or has had historical influence 4. Expresses "noble" or "profound" or perennially important sentiments 5. Is a personal or emotional account 6. Stimulates, "refines," unifies the reader's emo tions or experience 7. Contains, rather than is, a statement of an event 8. Is written by a writer of literature 95 9. Is in verse 10. Functions like literature One notices at once that most of these characteristics are rather vague and that some, at least, could be combined or eliminated without much loss of specificity. This is what makes it so difficult to hold anyone to specific cri teria when talking about literature in terms of literary elements. The longer the list and the more general and sub jective each item, the more likely are we to accept a work as literature because it exhibits not one but several liter ary elements. Any one by itself might be questioned as a defining feature, but when several literary traits are obvi ously present, one rarely thinks of raising the objection that no amount of nonessential elements necessarily makes a 19 single essential one. When there are half a dozen liter ary elements in a work, we are inclined to think that we can concede any one of them and still have a sufficient case. 19 Questions of judgment are another problem. With them we are not classifying but deciding whether or not we are justified in approving or condemning something or someone. For instance in law courts, questions of motivation, ef fects, mitigating circumstances, amount and kind of evidence are crucial. The judge does not classify a man as a crimi nal but finds him guilty of committing an unlawful act and guilty in a certain degree. "Theoretically the goal we all strive for in litigation is the probable truth. . . . the strength of either side of a case depends not so much upon the direct testimony relating to these principle facts alone, but, as one writer very tersely puts it, 'upon the support given them by the probabilities created by estab lishing and developing the relation of the minor facts in the case.'" Francis L. Wellman, The Art of Cross-Examina tion. 4th ed. (New York, 1936), p. 168. 96 But if this kind of reasoning is the basis of literary study, then literature, like negroes, cannot be-the subject of formal study. Evaluations can never be criteria for systematic, responsible, scientific, classification. Perhaps the most troublesome of the family resemblances listed above is number ten— functions like literature. We have postulated as the defining feature of literature not a unique function but a unique attribute. The reason for this is that while all literature functions literarily, non liter ary works can, and often do, function in the same way. Before we can analyze in detail the pattern of resenblances which has plagued literary scholarship, we must complete our definition by determining how it is that literature func tions, or is interpreted, or is meaningful. All works of literature are statements of events, that is, they are all unverifiable. But not all statements of unverifiable events are necessarily works of literature. In the next chapter we will complete the statement: "A work of literature is a statement of an unverifiable event which functions. ..." CHAPTER III THE FUNCTION OF LITERATURE Murray Krieger1s antinomian dilemma in The New Apolo gists for Poetry is instructive. He is quite aware of the inadequacy of a theory which claims that works of literature are both contextual (significant in and of themselves) and referential (applicable and immediately relevant to human experience), but he has maintained the precision of this contradiction rather than succumb to the usual compromise of common-sense jargon. He is convinced that however we con ceive of the literary experience, we cannot say that a literary work is dependent on or refers to anything outside of itself. As long as he used terminology which could not, without contradiction, present this, he clarified the issue more by remaining faithful to his terminology than by at tempting to do justice to his literary experience.^ It would seem, however, that the greatest clarification is dependent on a radical change of terminology. W. K. Wimsatt has attempted to reconcile the same two divergent elements by employing the traditional terms ^(Minneapolis, 1956), cf. esp. the final pages, 198- 201. 97 98 2 "concrete" and "universal" and uniting them in a paradox. A paradox, however, is not a final solution to any problem. The seemingly inconsistent ideas involved in it conflict with each other because they are actually distorted or mis applied. As Susanne Langer correctly points out: They are misconceived, and consequently their union is misconceived, but it [the misconception] is motivated by a sound sense of their importance and logical connection. The word "paradox" bespeaks this peculiar status; both contradictory elements are "doctrinal," i.e. they are really accepted and the conjunction of them is admitted, even though it is not understood.^ It would be hard to deny that the concepts "contextual," "referential," "concrete," "universal," are all applicable to the study of literature. But the problem is to find a conception of literature which will acknowledge these and other aspects without becoming involved in contradiction, inconsistency, or paradox. Works of literature are not, as we have seen, referen tial statements which are meaningful because they refer to the existence of a corresponding situation or condition in human experience; they are things or "objects" which in some way, or to some extent, are ends in themselves. This seems to be what Krieger means by "contextual" and Wimsatt by 4 "concrete." On the other hand, works of literature are all 2 Cf. The Verbal Icon and his Chapter 32 m Literary Criticism: A Short History. 2 Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 16. ^Cf. also the round-robin polemic on contextualism which appeared from 1958-1962 in the Journal of Aesthetics 99 linguistic statements; they are meaningful because they are language and because they "concern" or "have to do with" the kind of things which .constitute human experience. Presum ably Krieger's "referential" and Wimsatt's "universal" at test to this. Our problem, then, is how to explain the ~ significance or meaningfulness of a statement of an event without having recourse to the verifiable knowledge of science and history or to the mystical experiences of reli gion and iconography. The solution, I think, lies in the concept of analogy. Analogy The concept of analogy is frequently used in modern literary studies to explain what literature is and how it is meaningful. Crane and Olson talk about literary analogy in Aristotelian terms? and in criticizing these Neo- Aristotelians, Wimsatt, speaking from the position of Catho lic Realism, points out in The Verbal Icon that a poem is not any kind of object or thing "but only analogously so" (p. 50). Philip Wheelwright speaks of recent developments in semantics and psychology as creating for the critic "new and Art Criticism. The last word was Krieger's "Contextual- ism was Ambitious," XXI (Fall 1962), 81-88. There he con tinues to defend the value of acknowledging the problem rather than of reducing literature to referential meaning. 5 The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953), p. 48; Critics and Criticism, p. 56. 100 g possibilities of discrimination, analogy, and allusion." The only thing which these critics have in common is their undefined use of "analogy." Before we can make use of it in defining literature, we must be clear as to what an analogy is, so that we can understand how works of literature are meaningful analogously but are not themselves analogies. Before modern science had established the world of fact, analogy was a basic way of knowing Reality, but the scientific mind, when conceived in the narrow, positivistic sense, had no use for analogical reasoning. Recently, how ever, there has been a renewed interest in the possibilities of analogy and non-discursive understanding, not only by neo-scholastics but also by logicians and philosophers of science. Although the four types of analogy postulated in Thomistic philosophy are not readily applicable to anything but scholasticism, recent conceptions of the scientific method have given the term a definite scientific signifi cance in understanding the relationship between general end specific propositions. The way propositions derived from empirical observations are meaningful in relation to general laws and theories and the way laws and theories are related to unexamined situations is conceived of as analogous. This particular use of analogy, however, is not really applicable 6"Mimesis and Katharsis: An Archetypal Consideration," in Alan S. Downer, ed., English Institute Essays; 1951 (New York, 1952), p. 3. 101 to literature as we have conceived it, because literature is not concerned with propositions, laws, or verifiable events. In the traditional and most general sense, "analogy" is the term for that mode of reasoning by which, from the simi larities of two things in certain particulars, their simi larity in others is inferred. It is a kind of parallel deduction which assumes that if things are known to have similar attributes (that is, more than one) they have simi lar structural relationships and that we are thus justified in assuming the existence of further similar attributes. The fact that this conception arose out of an ancient under standing of mathematical relationships and thus dealt with abstract concepts and not with concrete situations or condi tions is not important, though an analogy can still, when properly understood, be reduced to algebraic form. When a child doubts that it is worth while to save his pittance of an allowance, he may be told that money saved is just like a little acorn growing into a big oak. That is: saved allowance _ little acorn accumulated capital big oak Saved income and acorns have at least two things in common: initial smallness and potential for growth. The analogy is saying that because these attributes are shared by allow ances and acorns and that because we know acorns eventually get big, we are justified in inferring that saved allowances will also get big. 102 An analogy, however, is not properly considered a proof of anything. Proof is a matter of verification and of com paring essentially similar things. It is a misconception to think of analogy as a rival or equal of scientific verifica tion; even if the scientific method is understood to include analogical reasoning, an analogy in itself is not discursive but presentational. It can only juxtapose events or state ments about events in such a way as to emphasize the simi larities of essentially dissimilar things. We do not judge an analogy in terms of its adequacy in complementing and supplementing organized knowledge; we judge it by whether or not it has presented an unfamiliar thing in terms of a familiar in such a way as to reveal heretofore unrecognized characteristics. Traditionally the two analogues of an analogy are considered to have two or more similar features. What this means is that however dissimilar the two analogues are, there is a pattern of similarity and not just a super ficial resemblance. If analogy is not taken to be a kind of proof, we can not speak of a false analQgy, for all analogies are false in the sense that two dissimilar things are not the same thing. An analogy is not judged for truth but evaluated as to its effectiveness in enabling us to see similarities which we had not heretofore noticed. The value of analogy is that it forces us to conceive of things in a new way and is thus a necessary precursor of any discursive or scientific study. Knowledge does not begin in the laboratory but with an awareness that certain areas of experience are similar to others. An analogy is not true or false but an effective or ineffective comparison. Though of course what is for one person or one occasion an effective analogy can be for some one else or at some other time an ineffective or inappropri ate one. Analogies can also be invalid. An analogy can be proven invalid (1) when one or both of the analogues is falsely stated; (2) when the relation or proportion of the two analogues is not equal. An example of the first in stance is the statement "Just as the big pines can grow from little acorns, so the child can grow rich if he learns to save." An example of the second instance is the statement "Just as the big oak came from a little acorn, so this little pebble came from a big boulder." Here both analogues are true, but the analogy is invalid because the relation ship between the two is misconceived. They do not share two or more basic characteristics relating to how the tree and the pebbles came to be what they are now. An analogy is not just the statement of a comparison but the comparing of things which share common characteristics and thus, to some extent at least, a common structural pattern. 104 Implied Analogy An analogy is a statement juxtaposing two things and claiming a basic similarity between them. Obviously then works of literature are not analogies; they are never just a proposition and thus never a simile, metaphor, or analogy. They are, however, an implied analogy. They are like "Big oaks from little acorns grow," though of course this implied analogy is not literature because it'is a proposition. If I overhear the child lamenting his small allowance and say to him "Big oaks from little acorns grow," he might be puz zled by my oracular utterance or he might under the circum stances understand that I am implying that acorns are analo gous to small allowances. He would in that case be supply ing half the analogy and, hopefully also, the relationship between the two analogues. I took the initiative by stating suggestively an analogue, but he did half the work by com pleting the analogy with a second analogue. In effect, I asked him to complete an equation which could be relevant to the present circumstance. Out of context, the meaning of my statement was the claim, and a correct one, that acorns are the seeds of oak trees. In these particular circumstances the function, or interpretation, or meaning of my statement was that acorns are analogous to small allowances. The function, or interpretation, or meaning of a liter ary work, its relevance to the space-time world, is as an implied analogy with some aspect of human experience. The 105 first difference, then, between analogy and literature is that a work of literature is only one analogue and not two. An implied analogy does not specify the context which gives the analogue its significance. A second difference is that analogy moves from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it ex plains what we don't know in terms of what we do. Our anal ogy with the acorns and allowances was for the benefit of someone who understood the relationship of acorns and oaks but not the potential of accumulated savings. "Just as you know the acorn to develop into an oak, you should recognize that saving an allowance results in the accumulation of a large balance." Though less likely, someone could under stand the nature of saving but not the relation of acorn and oak. We could then turn the analogy around and explain plant growth in terms of capital accumulation— the unfamil iar in terms of the familiar. Literature, however, moves from the unfamiliar to the familiar. The work itself is new and unique, and before we can see any analogous relation with a situation or condition outside of the work, i.e. understand the context, we must first become acquainted with the work as a statement of an event. Life outside the work is familiar, but not until we have understood the work of literature as a statement of an event can we see a particu lar aspect of life which is analogous to the work. A work of literature is a statement of an unverifiable event which functions as an analogue in an implied analogy with an aspect of human experience. If it is possible to have an account of an unverifiable event which is not analo gous to an aspect of human experience, that is, which does not have to do with people or with people-like creatures doing something, then the second half of the definition is restrictive. However, it is rather difficult to conceive of a statement which is an account of the moment, which creates an unverifiable event, and does not in some way have to do with human experience, and I have been unable to find an example with which to test the definition. If such a state ment is found, then we would simply say that while .all works of literature are statements of unverifiable events, not all such statements are literature— only those which function as an analogue in an implied analogy with an aspect of human experience. As a hypothetical example for the clarification of the definition, let us suppose a short poem which is a third- person present-tense account of the effects of a breeze on a flower. Such a work would be a statement of an unverifiable event, but, unlike a similar poem which was a first-person present-tense account of a man in the act of perceiving a flower, or of a flower consciously (i.e. like a person) re sponding to the wind, or was an utterance addressed by a man to a flower, it would not function as an analogue in an im plied analogy with an aspect of human experience. That is, there would be no warrant in the work for interpreting the 107 event as an analogue in an implied (not just possible) anal ogy. Statements of events are not literature by chance or default; they are literature because they require an ana logical interpretation to be completely meaningful. A reader might insist that he "takes" our hypothetical poem as analogous to human experience— perhaps by interpret ing it allegorically. But statements of events are not literature simply by virtue of the way some readers may wish to interpret them. They are literature if and only if they imply this analogousness. The implication is an attribute of the work and not a result of the ingenuity of the reader. The poem would be the account of a single moment (as is "The Metro"), but it would not constitute a human experi ence. To be described is not to be perceived, and unless a statement of an unverifiable event either describes a human event or provides evidence that what is described is being stated or perceived as a part of a human event, then it is not analogous to an aspect of human experience. Speaking and perceiving are aspects of experience; what is said and what is perceived, however, are aspects of experience only insofar as their subject is people or people-like creatures doing or experiencing something. This definition, restrictive or nonrestrictive, is of limited use, however, until we explain how to determine for any given work its specific analogue in human experience. The key to understanding the analogousness of a work is what 108 I would call the "theme." The theme is__the most inclusive yet concise inference that we can make about the kind of human experience which characterizes the event; it is about a pattern rather than about the particulars of the event. It states in general terms what the work is about and de limits the aspect of human experience which the work is analogous to. As the character or characters of a literary work are to the event which it states, so are a person or persons to some aspect of "real life." In effect it is the solution to the analogical problem: characters________people in real life_______ event X kind of situation or condition We must be careful to distinguish the one best state ment of the theme from the event (which we summarize in a paraphrase), and from the many inferences we can make about the event, and from the innumerable implications the work has for life. When we paraphrase a work of literature, we summarize the event with approximately the same order and emphasis. A paraphrase can be almost as simple or detailed as one chooses, though it is usually longer than a statement of the theme. A paraphrase is concerned with just the work: Katherine Anne Porter's "Old Mortality" is about the rela tionship of a Southern girl named Miranda to her family as she grows up to the age of eighteen and then elopes. There is no one most adequate paraphrase; each one will differ according to the amount of detail included. Similarly with an inference— we treat the event in a work as if it were true and infer something about it which is not actually stated in the text. We infer that Miranda's primary motiva tion in marrying suddenly, whether or not she recognized it at the time, was to achieve freedom from her family. Para phrases and inferences always include the Mirandas, the Uncle Gabriels, the New Orleanses which are the ostensible subject of the work. On the other hand, implications and themes, though they are based on the work, are not about it but about life. An implication is a generalization about some aspect of human experience which the work or part of it can be taken to corroborate. An implication of Miranda's hasty marriage is that women sometimes marry early and sud denly as a rebellion against their families. Finally, there is the theme— like a paraphrase in that it is an inclusive generalization based on the entire work and like an implica tion in being a generalization about life rather than about the particulars of the work. The theme of "Old Mortality" is the way children embody the traits of the older genera tion even in rebelling against it. "Old Mortality" is a statement of how this happens in a particular instance. That statement of is what is unique, but themes are recur rent; they are what enable us to recognize the work as anal ogous even though it is unique. Individual themes can appear again and again as the themes of particular works. Indeed, the title of "Old Mortality" suggests this recur rence of its theme elsewhere, since it is also the title of 110 a novel by Scott. In stating the event, we talk about the particulars of the work; in stating the theme, we talk about the general kind of experience which the work is and to which it is analogous. Gilbert Ryle has emphasized the useful distinction be- Q tween "knowing how" and "knowing that." We may understand and appreciate a work long before we are able to articulate its analogous meaning, i.e. its theme. We know how to read the work— to recognize that it is a statement of an event which functions analogously with an aspect of human experi ence. But this is different from knowing that the theme of the work is such-and-such. The knowing how is an absolute preliminary requirement for every reader; the knowing that— the stating of the theme— is the task of literary criticism. In theory, at least, there is one most adequate statement of this theme, and we judge this statement as to its adequacy in abstracting the controlling idea of the work and in de limiting an area of human experience which is neither too specific nor too general. It must be general enough to locate the work in a recognizable area of human experience but specific enough to exclude more than it includes. Every statement of an event has a theme, not necessarily because the writer had in mind a controlling idea which he success fully embodied in the work (although many works seem to get Q The Concept of Mind (Oxford, 1949), esp. pp. 26-61. Ill written this way), but because any human situation, real or fictional, can be critically analyzed and, as far as the evidence goes, responsibly interpreted. This interpreta tion, in its most concise form, is, for literary works, the theme. For diseased patients, it is the doctor's diagnosis of the illness. Sometimes the diagnosis is less clear-cut than we would wish, but there is always a statement about the kind of problem which, in theory at least, can be worked out to the agreement of all informed parties. We do not judge a statement of a theme by whether or not it in itself does justice to our literary experience, but only whether it is an adequate general account of what the work is about, its controlling idea. To be sure, the basic element of our literary experience is the conscious or unconscious parallels we draw with life. It is not the task of the theme, however, to state these parallels. The theme is not "the moral" but the subject. It does not pass judg ment but identifies what the work is about. It is prior to any implications which the work may have for morality. In saying that the theme of "Old Mortality" is the way children embody the traits of the older generation even in rebelling against it, we are interpreting the work. But when we say that an implication of it is that Southern society continues to encourage a romantic fatalism, we are in addition going outside the work and passing judgment on an aspect of human experience. 112 To illustrate more specifically what is meant by theme and implication, let us analyze Nostromo in these terms. The theme of Nostromo is the way that ideas, especially the idea of material progress, affect not only those who hold them but also those who are subject to them. The reader who fails to understand that this, or something very like it, is the theme of the novel has not fully understood it. Were we to say that the theme was the relation of the "real" to the "ideal," this would not contradict our previously stated theme. Were we to say that the theme was the effect of ideals in nineteenth century Latin America, there would still be no contradiction. But both of these are inadequate statements of the theme. The first statement is too gen eral; all human experience can be viewed in terms of the "real" and the "ideal." It fails to delimit one aspect of human experience which can serve as an analogue with the work. The second statement is so narrow that it cannot cover all the implications which arise from the work. The reader with little knowledge of nineteenth century Latin America would then find very little analogous meaning in the work. Since he does, however, this invalidates such a nar row conception of the theme. The specific event takes place in Latin America, but the general aspect of human experience to which the work is analogous is not Latin or Nordic or American or European, nor is it unique to the nineteenth century. 113 One of the implications of Nostromo is that the part nership of colonist and capitalist, despite the sometimes lofty ideals of the partners, inevitably debases them and the natives as well. We can substantiate this interpreta tion of an aspect of human experience by reference to par ticular parts of the work which treat Charles Gould, Nostromo, and Mr. Holyroyd; we can cite instances of omnis cient commentary; we can compare the fortunes of Costaguana before and after the Gould Concession and before and after the revolution. We may disagree more than we agree with this interpretation of life, but if we cannot find some validity in it, it is not meaningful analogously. We must remember that an analogue is not a referent but a similar event; no referent exists for the literary statement as a whole. Thus, a postulated implication is neither right or wrong in relation to a particular event or concept, but only more or less adequate as a statement of a parallel between the work and an area of experience. We are not bound to either specific or general state ments in drawing implications, except that each statement of an implication must make some kind of judgment or evaluation of life. A statement of a theme, on the other hand, is not a judgment or evaluation, just a statement of what kind of experience the work is about. We might draw the more gen eral implication from Nostromo that ideals are necessary ingredients of human personality, though they destroy the 114 personality when they become obsessions. And indeed/ this is perhaps the most general and most consistently demon strated implication of the novel and might, if we wished, be termed the moral. Not every work, of course, states or seems clearly to support a specific moral judgment. Conrad's Flaubertian short story "The Idiots, 1 1 for instance, has a theme but no moral. What the work is about specifi cally (the event) is the birth of four idiots to a French peasant family and the resulting murder of the father and death of the mother. What the work is about generally (the theme) is those men who, . . . like the earth they master and serve . . . slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there is in the core; heat, violence, a force mys terious and terrible— or nothing but a clod, a mass fer tile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life or give death. "The Idiots" contains this statement of its theme, and inso far as the story can be said to "demonstrate" anything, it establishes the legitimacy of this question. But it neither gives nor implies an answer and offers no hints as to how one ought to govern his conduct. Indeed, it is one of the implications that, for this kind of men at any rate, there is often not much real choice. When we decide that a work does have a moral, it is often nothing more than the theme stated as a moral imperative. The theme of Almaver's Folly is the way that irresolute romanticism (as opposed to the non-romantic and to the resolute romantic) leads to 115 g inactivity and decay. The moral of this "Story of an Eastern River" is that there is little virtue and no reward in being, like Almayer, an irresolute romantic. There is a difference between making comparisons be tween the work and specific persons or situations in life and drawing implications. We might say that our neighbor treats his wife with the same standard of solicitous dis interest with which Charles Gould treats Mrs. Gould. If this is true, we are comparing a particular aspect of a particular person's experience with an aspect of the novel. We are not stating an implication about an aspect of gen eral human experience. However broad or narrow the state ment of an event may be, it is always stated as a general proposition, and this never includes the particulars of time and space. In short, there is not an event which is the referent. An implication is substantiated both by the work and by specific instances of human experience, but the statement itself of the implication does not include refer ence to the particulars of person, thing, place, time. The statement of an implication is an interpretation about Human Experience, not about a person's particular experience. We may say that men with a high sense of purpose in their pro fession and in their dealings with humanity in general are often ignorant of the harm they do themselves and the pain 9 The same theme, incidentally, as E. A. Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy." they cause others when they courteously ignore their wives as lovers and individuals. This is an implication of Nos tromo. and it is just one step from this to a comparison of some person's experience with the lives of Charles Gould and his wife, but a comparison is not an implication; it is only based on an implication. Logically, we derive implications and then apply the work, by means of the implications, to a particular situation. In practice, nevertheless, we may initially intuit the similarities between the work and a particular personal experience, but when we analyze our com parison in order to substantiate it by reference to aspects of the work and to aspects of our experience, we must postu late an implication which will apply to both the work and to aspects of our experience. The similarity between the two is an implication which can be substantiated by the work and by a particular experience. Besides distinguishing between comparisons and implica tions, we must also distinguish between evidence and impli cations and deductions and implications. As we have re peatedly emphasized, a work of literature is not, as an event, the referent or proof of anything. The man who would postulate that "The Oedipus complex is a factor in all mother-son relationships" and then cite Hamlet as an example in his collection of evidence has misunderstood the nature of the event in literature. If he deduces from Hamlet that the Oedipus complex is a factor in all mother-son relation- 117 ships, he Is no better off. A literary implication is neither an empirical fact nor a logical conclusion but a judgment or evaluation which can be substantiated by both the work and an aspect of human experience. By "substan tiation" is meant that work and life at least do not contra dict the implication. The implication is meaningful because there are particular events in work and life which can be explained by this general proposition. Since an implication is not concerned with absolute truth or falsity, we need not be deterred when evidence to the contrary is offered. That there is some truth or validity to the general proposition is all that matters.^-0 We do indeed, as Wellek says, "have to have a knowledge independent of literature in order to know what the relation of a specific work to 'life1 may be" (p. 202). The more we know about life, the more implications we will be able to draw from and substantiate by a given work. Indeed, some works will be completely beyond a reader who has a particular 10 John Hospers ("Implied Truths in Literature," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX [Fall 1960], 37-46) discusses the problem of how we can get general prop ositions about life from literature. He recognizes that the reason this is possible is not that the author necessarily did in fact consciously imply them, or that they are somehow in the work (as if it were a syllogism), but that the exist ence of any human situation can and does serve as corrobora tion for a variety of judgments about different aspects of experience. However, what he means by concluding that "I am not saying that truth in literature is an important feature of these works aesthetically" is not explained nor does it . seem relevant to the problem. 118 limitation in his experience. We cannot appreciate the uniquely analogous meaning of a work of literature unless we are able to delimit an analogue for it in life and then trace the similarities between the two. The perennial point of contention between the theorists who (like Dr. Johnson) think of poetry in terms of the "grandeur of generality" and those who (like the New Critics) stress the particularity of poetry is not so diff- cult to resolve. The work itself, the statement of an event, is unique and particular; but its theme and implica tions are generalizations about human nature and experience. We escape then the concrete-universal paradox of Wimsatt and the autonomy-versus-referentiality contradiction that was the despair of Krieger. The notion of autonomy is essenti ally a misconception, because by its very nature no meaning ful human utterance can be autonomous. A meaningful human utterance means— but not necessarily "referentially." Referentiality has proven to be a rather narrow, positivis- tic, and inadequate notion of meaningfulness. Commands, questions, general propositions are not referential, nor is literature. Literature is neither autonomous nor referen tial; it is meaningful analogously. The language of a work of literature— that is, the particular statement— is all that we have to construe the event that will be meaningful to us as an analogue of an aspect of human experience. What the nature of meaning really is, what makes it and/or language possible at all, how we know that we know, 119 is one of the ultimate philosophical "problems" and as such unanswerable. But we do not have to solve the mind-body problem (of which the problem of meaning is only one of several versions) to agree that instances of language use are meaningful, that one can understand and use language without knowing what meaning is or without being able to state the meaning of particular utterances which are mean ingful. In addition, however, if one is interested and willing to go to the trouble of detailed analysis it is possible to give increasingly accurate and adequate accounts or interpretations of particular utterances. Such an inter pretation would acknowledge the relevance or function or use of the utterance and would attempt to characterize in gen eral the kind of statement it was and in particular how this one was uniquely significant. If we are content to call the articulating and elaborating of a statement its meaning, then the attempt of this dissertation to state precisely the nature and function of literature by analyzing specific works is simply an attempt to establish how literature is meaningful— what in general literary meaning is and what in particular is the meaning of specific works. Literary mean ing in general (and most succinctly) is the way a statement of an unverifiable event functions as an implied analogy with some aspect of human experience. The meaning of "Old. Mortality" in particular (and excluding all analysis of inference and implication) is the way children embody the 120 traits of the older generation even in rebelling against it. A complete analysis of literary meaning would be a detailed, systematic theory of literature based on a successful liter ary history. A complete statement of the meaning of a par ticular work would be a critical study which analyzed every thing about the work which had either rhyme or reason. The hope that either project will ever be accomplished may be a chimera, but this does not obscure the fact that it is demonstrably possible to distinguish between the success of different attempts. History and Implied Analogy All works of literature are statements of events, and all statements of events are literature; but while all literature functions analogously, not every work which func tions analogously is literature. Any statement about an event which involves human actions (that is, history in the broadest sense, including biography and autobiography) is primarily meaningful because it is referential and veri fiable. But as almost every reader of history knows, some histories at some time are more interesting as stories than they are as factual accounts. The less we know about the time and place being depicted, the less familiar we are with studying history, the more likely we are to read history as if it were literature. When we do this we are not primarily concerned with the facts but with the outcome of an episode, with the "plot" of a narration and how it relates or is 121 analogous to something we are familiar with— with an aspect of human experience. This is more likely to happen when the subject of the history is a small one than when it is a large one. The History of the Peloponnesian War is more likely to be read as literature than are the works of Spengler, Toynbee, or McNeill. Yet even these tomes have such well-developed themes that "all" of world history can be read as a single, unified event complete with plot and implications. The more a history, large or small, is con cerned with particular people doing particular things, the easier it is to read the account as interesting in its own right— not about human experience but like it. Most histories are eventually superseded when new information becomes available and new interpretations are shown to be more adequate, and while these works are still history, still verifiable statements about events, still essentially true, they are no longer important as histories. Some of them gather dust on library shelves, but others are such good stories that they continue to be read as litera ture. Gibbon's History is an example of this transition from a primarily referential function to a primarily analo gous function. But the point to remember is that while there are more accurate and more adequate histories of the Roman Empire, Gibbon's is still a statement about an event and not a work of literature. 122 A greater problem arises when the history is not a public but a private one. Is an autobiography true simply because the author, who ought to know if anyone does, says it is? Probably not. The canons of scientific verification demand that there be substantial evidence beyond one man's word. An autobiography may reveal heretofore unknown, and perhaps unknowable, information, but in addition the account as a whole must be in accord with and not contradict previ ously established facts about the author's life. If an un known person wrote an autobiography which was not verifiable we would be forced to call it literature. But autobiogra phies are not usually written by unknown but by public fig ures, and public lives offer abundant evidence for confirma tion. When an autobiography does not contradict the facts as we know them from pther sources and the new material is in accord with the old, we are justified in saying that the event as a whole, the subject's life, is the referent for the work— that the work is a statement about an event. A strict and complete account of the life of Henry Adams would be a good deal different from The Education of Henry Adams. But what this autobiography does give us, for all its ommissions and personal interpretations, is a veri fiable account of the life of a real person. And as such, it is history. Statements about events are never complete— not the most detailed history or minute account of a labora tory experiment. But if a statement, as far as it goes, is 123 about a space-time event (e.g. a man's life), then it is not literature, even if and when it is meaningful analogously. It is often claimed that in some way objective, or scien tific, or historical truth and falsity are irrelevant liter ary considerations. If we maintain this, however, we can only mean by it that the literary or analogous function is not one to which truth or falsity is applicable. We cannot say that knowing a thing to be verifiably true is ever an irrelevant consideration in analyzing, or classifying, or defining it. The Education would be an interesting and in structive story if no such person as Henry Adams had ever lived, but the crucial point is that he did live, and this is what separates statements about events from statements of events. Something which is fact cannot also be fiction. Is there an event in The Prelude? If so, what is it? Is it referential or not? The Prelude is not literature if there is no event, but if the event is Wordsworth's life then it is autobiography and not literature. There is no clear-cut answer here. The poem is devoted more to Words worth 1s speculations and meditations than to an account of his life. A person's thoughts on a variety of subjects is not an event unless these thoughts are placed in the context of an act of utterance. If the speaker is a real person and the context of place and time is his life, then the event is autobiography and not literature. Probably the closest cousin to The Prelude; or. Growth of a Poet's Mind; An 124 Autobiographical Poem is The Education of Henry Adams. In each the intention is not so much to write an account of a man's life as to give an interpretation of his intellectual and spiritual awakening over the course of a lifetime. But insofar as such an interpretation is based on an account of a space-time event, the work is history because all the information given is in accord with the wealth of informa tion we have from other sources. There is much in these works which is by its very nature unverifiable, but much which is verifiable, and if there is an event it can be nothing but the history of a man's life. The fact that Wordsworth has written in verse can be of no more signifi cance in classifying than the fact that Adams has written in prose. If all things written in verse are poems, then The Prelude is a poem. But the only agreement that exists about the nature of poetry, and even here there are dissenters, is that it is verse. And not all verse, not all poems, are statements of events. Look Homeward, Angel may be almost as ''autobiographi cal'' as The Prelude in the sense that the writer's life is the direct source for the incidents in the work, but there existed no Eugene Gant as depicted and no place Altamont, North Carolina, as claimed. Not whether a work is based on fact but whether it purports to be fact is the crucial con sideration. Look Homeward, Angel, as stated, is not true; and most of it is not even verifiable. The Prelude and The 125 Education, as stated, and as far as public verification can determine, are true. They are not literature. Likewise, Boswell's Life of Johnson and Jones's Life of Freud are history, even though we have to take one man's word for many of the conversations and personal incidents which comprise each work. Everything which Boswell says about Johnson is in accord with the facts which we have about him from other sources, and much of what Boswell says is verifiable— public events especially: births, marriages, deaths, residences, acquaintances, trips, publications, honors. Much of what Jones says about Freud is public record, but some of it is not. We have no reason, however, to think that Jones is not giving us the truth to the best of his ability. Certainly one Sigmund Freud did live and die at the time and place specified; so did a Samuel Johnson and a William Wordsworth. We may read their lives as if they were fiction, but we can read the life of Eugene Gant only as fiction. We need further to distinguish between false and inade quate accounts of events and literature. When a scientist falsifies the data of a laboratory experiment, when Russian history books get rewritten to fit the current party-line, when a defendant makes up an alibi to protect himself, these are not literature simply because they are demonstrably false. Literary statements are not false statements about events, they are unverifiable statements of_ events. We say 126 that literature "purports" to be true; that is, it "con cerns" or "has to do with" events and sometimes even makes the outright claim (as does much eighteenth century fiction) to truth. But false statements do much more. By their very nature they make the demand that everyone live and behave in terms of the statement being true. It can make a great deal of immediate and practical difference to a variety of people when accounts are not true. It makes none at all that literature is not. Lives, property, freedom, reputation, truth, justice, the advancement of knowledge, are at stake when people must decide on the truth or falsity of public statements. At stake with literature is only the relevance or irrelevance of a hypothetical situation to some general aspect of human experience. Irving Stone's fictionalized biography of Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical fiction (e.g. Down There on a Visit) are about the closest things we have to unclassifiable border line cases. The event in Stone's "biography" is real, and most of the incidents in it are in accord with the facts as we know them from other sources. But unlike Boswell and Jones, we catch Stone at times red-handed making up inci dents and presenting conversations which he could not pos sibly know to have occurred. Is this enough to disqualify the work as biography? And if it is, is it thereby litera ture? We could call it falsified history which is more true 127 than false, but it is also unverifiable by virtue of numer ous conversations. In terms of the definition this latter consideration seems to be the crucial one, and we would call The Agonv and the Ecstasy a work of literature. It is based on fact, but like War and Peace, the event as stated is essentially unverifiable. In Down There on a Visit the protagonist is named Christopher Isherwood. In many ways this work is like a Look Homeward. Angel in which the protagonist's name is Thomas Wolfe instead of Eugene Gant. Christopher Isherwood the man did in fact visit the places (Berlin, Athens, Los Angeles) as recorded in the work and at the times specified. Yet, although Down There on a Visit is clearly autobiograph ical, it does not stand up very well as history, not nearly so well in fact as The Prelude or The Education of Henry Adams. nor indeed as well as The Agonv and the Ecstacv. And in fact the author seems deliberately to exclude his work from the realm of autobiography— for example, this dis claimer from the first chapter: "And now before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man "I," let me consider him as a separate being. ..." The deciding factor is probably that our only source for most of the incidents -in the work, as they are depicted, moment by moment, is the book itself. Unauthenticated char acters and extensive dialogue are as much a part of Down There on a Visit as are the verifiable travels of Mr. Isher- 128 wood. The question is not how many clues or how much fact is in a work, but whether or not the statement as a whole is written so as to be verifiable. We are probably con fronted once again with a work of literature which is obvi ously based on fact but which makes little or no effort to make itself verifiable. The crucial difference between Isherwood's autobiographical literature and Wordsworth's autobiographical poem is that the former reports extensively on a variety of unverifiable people doing a variety of un verifiable things, while the latter reports almost entirely on one verifiable person (perhaps two, the second being Coleridge in name and deed) and almost all of the non- psychological activity reported is verifiable. Perhaps we can summarize this discussion by saying that works (e.g. The Prelude and The Education) which purport to be autobiographical purport to be true— to be history. They may or may not be verifiable? if, on the whole, they are not verifiable, they are false or inadequate history, not liter ature. And in any case they will be the data for future historians. On the other hand, a work (e.g. Down There on a Visit) which purports to be literature and is written as accounts of the moment could conceivably be verifiable. If so it would not be literature. But if it is not verifiable, it is not then false history but literature. CHAPTER IV THE MODE OP EXISTENCE OP A LITERARY WORK A work of literature is a statement of an unverifiable event which functions as an analogue in an implied analogy with an aspect of human experience. Thus we have defined literature and, at least in some sense, thus answered the question, What is. literature? But such an answer is likely to leave unsatisfied some people who will continue to ask, "Yes, but what is it— really?" Or as Wellek expresses it, "What is the 'real* poem; where should we look for it; how does it exist?"1 Answers to these questions our definition does not obviously supply. The definition does, however, imply answers. But before we examine these implications, we ought perhaps to take the precaution of first examining the question. Not every question that is askable is answerable, answerable at any rate by means of rational inquiry. Wellek does not attempt to define literature, but he does attempt to determine what the "real" poem is, that is, to answer the "extremely difficult epistemological question, that of the 'mode of existence' or the 'ontological situs' of a literary work of art" (p. 129). This is not an 1Theorv of Literature, p. 129. 129 130 uncommon question in speculations about art and aesthetics. And the traditional answers to it are those countered by Wellek— that the work of art is what exists on the printed page or that it is what is produced orally or that it is the experience in the mind of the reader or that it is the ex perience of the author. Wellek sees clearly that none of these answers is satisfactory, but he does not question the question. Rather he concludes with a sort of synthetic answer. Rejecting the idea that the work is any one of these things, he concludes that it is in some way all of them. The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (like a statue) nor mental (like the experience of light or pain) nor ideal (like a triangle). It is a system of norms of ideal concepts which are intersubjective. They must be assumed to exist in col lective ideology, changing with it, accessible only through individual mental experiences, based on the sound-structure of its sentences. (p. 144) Now this seems like no answer at all or at best a paradox. It tells us what a work of literature is not, rather than what it is and thus violates that elementary rule of classi fication which requires that one define positively rather than make up a category by exclusion. Yet there is some thing to every paradox. It embodies truisms which we all recognize but cannot reconcile. And these self-contradictory axioms derive, predictably enough, from self-contradictory sources. The question which gives rise to Wellek's answer is itself a splice made from two incompatible ideas. He 131 purports to be asking one question, but he really asks two— the answer to each of which must be very different. Thus the paradox. Notice that Wellek has not tried to say what either a work of art or a literary work of art is. The question of the mode of existence of a literary work of art would seem necessarily to presuppose answers first to the question "What is a work of art?" and having determined that, sec ondly, to "What is a literary work of art?" Of course the distinction might run the other way. That is, perhaps the question assumes first the answer to "What is a literary work?" and second the answer to "What is a literary work of art?" Given the question as Wellek formulates it, it is impossible to determine what is being asked. Is the mode of existence of works of art in general already known? Then the question would seem to attempt to determine only the peculiarly literary attributes of such an existence. Is the mode of existence of a literary work already established? Then the question seeks to determine only how those which are works of art exist? Finally, lurking behind this basic ambiguity in the question is the fact that no agreed upon answers have yet been established for either of the alterna tives. Neither works of art nor literary works have been satisfactorily identified and defined by any one. Indeed, considerations regarding mode of existence seem to be designed solely to get around the more fundamental 132 problem and necessity of definition. This is readily appar ent in what Wellek omits to consider under mode of exist ence. There is no attempt to establish any contingency between the mode of existence of literary works and their nature, although the nature of literature is the subject of an earlier chapter in Theory of Literature. There he as serts that "Language is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paints of pictures, or sounds of music" {p. 10).. Then he goes on paradoxically to observe in the next paragraph in a dependent clause that "literature, in distinction from the other arts has no medium of its own" (p. 11). Stone or bronze of course are no more confined to use by the sculptor than language is by the writer of liter ature. But the important point here, contradictions aside, is that Wellek admits to language being the medium of liter ature and yet when inquiring about the mode of existence of literature completely ignores any question of the mode of existence of this medium. If language is the medium of literature, then determining the mode of existence of lan guage is a necessary preliminary step to determining the mode of existence of literature. In failing to follow this logical sequence of inquiry, Wellek ends up by trying to answer the question he has not but should have asked first. His answer to the question "What is the mode of existence of a literary work of art?" is really an attempted answer to the question "What is the mode of existence of any instance 133 of language?" The literary work of art has in this case no more of a special ontological status than has an instruction manual. Any instance of language shares with Wellek's "literary work of art" the paradoxical status of being both a physical phenomenon and something more than that, some thing which, for want of a better term, may be called mental. Then, most importantly of all, if Wellek had actually posed the question which he has had to try to answer in this roundabout way, he would have seen at once that it was un answerable. If he had first determined what kind of thing literature is, what class of things it belongs to, he would have seen that to try to specify its mode of existence is as naive as trying to solve the mind-body problem and indeed comes to the same thing. A major goal in constructing the definition which is the topic of this dissertation has been to define literature without recourse to paradox; hopefully this has been done. What cannot be done without recourse to paradox, however, is to define the mode of existence of a literary work. For no kind of statement can be understood ultimately, ontologically. The connection between state ments as physics and statements as meaning can only be known to exist. How this connection exists, what it is, is a mystery. Labeling the relation "a system of norms of ideal concepts which are intersubjective" is simply giving a name to the problem, not solving it. 134 While we cannot fathom the nature of language and/or meaning, we can, on the other hand, distinguish and analyze different kinds of meaning— that is, we can identify the various conventions of language and ascertain which ones are relevant to interpreting specific statements. The purpose of this dissertation has been to identify the conventions which characterize statements known as literature, and while this does not solve or even "shed light on" the problem of meaning and the mind-body problem, it does allow us to raise and to solve some less ambitious ontological questions of a genuine literary, as opposed to metaphysical, nature. One of the most obvious of these is the status of the literary event. This is not, as is the mode of existence of the work, a problem characteristic of all language. It is peculiar to literature in that the literary work appears to refer to an event, indeed, often in great detail, but in fact does not, for the event is fictitious. Where then, and how, does this apparently nonexistent event come into our ken? Here is a genuine literary problem with which that of the mode of existence of the work has unfortunately been confused. Another such problem concerns the limits of the statement itself, the necessity of distinguishing between those features of the statement which are attributes of the work and those which are attributes of its oral or written presentation. There are many features commonly associated with literary works, such as titles, illustrations, prefaces, 135 typography, which are not bv definition parts of the work. Verse is perhaps the most notable of these features and translation the most crucial testing ground for establishing what the limits of the statement are, that is, what features of the statement of an event can be omitted or altered with out altering its identity. The definition of literature developed here clearly implies solutions to these kinds of questions about mode of existence, so it is to them we now turn. The Mode of Existence of the Literary Event All works of literature involve or have to do with an unverifiable event. What then is the mode of existence of an unverifiable event? Specifically, where is the event and what kind of thing is it? The mode of existence of the referent of a specific proposition depends on whether or not the statement is true. If it is true that "There is a 14,495 foot mountain in California," then that mountain exists as a space-time event external to and independent of any statement. If it is false that "There is a 14,495 foot mountain in Los Angeles," then that mountain exists only as part of the meaning of that or any other statement which erroneously refers to such a state of affairs. The mountain does not exist in or as the statement, but neither does it exist independent of that or some other statement which brings it to mind. An event called to mind by a statement but having no verifiable space-time existence independent of 136 the statement exists only in the mind or imagination of someone who thinks, creates, or recreates it in his mind or imagination. The mode of existence of such an event is not part of the physical or speech side of statements but part of the mental or, for want of a more precise and definable term, semantic side. The event of a work of literature is not the alleged facts which are stated as part of the statement; the event is the construct which each reader imagines for himself if he understands or is able to interpret the statement. It includes not only the "facts" given in the statement but also the inferences which are necessary if the meaning is to be a unified, though unverifiable, space-time event. No work can give all the information that is relevant to an event no matter how circumscribed the event- is or whether or not it is verifiable. There is no statement which has to do with an event which could not be more detailed and specific than it is. And therefore, even the most rigorous and con servative interpretation of a literary work includes infer ences which are not explicitly stated in the work. In unmediated works, for example, we must infer a situ ation, including speaker and hearer, in order to render the statement a literary work. But while this is warranted by certain characteristics of the work, it is rarely stated outright. We are not told that the speaker in "Felix Randal" is a priest or that he is speaking to a messenger. 137 But if we do not infer this, the work will not be compre hensible to us. In "Old Mortality" we must infer that Miranda was enrolled in the convent school where we find her "immured" half way through the story, even though there has been no account of it. To make the work a unified space time event we have to account for the fact that between Part I and Part II two years have elapsed and that when Part I ended Miranda was at Grandmother1s farm and when Part II begins she is unaccountably in a New Orleans convent school. Unless these are two different works of literature, we must infer that Miranda continues to exist from day to day and that, among other unstated things, she is taken one day with her sister to New Orleans and enrolled in a board ing school. This fact is not stated in the work, but any interpretation of the story which denies this inference can be demonstrated to be inadequate. And an interpretation which does include it can be justified by obvious and com pelling reasons. The event which a reader constructs in his imagination can be judged more or less adequate by comparing it with the statement, but the interpretation of every work of litera ture necessarily involves constructing an event in the mind of the reader and making it more detailed than the work, conceived as a collection of propositions, warrants. The event of every literary work includes not only the details given in the statement of it but also all the details which 138 must of necessity have happened to the people involved within the limits of the event. It is a highly justifiable inference that the heroines of Austen and James are as com pelled to defecate as those of Rabelais, Swift, and Joyce. It is impossible to conceive of a human being existing for several months without doing more physiologically than drinking tea, and insofar as, for instance, "The Real Thing" is a single, unified event we know of many incidents which must occur even without being told. This does not, however, permit speculation about Hamlet at Wittenburg or the girl hood of Shakespeare's heroines. The event in Hamlet clearly begins after he has left school and after Ophelia has ceased to be a child. As far as Shakespeare's play is concerned, these are idle speculations. What is not idle, however, is to make the necessary inference that between the time that Hamlet meets the ghost and the time he meets his death he eats and sleeps. To see a work as a unified event is to see it as a continuous segment of space and time rather than as a series of discrete episodes. The event in Hamlet is everything which happens to Hamlet from the time the ghost appears to the fatal duel with Laertes. The event of a literary work is not in the statement but in the meaning of the statement and therefore in the mind or imagination of the reader or listener. The meaning of a verifiable proposition is coextensive with the space time referent; to know the event to exist is to know the 139 meaning of the statement. But with literature the meaning is the referent; to envision the event is to know the mean ing of the statement. In this sense all literature is imagistic. And it is also for this reason that while the statement of an unverifiable event can be precisely deter mined and characterized, the event which it states cannot always be. When an event is unverifiable and exists only in the minds of readers, the only test with which to force agreement is a statement, not an independently existing referent. What a work says is by and large ascertainable, but what it implies, and it always of necessity does imply, is more open to interpretation. Some inferences are demon strably inadequate, but some seem neither sufficiently sup ported nor denied, and therefore a reader who accepts such an inference will conceive of an event slightly differently from the reader who rejects or never thinks of the alternate possibility. This is not to maintain that the work of literature is open to any and every interpretation and that its meaning lies only in the mind of the reader. Quite the contrary, the purpose here is to delimit the area of individual discrepancy in the conception of the work and to show in what way it is relevant to interpreting the meaning. There is not a variety of acceptable interpretations nor even different levels of meanings for a single work— just one most adequate interpretation. 140 There is a difference, however, between making infer ences about implied details of the event, such as Miranda's being enrolled in the convent school, and making the neces sary inferences about the statement without which there is no event. Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale".illustrates both kinds. "Ode to a Nightingale" is an utterance and therefore an unmediated event, so it of course leaves a great deal to inference. Nevertheless, the poem clearly delimits the con tours of a specific event. There is an address to a night ingale who is singing in the trees somewhere out of sight. This implies a speaker. The time is the middle of the night in May— it may be midnight. The moon seems to be up but is not directly visible to the speaker. The place is very clearly a rural area and either in or near a valley with a glade and its surrounding forest. But here the details begin to get ambiguous. And thus here the readers reach the limits of their common conception of the event. What the speaker says to the nightingale is clear enough, and the circumstances of his saying it are carefully delimited— up to a point— but then, on the further details of his circumstances, the speaker seems to be, indeed sys tematically to be, ambiguous about his location. Ambiguous, rather than vague, is the proper term here because two and only two alternatives are possible for the further envision ing of the event. The speaker may either be walking in the woods when he hears the nightingale singing or be lying 141 somewhere, in or out of doors, trying to sleep and only imagining himself walking in the woods. The sense of dis sociation from the world and a kind of mental numbness con veyed by the event is as characteristic of walking in the woods in the dark as it is of lying in bed in the dark try ing to sleep on a summer night. Reading the last line "Do I wake or sleep?" one is inclined to accept the latter alter native. Reading line 41 "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet" one is inclined to envision the former alternative. The point is that the poem does not say. Nor does it have to in order to create an event and thus be a work of litera ture. It does create an event and does provide that event with a number of details. It states more than, for example, "The Metro" or "0 Western Wind." But even so, the statement of "Ode to a Nightingale" does not go as far as the reader needs to in imagining the event. And though we can envision an event vaguely, we can not envision it ambiguously. Not every reader necessarily has a detailed visual image evoked by the poem— some people imagine more visually than others— but everyone will have a conception of the speaker doing something somewhere and will not be conceiving of him as both abed and walking. Indeed, so consistently ambiguous is the poet on this point that one is justified in thinking this ambiguity is intentional, since it does harmonize with the fading and blurring of the line between imagination and reality which the poem unquestionably deals with. As far as 142 interpreting the work goes, as opposed to conceiving of it, it is not necessary to decide. This does not mean that one accepts both alternatives; it means that neither is relevant to the interpretation and therefore that they are not open to debate. One other example should make this point clear. Since the ode is an utterance, we not only infer a speaker in the event of which the utterance is a part, but we also infer, even without thinking, that because he is a speaker he is human, and because he is human, we make the undeniable inference that he is a member of one of the two sexes. Again we have just two alternatives, and again we have no way of deciding upon one, and again in conceiving the event we conceive of one and cannot conceive of both at the same time. Recognizing that a statement creates an event by pro viding certain minimum details of place and time is only part of the literary experience, because to recognize is also to envision or imagine such an event as if it were real and complete. This of necessity involves both inferring and providing necessary but uninferrable details. In "Ode to a Nightingale" we infer that the statement is part of an act of utterance and that the speaker is a natural human being and therefore either male or female. We postulate in our imagining of the event either a man or a woman. The details of the statement oblige us to envision an early summer rather than a late summer night, but we are neither obliged 143 nor warranted in picking one sex over the other. Therefore, when we do make a choice, whether consciously or not, we are not, strictly speaking, interpreting the work but adding details to it. Information about the sex of a character is always relevant to envisioning the event, but it is not necessarily relevant to interpreting the work. There may seem to be an enormous difference between a work of literature like Keats's ode, which leaves a great deal, and a work like Joyce's Ulvsses. which tries to leave little to the imagination. Yet the difference is nothing at all compared to that between these two works and a work which has an inconsistent event and therefore cannot be con ceived of at all. Such a work cannot be literature, and yet there are a few works, works which have even been canonized in the English tradition, which may at first glance appear to present an event but do not. This canonization is rather puzzling because the works are obviously so incon sistent in event as to be incoherent. Graham Hough attempts to explain this puzzle in referring to The Waste Land. I cannot think that the problems raised by the structure of The Waste Land have been faced. They have been a party matter, a matter of polemic or defence; . . . to accept this sort of technique was at one time a sort of touchstone for participation in modern poetry . . . While the poem was still capable of causing bewilderment it established itself. The brilliance of the imagery, the auditory and incantatory grandeur of its best pas sages, stole into the consciousness and became a part of our poetical property; it became ungrateful, almost in decent to ask of what sort of continuum these fragments were a part. And we became satisfied with a level of coherence that we should never have found sufficient in any earlier poem . . . But the questions remain— above 144 all the question of what really makes the poem a total ity, if it is one at all.2 Hough requires, correction here on only one point. What he says of The Waste Land can indeed be said, even to "the brilliance of the imagery, the auditory and incantatory grandeur of its best passages," of an earlier poem— "Kubla Khan." To give Coleridge his due, he did not as Eliot did offer his work as anything but a fragment. But this has not prevented literary critics from accepting it as a good deal more. They simply disagree with the author. "In spite of Coleridge's statement," announces one critic, "the poem 3 appears to be a complete and finished pronouncement." Such a conclusion is arrived at in the usual manner, that is, by interpreting the work allegorically. Yet "Kubla Khan" is even less a unified work than is Christabel. which is incom plete but not inconsistent. "Kubla Khan" as an event never gets started. The poem opens with a third-person past-tense description of Kubla Khan's palace and surroundings, fol lowed by what the khan heard in the tumult of the river. Then occurs in line 37 an inexplicable shift to a first- person past-tense description of a vision. Beginning at line 42 this narrator wishes that he could remember the song 2 Image and Experience; Studies in a Literary Revolu tion (London, 1960), pp. 21-22. 3 Martin S. Day, History of English Literature 1660- 1837 (New York, 1963), p. 363. 145 of the damsel he saw in this vision which is in no way directly related to the preceding introduction of Kubla Khan. Yet the narrator feels that if he could remember the damsel's song, he would be inspired to sing of "that dome" (Kubla*s), for if he did, everyone who heard him would see the scene and point him out as one especially blessed and to be feared. The work starts out as a third-person narrative and ends with a first-person admission that the narrative cannot be finished. Thus it could hardly constitute an event. Kubla hearing from afar "ancestral voices prophesying war" could, if sustained, be an event. Someone having a vision of a damsel playing a dulcimer and singing could, if sus tained, be an event. And people crying out to others to beware of the narrator could, if sustained, be an event. They are insufficiently sustained in themselves to consti tute a series of events, while in any case they are not pre sented as three works of literature but as one work. Yet the juxtaposition of three unsustained events can hardly be thought to add up to one sustained one. The poem is not a complete "pronouncement," and the only pronouncement in the poem is that it is not one. As for The Waste Land, in both its structure and its allusiveness it might well have been modeled on "Kubla Khan" (with the exception that Eliot has provided his own Road to Xanadu in footnotes). The number of fragmentary events do not by virtue of their juxtaposi- 146 tion add up to one event. The Waste Land, therefore, what ever else it may be— one man's Bartlett's or Rorschach— is not a work of literature. Indeed, line 431 of The Waste Land seems to offer as much of an explanation as "Kubla Khan" did of what it is: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," says the narrator. An attempt to establish the event of The Waste Land, then, would give substance to Hough's doubts about its co herence just as our analysis demonstrated the lack of coher ence in "Kubla Khan." Such an effort helps us to see not only what these works are but also what we mean by the con cepts "coherence" and "incoherence." Unlike other works discussed so far which have been called, but are not, liter ature according to the definition, "Kubla Khan" and The Waste Land are not therefore recognized as something else— history, autobiography, general propositions; they instead fail to be what they purport to be, works of literature. These works have been charged with being incoherent. Now we see what that means: Works of literature which are incoher ent are works which purport to be but do not succeed in being statements of an event. Once again the definition of literature presented here has helped us see not only what literature is but also what we can and do mean when we talk about it. 147 The Limits of the Statement Having delimited the range and usefulness of the con cept of the mode of existence of a literary event, we may now relate it to the problem of establishing the limits of the statement which, as it were, generates the event. What features of the statement are relevant to its nature and function as literature and what, if any, are not? The ans wer to this question could be arrived at by introducing alterations into a statement of an event. What changes would make the work a different one? Specifically, is the concept "variant version" a valid one, and if it is, what differences constitute a variant and which ones create a different work? The question is not actually a new one; it provides the impetus for several standard scholarly activi ties. Yet despite the fact that large areas of literary study— textual editing, folktale and ballad collecting and analysis— have been devoted principally to the study of this problem of variation, significant and otherwise, the cri teria according to which one work is clearly a "version" of another seem yet to be established. Once the concept of event is clearly understood, however, the problem of "vari ant versions" emerges as really a theoretical rather than a practical one. If a work of literature can be defined as a statement of an event, then it follows that variant versions are two or more works, in which the event is identical but the statement varies. It also follows that such instances 148 will then be extremely rare in oral literature and, because of the fallibilities of scribes and typesetters, extremely common in written literature. It is in the field of oral literature, however, that scholars have been spending con siderable effort to establish similarity and in written literature that they have been emphasizing the importance of detecting variation. It is in fact rather difficult to find examples of variant versions other than those produced by typographical errors. Even an author's revisions frequently embody material changes, that is, changes in the information necessary to creating the event in all its detail. Textual critics often point with horror to the mounting number of variants due to typesetting that occur with each new edi tion. Fredson Bowers notes anxiously, for example, that the sixth and most frequently reprinted edition of The Scarlet 4 Letter contains 62 variant words. Yet neither is this a sizable percentage of the probably 50,000 words of the text nor is any one of these changes material; that is, none of them modifies at all what is supposed to be taking place in the work. It is possible, indeed, to modify a statement of an event by a much larger percentage than this and still leave the event untouched, thus producing a variant version rather than a different though similar work. The kind not the amount of change is the determinant. 4 "Textual Criticism," in James Thorpe, ed., The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Litera tures (New York, 1963), p. 23. 149 Such wholesale alteration of the statement without any concomitant change in the event probably never occurs, how ever, except when one writer undertakes to revise his own or someone else's work. Thus Mark Twain's famous “emendation" of a passage from Penimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans purports to say in 215 words exactly what Cooper uses 320 words for. Here is Cooper's account: In a minute he was once more fastened to the tree, a helpless object of any insult or wrong that might be of fered. So eagerly did every one now act, that nothing was said. The fire was immediately lighted in the pile, and the end of all was anxiously expected. It was not the intention of the Hurons absolutely to destroy the life of their victim by means of fire. They designed merely to put his physical fortitude to the severest proofs it could endure, short of that extremity. In the end, they fully intended to carry his scalp into their village, but it was their wish first to break down his resolution, and to reduce him to the level of a com plaining sufferer. With this view, the pile of brush and branches had been placed at a proper distance, or one at which it was thought the heat would soon become in tolerable, though it might not be immediately dangerous. As often happened, however, on these occasions, this dis tance had been miscalculated, and the flames began to wave their forked tongues in a proximity to the face of the victim that would have proved fatal in another in stant had not Hetty rushed through the crowd, armed with a stick, and scattered the blazing pile in a dozen direc tions. More than one hand was raised to strike the pre sumptuous intruder to the earth; but the chiefs prevented the blows by reminding their irritated followers of the state of her mind. Hetty, herself, was insensible to the risk she ran; but, as soon as she had performed this bold act, she stood looking about her in frowning resentment, as if to rebuke the crowd of attentive savages for their cruelty. “God bless you, dearest sister, for that brave and ready act," murmured Judith, herself unnerved so much as to be incapable of exertion; “Heaven itself has sent you on its holy errand." And here is Twain's revised version: 150 In a minute he was once more fastened to the tree. The fire was immediately lighted. It was not the inten tion of the Hurons to destroy Oeerslayer's life by fire; they designed merely to put his fortitude to the severest proofs it could endure short of that extremity. In the end, they fully intended to take his life, but it was their wish first to break down his resolution and reduce him to a complaining sufferer. With this view the pile of brush had been placed at a distance at which it was thought the heat would soon become intolerable, without being immediately dangerous. But this distance had been miscalculated; the fire was so close to the victim that he would have been fatally burned in another instant if Hetty had not rushed through the crowd and scattered the brands with a stick. More than one Indian raised his hand to strike her down, but the chiefs saved her by re minding them of the state of her mind. Hetty herself was insensible to the risk she ran; she stood looking about her in frowning resentment, as if to rebuke the savages for their cruelty. "God bless you, dearI" cried Judith, "for that brave and ready act. Heaven itself has sent you on its holy errand. . . . "5 Nothing occurs in Cooper's account which does not also in Twain's. Twain eliminates no detail of the event that either has not already been stated or clearly implied by Cooper. All the changes are in the interest of removing what is either redundant or too obviously inferrable to need mentioning. In no instance is what is happening, what the event is, affected. Whether Twain's version or Cooper's is "better," however, must remain a matter of personal prefer ence. Some readers may prefer the economy of Twain; others, Cooper's emphasis through repetition and elaboration. The existence of variant versions provides us only with 5 "Cooper's Prose Style," in Bernard DeVoto, ed., Let ters from Earth (New York, 1964), pp. 122-124. Twain does add six words at the end which, though amusing, are neither to Cooper's point nor to mine.. 151 variation, not with any means of choosing one version over another. While the elimination of 105 words may make no material difference in the event, one or two punctuation marks can make all the difference in the world. The concluding two lines of Keatsi-s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" contain one of the best known instances of just such an ambiguity of event. Since this is an ambiguity, furthermore, which could be re solved by finding out what punctuation Keats had intended, an examination of it should reveal the usefulness of textual criticism in the interpretation of events. For of course the ambiguity involves much more than interpreting just the two lines; if that were all that were involved, an under standing of the sentiments expressed in the lines would be the only concern. But the problem goes deeper. The senti- ments can not be clear because it is not clear whose senti ments they are. Since the ode is an utterance, all the words are of course those of the person whose utterance it is, for he is the direct source of everything that comes to the reader. But in order to recognize that a statement i3 an utterance we must be able to infer the act of utterance of which it is a part. And as far as the act of utterance is concerned, much more may be happening than just that the speaker is speaking. In Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, though we have at first hand only the words of the duke, we know that as he is speaking them, the count's 152 emissary replies. We even know much of what the emissary says, as well as other things he does (sitting down, rising, stepping aside for the duke), and these all constitute part of the event of which the duke * s utterance is only another part. It is this act— the event of the statement— and what constitutes it that is ambiguous in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The speaker begins by calling upon the personified urn to answer his questions about the scenes painted on it. Then he addresses various figures in these scenes. Stanza four opens with another question, but to whom it is ad dressed is not clear. Then the priest in one of the scenes is questioned; then another question is asked— again of whom is not clear. Finally, in stanza five the speaker returns to addressing the urn as a whole. Now, since the utterance begins with seven questions directed to the urn, since at least two more in the utterance may be directed to it, since the urn is called upon at the end as well as the beginning of the utterance, and since the urn is described as capable of expressing and saying, the question arises: Does the urn finally reply? But this question cannot be answered and therein lies the ambiguity. There is no question of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" being like "Edwaird" in presenting the unmedi ated words of two speakers, but there is a question as to whether the event is like that of "0 Western Wind" in having only one speaker .(the wind never replies) or like "My Last Duchess" in including two. 153 If there were quotation marks around the entire two lines (or if we knew that the line divisions were being used in place of quotation marks), then it would be clear that the urn does finally speak, providing its inquisitor with an answer, however oblique, to his many questions. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Thus the speaker would be quoting the answer as it comes to him as part of the event. Here is a problem for the textual critic; yet textual criticism is unfortunately of little help after all. The critic can discover differences in texts, but he cannot help us decide which is the preferable one— even when, as here, an important part of the event is at stake. The quotation marks discovered around "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the 1820 edition may be rejected as not stemming from the author; they may be accepted as only setting off a "saying" or truism within the larger quota tion. This variant may be a correction; it may be an error. There is no way of knowing. If the urn is conceived as "saying" only the aphorism, then it is likely that "say'st" means "symbolizes" and thus that the urn does not actually speak. But even this does not necessarily follow, and the poet certainly does not preclude a speaking urn. On the contrary, he has it addressed, has it asked at least seven and possibly nine questions, and describes it as a "histor ian, who canst thus express a . . . tale" and as "a friend to man, to whom thou say'st." But contrary to this, the urn 154 also is addressed as the "bride of quietness," "the foster- child of silence," "silent form." And the contradictoriness of these two alternatives is reenforced by the oxymorons in the imagery of flowery tales, leaf-fringed legends, unheard melodies, ditties of no tone piped not to the sensual ear but to the spirit.** Thus, unless the textual critic can establish textually that Keats intended punctuation marks around these two lines, he cannot solve this crucial ambigu ity, for although a solution would be provided by discover ing their presence around both lines, it is not provided by their absence. As "Ode on a Grecian Urn" now stands, both alternatives are in terms of the statement as a whole equally plausible. Keats may not have resolved the ambigu ity for himself, or he may have been clear in his own mind, yet not realized the actual ambiguity of his statement. But for either of these rather common kinds of literary short comings, the value of textual criticism is clearly over emphasized. What the author has not done the critic, tex tual or otherwise, cannot do for him. Doubtless there are occasions when actual incomprehen sibility is eliminated by recourse to variant editions or to original manuscripts. But the desire to recover and g The ambiguity in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" provides an illuminating contrast to that in "Ode to a Nightingale." In the latter there is no question about what the event is, even though the lack of some information allows us to envi sion part of that event in our own way. But in the former the lack of information prevents us from envisioning this part of the event at all. 155 preserve the purity of the author's "intended" version that impels the textual critic is clearly insatiable. It derives from two basic but insupportable assumptions: (1) that the author had or finally came to have one single unified inten tion regarding these kinds of variations; and (2) that any unauthorized change in the text is a "corruption" and there fore must make a significant difference. When the textual critic has to acknowledge, as Bowers does, that we cannot in many instances find a single intention, even if there may have been one, that authors often seem not to have remem bered what it was, if they had one, that some authors do not notice or seem to care about alterations which do occur, that alterations in the course of transmission are inevi table, then any support for the first assumption entirely 7 disappears. To these admissions has been added the point that the textual critic is frequently presented with con flicting intentions of exactly the same weight. If these alternatives do not make any difference in determining the meaning of the work, then they can safely be ignored. If they do make a difference, then it is difficult to see what value outside of a numerical one there is to being presented with two or more almost identical works of literature in stead of one. 7 Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 1-34. Note especially the anecdote concerning Eliot's failure to remember his own revisions, pp. 32-33. But Bowers does not draw the obvious conclusion. 156 This conception of variant versions following from the definition of literature presented here is not mere quib bling. It embodies a very important principle of literary interpretation, interpretation, that is, of the meaning of any given work of literature. The textual critic's second working assumption, that unauthorized textual changes are "bad" is demonstrated by his contempt for critics who have based a generalization about a writer's meaning or imagina tive skill not on the meaning or achievement of the author at all but on what turns out to be a typographical discrep ancy. Bowers cites the instance in which F. 0. Matthiesen identified "soiled fish of the sea" as a Melvillian dis- cordia concors that "could only have sprung from an imagina tion that had apprehended the terrors . . . of the immate rial deep as well as the physical." "Unfortunately," says Bowers, credit for this metaphysical shock should properly go to the unknown compositor of the reprint consulted, whose memory or fingers slipped while trying to set "coiled fish of the sea."® The incident does not therefore demonstrate the need for accurate texts, however. As far as I can determine, whether the fish are soiled or coiled makes absolutely no difference in the meaning of the novel in which the phrase appears since it is merely a general comment about deep sea fish and not about particular fish which participate in the 8,,Textual Criticism," p. 23. 157 event. Furthermore, neither "coiled" nor "soiled" seems to make much sense in the context. It is hard to see why deep sea fish should be described as "coiled" any more than "soiled." What is demonstrated by the incident, conse quently, is the essential subjectivity and scholarly worth lessness of such generalizations as Matthiessen's. General izations about an author's imagination based on a phrase or even a collection of phrases misapprehend the nature of literature and the kinds of achievements possible in its composition. Textual critics like Bowers in fact find themselves caught up in an inconsistency. On the one hand they deplore the interpretations of New Critics like Empson, who bases the whole point of an Eliot poem on a printer1s discrepancy in the last three lines. On the other hand they insist upon the recovery of the initial purity of an author1s text be cause "an author's punctuation and capitalization (and pos sibly his spelling and word-division) are literary instru ments" (p. 24). But if they are not instruments for deter mining the event, then it is difficult to see how they are literary. The ascendancy of the printed word in the past century has stimulated a sort of textual fetishism which can probably find no current parallels outside of the orthodox Muslim's attitude toward the Koran. The meaning of a work is derived from the event which the work creates. This must be the scholar's basic principle of analysis. Some creators t 158 give more, some less, assistance in the interpretation of the event by means of the comment upon it and the disposi tion of its details. The shorter the work, the more likely the creation of the event is to depend on fewer words of text with a resulting likelihood that a single error can be crucial, but in most statements, literary or otherwise, the inherent redundancy of language, as telephone engineers have found, by and large assures communication. And insofar,as this is true, the dangers of printed transmission are a bugaboo. The same principle of course applies to other inciden tal features of the written or printed text, whether type faces, line arrangements, colors, illustrations, or illumi nations. If an illustration is specifically referred to in the text as part of the text, then it must be considered part of the statement. Incomprehensibilities would result if the literal narrative lines or the blank page were omitted from Tristram Shandv; the dancing men ciphers from Sherlock Holmes' "Adventure of the Dancing Men"; or the map from his "Adventure of the Priory School." On the other hand, omission from an edition of Treasure Island of the map of the island drawn by the author would not cause any ob scurities because the map is never referred to by the text as being in it. An edition of George Herbert's "The Altar" may or may not retain the typographical shape of the origi nal, for it affects neither the statement nor the event and 159 therefore is just like the Treasure Island map. No refer ence is made in the poem to this printed arrangement, and the event of the poem remains in any and every shape an utterance addressed to the Lord by one of his servants. The phrase "this altar" in the closing line may be taken as referring also to the typography, but it functions quite unambiguously as a reference to the speaker's heart de scribed as a "broken altar" in the opening lines. Any of these features may or may not be part of the statement, de pending on whether or not they are referred to by the state ment as being part of it; in no case, however, are they part of the event. Once visual features become part of the event we have a cartoon, movie, or drama, not a literary work, for the literary features would then be incomprehensible without the visual ones. E. E. Cummings' contributions to typo graphical styling were probably as great as his contribu tions to literature, but this in no way demonstrates that typography is the same as literature or has anything to do with its essential character— even in Cummings' own works. Before going on to consider the relevance of oral fea tures to literature, however, we do have to face a genuine problem unique to its written or printed character. That is the place and significance of labels, epigraphs, prefaces, and other verbal— as opposed to visual— features which appear detachable from the work. How do these features affect, for example, the identification of space, time, or narrative type in the work? Here again we must apply a corollary of our basic principle: Any detachable element which provides information of the unverifiable event qua unverifiable event and is not inconsistent with the narra tion of that event is part of the statement. What is meant by detachable elements is not chapters or acts or stanzas. These are part of the statement; there is no principle by which we can exclude some subdivisions and retain others. They are like the layers of an onion? they constitute the work rather than are appended to it. In Tom Jones the de tachable elements are not the eighteen Chapter Ones of the eighteen books which comprise the novel but the title and the dedicatory essay. So-called "interchapters" (in Tom Jones. Middlemarch. War and Peace, etc.) are not detachable and are distinguishable in the narration only insofar as statements which refer directly to the event can be untan gled from those which are "about" something else. As far. at least, as this study is concerned, the notion of titles is like that of plays, lyrics, stories, poems. That is, these are traditional terms which have broad but imprecisely defined meanings, and while it is necessary upon occasion to make use of them, they cannot be treated as anything but makeshift concepts. The "title" of many lyric utterances is simply the first line or a short ened form of it. The titles of some works have been lost and new labels have been supplied for convenience. And, 161 indeed, the policy that works but not titles can be copy righted seems to acknowledge that in most instances, at least, they are not part of the work. For the purposes of this study a title is anything which is regarded as such; so it was with "poem." But as with poems, not all titles are included within our conception of literature. For example, no work which is an utterance can have a title which is part of the statement of event, because in an unmediated event every word of the statement is part of the event, is the direct words of a person whose act of utterance constitutes the unverifiable event. In the case of "0 Western Wind" the title is simply redundant, the opening phrase having been lifted out of the statement and appended as a label. Such is the convention with most utterances, though not, however, with The Fall and Haircut. There is no conventional label ing of these utterances, instead there was a deliberate choice which, at least with The Fall, seems to be also a commentary on the work. However, if we allow these titles to be part of the statement of event, then we can no longer interpret the events as unmediated utterances and would be forced to read them as third-person accounts. Not only does this alternative seem an inadequate interpretation of the works, it also fails to take into account the several rea sons for viewing detachable elements as in fact detached— detached at least insofar as the event and the statement which creates it is concerned. 162 When a work is a third-person account, then the ques tion of titles does not really arise since a title is itself a similarly undifferentiated "statement." The title of War and Peace is a commentary upon the event just as the third- person account of that event is a commentary upon it. In the same way, though less frequently, the title of a first- person account can be part of the narration, part of the statement of the event. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.. Gentleman is a first-person account of that person's life, and the account is furnished by the author, Mr. Shandy, with the title. The title, therefore, is part of the work because it is part of the narrating of the event. The title "In a Station of the Metro" is also part of that first- person statement of an event, not, however, because the nar rator as a character makes a point of providing the reader with one but because it is an essential part of the account. It is as if the haiku quoted above had been entitled "Old- Pond" and the poem had read "Prog jump-in / Water-sound." This poem creates an event by juxtaposing rather than gram matically connecting the images. Pound does the same thing except that he writes the first of the three as a title. Written to emphasize the unity of the entire statement, the poem, now untitled, would look like a traditional haiku: In a station of the metro: the apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough. 163 Coleridge's poem "Dejection: An Ode" is a first-person account of a man sitting alone on a stormy night, and the title provides no information about the event, nor is it a part of the narration as a whole. There is, however, another problem. Directly below the title and before the man begins his present-tense account, there is in italics a four-line stanza from the ballad "Sir Patrick Spence" which is labeled as such. The first lines of the ode read: Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade. . . . There is no evidence that the speaker is reading the ballad. It seems to be quoted as a preface to the ode (and like the title it occurs not only before the text of the poem but before the Roman numeral "I" which prefaces the first stanza) only to provide a thematic introduction and to in sure that the important reference will not be lost. The event of the poem is not a man speaking or composing an ode; it is a man musing or talking to himself. The only way in which the lines from the ballad could be made part of this statement is for the character-narrator to speak them as part of his narrative. This he does not do, but even if he did, we would still have to account for "— Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence," which is written under the quoted stanza. We must conclude then that this is editing on Coleridge's part (just as Coleridge as editor furnished the marginal 164 summaries to "The Ancient Mariner") and not part of the statement of event. . Finally, we have comments by the author qua author appended to the beginning or end of a work on his relation to the work or on its relation to something else. The pref aces of Conrad and James fall into this category. So does Tennessee Williams' "Production Notes" appended to the con- f ' elusion of The Glass Menagerie. The text of recent plays is sometimes prefaced with information on the initial produc tion; this is not part of the statement of event. The problems concerning the mode of existence of a written statement seem worlds apart from any that might arise in the treatment of oral literature. Indeed, the term "literature" implies a rather one-sided conception of the phenomenon. Certainly the fundamental assumptions of the textual critic provide a rather striking contrast with the enterprise of the collector and student of oral literature. One might almost think they were studying entirely unrelated phenomena— they go about it so differently. The student of oral literature, primarily of the folktale, has heretofore been mainly occupied with the "discovering" of the same or similar works in different geographical areas and linguistic groups. Yet the textual critic would no doubt be appalled at the "corruption" that occurs in transmission. Numerous collectors of oral literature have testified to their 165 inability to get the same song or story twice from an in- g formant. The informant will cheerfully agree to repeat the work, but he will inevitably alter it— -and not in minor ways but materially. It is almost impossible to find two identi cal oral works of literature. If they do occur, they must go either unnoticed or unrecorded or both. For to be sure what the collector really seems to be after is a maximum of variety within certain limits of similarity. The wider the range of variants, the more they coincide with the peculiar aims of the folktale collector, modeling his study as he does on Indo-European linguistics. And the nature of oral literature consists of the memorizing, not of statements or even of events, but of a kind of skeleton of the event or a series of incidents which may be varied, elaborated, or com bined according to the demands or impulses of the moment of presentation. Here then is variety in God's plenty. The question of variant versions does not therefore center, as in textual criticism, upon the existence of vari ation but upon attempts to establish similarity. The ques tion is not are these different works but are these the same work. The answer in terms of our definition is of course that, since any change in the event creates a different work of literature, almost all instances of oral literature must g Cf. C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952), esp. pp. 216-221; Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (New York, 1932), pp. 163-188; and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), esp. pp. 26-29. 166 by virtue of their mode of composition constitute distinct— not variant— works. No amount of quite obvious similarity suffices. The difference of event is always crucial. Take for example two ballads from Child's collection, 210 A and C. Probably upon first reading the similarity between the two poems seems overwhelming. But should one attempt to determine the meaning of each poem, he would find that they are by no means interchangeable. A C O it’s up in the Highlands, And along the sweet Tay, Did bonie James Campbell Ride monie a day. Hie upon the Hielands, And laigh upon the Tay Bonnie George Campbell Rode out on a day. Sadled and bridled, And bonie rode he; Hame came horse, hame came He saddled, he bridled, And gallant rode he, And hame cam his guid horse But never cam he. sadle, But neer hame cam he. And doun cam his sweet sisters, Out cam his mother dear, Greeting fu sair, And out cam his bonnie Greeting sae sair, And down cam his bonie wife, Tearing her hair bryde, Riving her hair. "My house is unbigged, My barn's unbeen. My corn's unshorn, My meadow grows green." "The meadow lies green, The corn is unshorn, But bonnie George Campbell Will never return." Saddled and bridled And booted rode he, A plume in his helmet, A sword at his knee. But toom cam his saddle, All bloody to see, Oh, hame cam his guid horse, But never cam he! 167 One ballad editor refers to A as an "incomplete" ver sion "perhaps improved" upon in C,1® and as long as we con tinue to think in terms of one poem with variant versions, we will be inclined to dally with evaluations and overlook the fact that these two works are two different statements of two different events with two different themes. Upon closer examination one will notice first of all that the central figure in the two poems is not the same. In A it is James, in C it is George, Campbell. A small difference, perhaps, but big enough in kind to render them distinct without any other differences. But there are others. What happens in each poem is as different as who it happens to. Notice for example that James Campbell is accustomed to ride out where he does, whereas George is going only this once, on what turns out to be a momentous occasion. When the pro tagonists' horses return, James's sisters and wife appear to mourn him but George's mother and bride. In A the wife laments only what is left undone; in C the bride (perhaps in keeping with her bridehood) speaks specifically of her lost husband as well. And C goes on most importantly to give us some indication of how George Campbell met his death. As opposed to James, George appears to have gone out dressed for battle and to have met a violent end in the saddle. Why James never returns, how he came to die, we are never told. 10Bartlett Jere Whiting, Traditional British Ballads . (New York, 1955), p. 59. 168 In A it seems that death takes the protagonist unexpectedly? in C, just the opposite— George goes prepared and, as it were, dies with his boots on. The different treatment of the saddle in each poem makes clear the contrasting themes. In A the return of the empty saddle makes it seem almost as if the man never existed and thus coincides with the non existent house and barn ("unbigged" and "unbeen"). In C the saddle returns "all bloody to see" and thus is a vivid re minder to the bride and mother of the violence and horror of the human conflict which must have brought on George's death and contrasts sharply with his glamorous departure. A is analogous to the experience of death as a sudden ceasing-to- be; C is analogous to the way in which human conflict de stroys human hope and fulfillment. Any one of the differences noted would have been suf ficient to render the poems distinct works of literature, but that there are several such differences raises serious doubts even as to their basic similarity and common origin. And our discussion has left untouched the numerous immate rial differences of wording and arrangement which if the text were by a famous author would bring the textual critic running. Granted, it may be argued, that what you say is true by definition--your definition— what difference does it make? That the two works are so similar as to be almost identical is what is important, not some pedantical' distinction between them. The only possible response to this point is to ask another question: Important for what purpose? The amount of difference or similarity observed between two or more things will depend to a great extent on the purpose for which they are being compared. For the historical- geographical method of folktale analysis aimed at the recon struction of some supposed archetypal event gross similari ties of incident are likely to appear more significant than essential difference of event. Indeed, the student of oral literature often seems not to be interested in literature at all. But works composed and disseminated orally are just as much statements of events as the literature found in manu script and print. Therefore they can be studied as litera ture, and when they are studied as literature, then their uniqueness as created events rather than their similarity in incident and phrase to other works of literature is the im portant factor in determining their meaning and classifying them along with other works in a literary taxonomy. The fact that singers and oral storytellers throughout history have used traditional, conventional, and sometimes histori cal incidents and verbal formulae has obscured for the lit erate collector the fact that almost every folktale, myth, and ballad on record is a unique work of literature, what ever it may have in common with others of its kind. There fore these unique works cannot be omitted from any literary taxonomy or history without consequent distortion. 170 In short, what is implicit in the definition and class ification of literature presented in this dissertation is that there is only one kind of study of literature qua literature. Corollary to this is the implication that works of literature cannot be satisfactorily utilized as data for non-literary studies before they have been interpreted and classified literarily. The fact that Child 210 A and C have different characters, different events, and different themes should be as important to any use of them, literary or otherwise, as is the fact that their central characters have the same last name. Insofar as prior study of folksong, folktale, and myth^ has been prompted by evaluative, psy choanalytic, or anthropological motives, the literary char acter of the phenomena has been obscured, and such study runs the risk of building its house upon the sand— of hav ing, in short, no foundation. From the foregoing discussion of variant versions, what the definition implies about translations should emerge as an obvious deduction. In considering Twain's "revision" of Cooper we saw that it was possible to alter the statement of an event relatively extensively without materially affecting the event. In the case of literature then what is trans lated from one language into another is the event. Transla- ■^Cf. Wolfgang von Einsiedel, "Niemals war der Mythos 'literarische' Eigenform, geschweige denn -gattung. Er war im wortlichen Sinne Erzahlung, ..." Die Literaturen der Welt in ihrer mundlichen und schriftlichen Uberlieferung (Zurich, 1964), p. xiv. 171 tion replaces one statement with another while retaining the event in all its detail. Depending on the translator, it may also try to imitate some of the nonsemantic features of the original. But many of the features of the statement, especially in the case of verse, may be inimitable in the translating language. Yet we agree that a prose translation of the Iliad is indeed a translation of that work and not another work in its own right. Set a Greek and an English version of the Iliad side by side and one would obtain agreement that they are the same work, even though the English version entirely lacked, among other things, the dactylic hexameter of the original. Much is, to be sure, lost in translation. But something also remains— the event. For we do recognize that one work can exist in two different languages. Why? Because the disposition and details of the event remain the same. Such a conception of translation does not minimize its difficulties; it shows where they come from. Perhaps most often translation will create a problem because the translator can not quite figure out what is hap pening in the work. Robert Fitzgerald's postscript to his translation discusses some instances of this problem in the 12 Odyssey. Exactly what is Odysseus doing in the famous contest of "shooting through the iron"? Just how is it that the suitors obtain those throwing spears at the crucial point in the fight? Probably the.majority of famous gaffes 12(New York, 1961), pp. 465-483. 172 in translation have resulted from mistaking what is liter-, ally happening in a scene. This kind of difficulty helps to explain the recurring insistence that lyric poetry is impossible, or at least harder, to translate than any other kind of literature. As we have pointed out, most of what is called lyric poetry consists of the kind of event which is an utterance. Infer ring that the event of a work is an utterance is of course very much dependent upon such features of the statement as personal pronouns, forms of address, exclamations, ques tions. And these are the very features of the statement most likely to be idiomatic, that is, incomprehensible in translation. Even when the event of a lyric is not an utterance, whatever it is is so slenderly established as to hinge on a very few words in a statement which is brief to begin with. Any misunderstanding then is likely to be major. Finally, there is the significant factor of conven tion in lyric poetry. The event in a lyric may derive al most entirely from what is taken for granted in the culture of its origin but which is far from evident in a word-for- word translation. The knowledge that certain kinds of utterances are characteristic, for example, only of male lovers and only of male lovers in a certain kind of situa tion is a convention that a poet may rely on to convey the event of his work to a reader or hearer in his own culture while the translator, because the culture is dead or in some 173 other way inaccessible to him, remains in the dark. The longer the work, the more data it can supply for inferring conventions, and thus the less crucial will they become to the interpretation of the work. And if it is a narrative rather than an utterance, no matter what its length is, its meaning as a whole will be less dependent on an inferrable dramatic context and therefore less dependent on the conven tions of the time and place of its origin which often govern such inferences. Frederick R. Burton's account of his efforts to under stand the songs of the Ojibways contains a compelling example of this dependence of the event of lyric poetry upon cultural convention and the impossibility of capturing it in a literal translation. Burton gives the original 0jibway and a literal translation of the song which first awakened his interest in 0jibway music: Chekahbay tebik ondandeyan Throughout night I keep awake Chekahbay tebik ondandeyan Throughout night I keep awake ahgahmah-sibi ondandeyan Upon a river I keep awake. Then he follows it with this illuminating account of his efforts at translation: I venture to take the reader over the course that was necessarily mine when I undertook to translate the song. At that time 1 knew not one 0jibway word. The intelli gent Indian whom I asked for a translation slowly dic tated the following, "I am out all night on the river seeking for my sweetheart." 174 This impressed me as poetic in feeling, but I wished to get closer to the words themselves which 1 had care fully spelled from dictation and written as sfoove, leav ing spaces beneath for the English equivalents. I could see that there were only four words. By dint of patient, detailed questioning Z arrived approximately at the English equivalents above given. Then I was puzzled and disturbed. "Where is the word for sweetheart?" I asked. "It is not there," replied the Indian, tranquilly. "Then," said I, how do you make out that the song means 'I am seeking for my sweetheart'?" . . . _ He pointed to the word "ondandeyan" which occurs three times. "That mean," said he, "'I keep awake.' I get tired, yes, and sleepy, but I no sleep. I keep awake. That word (tebik) is night. Now you see. Why does a man keep awake all night when he want to sleep?" "Well," I suggested, half in weakness, and half in determination to make him work out the meaning, "he might be hunting for deer, or something else to eat." "No, no!" he responded gravely, "not this time. See: I keep awake all night long on the river. Only one rea son. I go to find my sweetheart. The word is not there but we understand it. We know what is meant. Perhaps mebbe her family has gone away. Perhaps mebbe she said she would meet me and something happened so she couldn't. I don't know; but we know that the man who made this song was looking for his sweetheart, and we do not need the word there." With this bewildering light thrown upon the subject, I retired to my own quarters and pondered. It was my eager desire to make the attractive melody available for paleface singers. To this end it was essential that there should be singable verses. Observe this use of the plural. One verse, or one stanza would not do for the demands of civilization. The Indian is content to sing his one line over and over again, but the paleface must have variety in his language even in so short a song as this. I confess that my first impulse was to string to gether some rhymed lines that would fit the tune, and let it go at that, as the easiest way out of the diffi culty, but it seemed a shame to discard the suggestion offered in the Indian verse, and doubly wrong to put forth an Indian song that should not ht least reflect the Indian thought; but so much was implied and so little expressed! And that despairing reflection was the key to the problem.. So much implied! I set myself to studying how much more might be implied than the search for a sweetheart, and it occurred to me that if an 0jibway were on the river he 'would necessarily be in his canoe. Here was promise of singable results and of the verbal repeti- 175 tion without which no representation of the original could be regarded as satisfactory. It was with conscious excitement that I hurried to my Indian friend and asked the question— would not the singing lover be in his canoe? "Of course, 1 1 said he, and then a ghost of a smile lit up his dark features; "but you don't find the word chemaun there, do you?" he asked. Chemaun means canoe. "No," I answered, "but it's understood, isn't it?" "Yes," said he, "we understand it so," and he turned away as if that settled it, or as if a continuance of the conversation would lead him to inquire sarcastically if I supposed the lover would be swimming the river all night, or balancing on a perilous, uncomfortable log. It did settle it, and before I arrived back at my table I was humming the first of the stanzas with which the song has been identified since its publication— In the still night, the long hours through, I guide my bark canoe, My bark canoe, my love, to you. While the stars shine and falls the dew I seek my love in bark canoe, In bark canoe I seek for you. It is I, love, your lover true, Who glides the stream in bark canoe: It glides to you, my love, to y o u . Whatever we may think of Burton's final version, his literal translation barely constituted an event at all be cause he was unable to make the inferences which a knowledge of 0jibway culture made natural to the Indian. And primar ily what Burton did in his final "translation" was to make these conventional inferences an actual part of the state ment. Almost every translator must do this to a greater or lesser degree. That is why more is required in translating than just a knowledge of the language. But this problem of 13 American Primitive Music with Especial Attention to Songs of the Oiibwavs (New York, 1909), pp. 149-153? quoted in John Greenway, Literature Among the Primitives (Hatboro, Pa., 1964), pp. 27-30. 176 interpretation is not limited to the activity of translat ing. Take a poem from English literature which-presents no apparent linguistic difficulties, "0 Western Wind." The song obviously implies a direct relationship between the rain brought by the western wind and the return of the lover. A likely hypothesis is that the absent lover is a deep sea fisherman out on a voyage which will end with the coming of the rain but that the rain will not come until the wind changes. Notice that the speaker prays for a "small rain"; a storm would be dangerous to the beloved. Neverthe less, no matter how ingenious, this is only a hypothesis. What the connection between the wind and the return may actually have been for the original singers is completely lost; therefore, the poem is that much less clear to us. Modern attempts to account for this connection without con sidering the event have been hopelessly abstract, anachro- 14 nistic, and unconvincing. We have lost the Ojibway's 14 Cf. Robert Penn Warren's analysis in his essay "Pure and Impure Poetry." The lover, grieving for the absent beloved, cries out for relief. Several kinds of relief are involved in the ap peal to the wind. First there is the relief that would be had from the sympathetic manifestation of nature. The lover, in his perturbation of spirit, invokes the pertur bations of nature . . . Second, there is the relief that would be had by the fulfillment of grief— the frost of grief, the drouth of grief broken, the full anguish ex pressed, then the violence allayed in the peace of tears. Third, there is the relief that would be had in the ex citement and fulfillment of love itself. There seems to be a contrast between the first two types of relief and the third types speaking loosely, we may say that the t 177 ability to draw inferences from a statement of an event when we fail to consider the event while trying to determine the meaning of the statement. Such a task is bound to fail. For as this chapter has tried to demonstrate in a variety of ways, the concept of event is essential to the interpreta tion of literature. Understanding the words is only a step towards understanding the work. first two types are romantic and general, the third type realistic and specific. In Ray B. West, Jr., ed., Essays in Modern Literary Criti cism (New York, 1952), p. 251. CHAPTER V A LITERARY TAXONOMY The Nature of Taxonomy Taxonomy is that endeavor which treats of the princi ples involved in classifying phenomena. Sometimes the term refers to such endeavor taken collectively, but usually it is used to mean a branch of a specific discipline, and more often than not of biological disciplines in particular. The reason for this is significant. In some fields of science, for instance chemistry and physics, there is little distinc tion between the subject as a whole and the way in which the subject matter is analyzed and classified. The determining of atomic and molecular structure, which is the basic method of grouping and distinguishing in the physical sciences, is itself the very basis of the science and not really a dis tinguishable part of it. Chemistry and physics do not deal with objectively existing or finite objects in nature but are concerned, primarily at least, with the analysis of mat ter in the abstract. They are not the study of certain kinds of things but of the constituent elements of all things. He can say that scientists in these fields are con cerned more with breaking down the things they find in 178 179 nature than in grouping such things into larger and larger categories, that is, than in classifying and in constructing a taxonomic system. There is no science which does not analyze for constit uent elements, but some sciences, in addition to this, are equally concerned with phenomena as they are found in nature and in seeking to formulate such phenomena into a system of classification which will most adequately reflect the simi larities in a multitude of different individuals. In sci ences which both analyze and classify, we most commonly encounter the notion and the specialized subdivision of taxonomy. Botany and zoology are just such sciences. As opposed to chemistry and physics, they study things qua natural phenomena, and as such they have special subdivi sions devoted to classifying. Obviously there are many differences between identify ing and classifying living organisms and identifying and classifying man-made products. These differences will be pointed up as we develop our literary taxonomy. More impor tant than the differences, however, are the similarities. Biological taxonomy made possible the discovery of evolu tion, and evolution in turn has made possible an increas ingly adequate taxonomy. There is little profit in debating which comes first; the significant lesson is that no real grasp of biological history was possible without a persist ent and rigorous concern with taxonomy. It proved to be impossible to identify individual organisms without also classifying groups of organisms, and impossible to classify groups of organisms without developing consistent and appli cable principles of taxonomy. The work of Linnaeus made Darwin possible, but Darwin was the first to demonstrate the essential correctness of Linnaeus. And having learned from Linnaeus, Darwin was able to improve Linnaean classification by referring to the facts of history. The lesson of bio logical taxonomy is that phenomena cannot be studied, qua phenomena at least, without criteria for identifying indi viduals and principles for constructing or discovering a series of related groups in which to locate the phenomena. Biology needed to realize that history is necessary for taxonomy; literary study needs to recognize that taxonomy is necessary for history. If literary taxonomy proves to be anything like bio logical, it would seem to follow that any history of litera ture which is based upon a system of taxonomy will of neces sity alter to some extent that system of taxonomy. Biology has long since discarded the notion of an a priori system, a notion which troubled even Linnaeus and which was corrected with a strong dose of Darwinian historical data. A success ful taxonomy does not have classes without members or indi viduals without classes. But before.such a history is writ ten, and as a prerequisite to it, we must, as Linnaeus did, begin somewhere, and that somewhere is with a consistently 181 applied descriptive analysis of individual works, irrespec tive of chronology.' History, be it political, literary, or biological, is at bottom hot an account of taxonomic systems; rather, it is an account of what things did exist, when they existed, and how individual existing things are (or were) similar to each other and how different. It presupposes, in short, the ability to compare and contrast, in specific detail, those things which are the subject of the history. A taxonomy which makes it possible to write a history is one which pro vides us with a system for analyzing, not only groups of related phenomena, but, more importantly, the specific char acteristics of individual phenomena. Biological taxonomy (that is, knowledge of groups or species) has developed in direct proportion to our knowledge of how to systematically analyze the characteristics of individuals which are to con stitute these; various species. And it is therefore justi fiable to say that while the goal of taxonomy is to deter mine how things relate to each other and to groups of things, and to develop principles for classifying them, the business of taxonomists is with studying the characteristics of individuals. The principles of a workable taxonomy must, therefore, be the means for analyzing individuals as well as being the criteria for constructing groups. If they are not, taxonomies will be like metaphysical systems, which are 182 perennially at war with each other but never in the same terms and with no prospect of either victory or compromise. Literary study, as a science, needs, almost as much as a definition of its subject, a systematic way of analyzing works and of organizing the information derived from such study so that it may be passed on to other scholars in the same form which they use for their own work. There needs, in short, to be a systematic and agreed upon way of increas ing our knowledge of literature. The significance of a work may always be open to reinterpretation, but the facts of a work, that is a systematic account of what it is, should be ascertainable once and for all in terms of specific and always present kinds of characteristics. And these must be the same characteristics which function as criteria in a literary taxonomy. A taxonomy of literature, if it is suc cessful, will be the framework within which all literary scholarship will be conducted because it will provide -that consistent terminology which is essential for coordinating the work of diverse scholars and their often widely diver gent projects. Such at least is the ideal, an ideal which the sciences have long since recognized, even when they have failed to achieve it. Biological taxonomy was originally based upon a scale of increasing complexity; the classes ranged from simple one-celled forms through progressively complex multi-celled forms. With the work of Darwin a new principle was estab- 183 lished— propinquity of descent from a hypothetical common ancestor. In some respects, however, Darwin's principle was not an innovation but only a modification of Linnaeus's be cause, with a minimum of reinterpretation, animal and plant species were seen to have evolved from the simple to the complex. And thus, with few exceptions, complexity and pro pinquity of descent are coextensive. The literary taxonomy to be developed here is based upon a scale of increasing complexity, complexity defined in terms of mediated and un mediated events and degrees or levels of proximity of reader or hearer to event. There are reasons for believing that such a taxonomy may eventually prove to be an evolutionary one as well, that historically, insofar as can be deter mined, literature has become increasingly complex. That is not to say that literature is now more complex and used to be simple, but that simple literature was a prerequisite for complex, just as simple organisms were a prerequisite for complex ones. There is little value, however, in debating the point until much systematic historical research has been V conducted. In biology a historical classification preceded biological history, which preceded historical or evolution ary classification. By conceiving of literature in terms of event, we cre ate a possibility for literary analysis which could not exist otherwise. This is the possibility of diagraming each and every work according to a single criterion. Every work 184 of literature is a statement and purports either to be, or to be an account of, an event. That is to say, a work is either coextensive with its event or it contains an event.’ Compare, for example, works like "0 Western Wind," "West minster Bridge," "Felix Randal," which are all unmediated acts of utterance, with "Stopping by Woods," which is a first-person present-tense account of an event in which the narrator is a participant:^- ------ r-fe.t . There is one level of narration in Frost's poem. In "Youth" (first-person participant past-tense) there are three levels, and in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (third-person past-tense) there are five levels of narration: 3 .*7 3 <- As we shall see, there are, among mediated events, at least five levels of narration possible. In addition, there are a variety of possible kinds of works in each level, and also a variety of ways these subdivisions can be further subdivided. This taxonomy has two classes (mediated and 1 For a legend of the symbols used in this taxonomy see the note on p. 188 below. 185 unmediated); the mediated are divided into five families or levels of narration, and each of these in turn may consist of one or half a dozen genera or paradigms. And finally, each of these can have up to a dozen species, a figure not likely to exhaust the possibilities. Biological species and subspecies run to astronomical figures, but this situation was reached only after vast numbers of individuals had been analyzed in terms of the taxonomic system, a task for sev eral generations of biologists. It is the nature of systems to expand and for distinctions to become increasingly pre cise as the number of individuals catalogued grows. The tenth edition (1758) of Linnaeus' Systems naturae (usually taken to be the definitive one) distinguishes only seven levels of classification and a few thousand species. Modern zoologists, using these seven as a framework, now distin guish as many as thirty-four levels and a hundred times as many species.2 The Principles of a Literary Taxonomy Every work of literature is a statement, and every work of literature creates an unverifiable event. The basic principle of the taxonomy rests upon these two assumptions. In ascertaining how a statement constitutes an event we are 2 George Gaylord Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy (New York, 1961), pp. 16-17. This work, which is the stand- ard one in the field and the only full-scale analysis in English of the principles of animal taxonomy, is my source for most of the points made in this chapter on the nature of biological classification. 186 ascertaining where it belongs in a system of classification which is based on the principle that there are specific and determinable ways that a statement can create or constitute an unverifiable event. A person comes to know of an event either by witnessing it or by hearing an account of it. An event which is witnessed is not mediated in any way. An event which is known only through an account of it is medi ated in two ways: by the source of the account and by the time of the account in relation to the event which is its subject. Every work of literature is identified by discov ering what the event is and then determining how many dif ferent tellings (if any) the event, or the most removed part of the event, is filtered through in the process of becoming known to the reader or listener. 3 The CLASS to which a work belongs then is determined by whether or not the event is presented in an account, i.e. whether or not it is narrated. If the work is an utterance and does not contain a narrated event within it, then it is unmediated; it has no levels of narration. The diagram of every unmediated work is identical. The biolo gist would call such a class "monotypic": the class is the family is the genus is the species. However, if the work is an account of an event, then there are one or more levels of narration of that event; this determines the FAMILY to which Classes are subdivided into families, families into genera, genera into species. 187 it belongs. Works with the same number of narrative levels are the same degree removed from the reader. To determine the GENUS of a work we diagram the narration and note the arrangement of the different levels of narration. Works of the same narrative level which also have the same arrange ment of events and narrations constitute a single genus. To establish .a SPECIES we need to analyze the different kinds of narration within the various levels. Is the narration third-person or first-person? If first-person, is the speaker a participant in the event he is recounting (that is, is he retelling something he only heard or making up his account)? Does the event occur before the statement of it (past), contemporaneously with it (present), after it (future), or does part of it occur before the statement begins and part of it after it has begun (durative)? And finally, is there more than one kind of narration for any 4 given level? These distinctions will all be explained in detail with examples as the taxonomy unfolds, but they will be easier to 4 Third-person : First-person participant: First-person non-participant: Past: Present: Future: Durative: The diagrams which include the above annotations are of species. The diagrams which have only dots to represent levels of narration are of genera— that is, they are para digms. 3 t > (i + p) Ip (i + n+ p ) f" * o follow after we have drawn up an outline of the taxonomy. The outline which appears on the following pages reflects the analysis of some hundred and fifty works. The sample is not representative proportionally because every effort has been made to catalogue as many different species as pos sible. Therefore, the most common species are represented by only a few more examples than the least common. The two basic classes are an essential feature of the system and will not change, but possibly the five families and cer tainly the eleven genera and forty-four species will in crease as more works are catalogued. As a rough estimate, I would hope that half of the now existing species have been identified; but even if this optimistic figure is correct, literary species are no more fixed than biological, and new ones will no doubt continue to arise. Indeed, it seems possible to predict, even with this very small sampling, that half of the present species have arisen within the past hundred years. Specifically, twenty-one of these forty-four species are not known to have existed before 1865. No doubt one reason for this is that oral literature, no matter how long and detailed, cannot possibly handle the narrative com plexity which printed works can. In reference to the outline of the taxonomy, every work and every kind of work can be referred to precisely without the diagram having to be drawn for it each time— no small saving when talking about works as complicated as Melmoth. 189 I. II. Unmediated events (one paradigm, one species) Mediated events A. One level of narration 1. Paradigm one a • >■<- b t d. e. -k<r- g. h. 3*- 2. Paradigm two a. b. f. i . B. Two levels of narration 1. Paradigm one (one species) I *4r 2. Paradigm two j£±_ a. b. P ++ c. kP 1 1 1 # 190 d. e. _a±_ f. h. x. 3f i >.fc- i k. 3. Paradigm three a. j) b• 2 £ i l t □ 4. Paradigm four (one species) >a - -> □ C. Three levels of narration 1. Paradigm one a. b. 3 C* L fe.«r ^ *- 1 1 1 % I 1 ___ Z Paradigm two a. b. c. fe«i. 191 d. e. 3. Paradigm three (one species) I 9 *r- □ D. Four levels of narration (one paradigm) b. a. Ip <- E. Five levels of narration (one paradigm) a. _ b. 3 <- f t /P 192 All unmediated works are simply "I." First-level mediated works are either IIA1 (a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i, or j) or IIA2 (a or b) because there are two different paradigms for works with one level of narration. Melmoth is a fifth-level medi ated work, and, since there is only one paradigm so far for fifth-level works, its notation is IIEa. The "a" species designation distinguishes Melmoth from The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights), which is a fifth-level work having the same paradigm but different kinds of narration within the levels. In an appendix is listed, with the proper outline designation, all of the works which have so far been analyzed according to this taxonomy. The complete set of paradigms and diagrams is included in the outline given in the preceding pages. In diagraming a mediated work there are three steps. First, we must decide what the event is and if there are subsidiary events. Second, we must decide how the event or events are narrated, that is, how many levels of narration there are and how they are arranged in relation to the events. Third, we heed to know in detail the nature of each instance of narration and specifically the person and time. There are more than a dozen different kinds and combinations of narration for any given level and dozens of ways that the narration of different levels in a multi-leveled work can combine. These narrative differences within a given para digm constitute the various species. 193 Every instance of narration is, on the one hand, third- person, first-person participant, or first-person non participant; and, on the other, past, present, future, or durative. Every level of narration has such a designation for person and time, but not necessarily just one. Some events have compound narration, that is, part of the event is narrated in one person and time and part in another; or, in the case of first-person, more than one person may be giving an account of the event. There is no narration within narration in such a case but merely different narra tions juxtaposed. Down There on a Visit (IIB2g) and USA (IIB3c) are examples of the first kind of compound narra tion, You Know Me A1 (IIAlj) and "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (IIB5) of the second. A special kind of narra tive juxtaposition involves not just different instances of narration on one level but also different events. This is the use of unsustained introductory events and is repre sented by works like The Turn of the Screw (XIB2j). These works will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter. The distinction of first and third-person is a tradi tional one but not always precisely conceived. For most purposes, first-person can be defined grammatically as the presence of a first-person pronoun. Third-person is then the presence of third-person pronouns or at least the absence of first-person. This criterion is true enough as it stands, but more precision is needed in determining 194 first-person narration. That is, there are instances of first-person works which do not include first-person pro nouns. For instance, Blake's "Tiger, Tiger" is first-person because it is an instance of direct address. There is no level of narration, however, because the poem is an utter ance, someone, a first-person, in the act of addressing someone else, a tiger. MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell" (IZAlb), which is not an utterance but a first-person par ticipant account, also makes no use of first-person pro nouns, nor does it involve direct address. However, the work unquestionably purports to be the words of the one character in the poem. And, interestingly enough, it avoids subject-predicate constructions and is written almost en tirely in the infinitive. The first stanza reads: And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth1s noonward height, To feel the always coming on, The always rising of the night. The event is a man lying face down at noon feeling the sun upon him but sensing the shadows of night rising behind it. The repeated use of "here" and "now" establishes this, but like "Stopping by Woods" (IIAlb) there is no indication that anyone is being addressed (the rather ambiguous title not withstanding) nor that the man is even speaking aloud. The words of the poem are his but there is no attempt to create an act of utterance. The title seems to serve only to re call the image of "Time's winged chariot" in "To His Coy Mistress." 195 When there is evidence (whether we term it grammatical or not) that the words of a work are those of a particular person and when there is no evidence of third-person om niscience, then we label the narration first-person. The question of inconsistency will be treated below; here we need to note only that, for our purposes at least, first- person narration means not only pronoun declension but covers^ also any other features (such as direct address) which indicate that a particular person is speaking. In addition to the distinction between third and first- person, it is necessary for our purposes to distinguish be tween those first-person narrations which purport to be a true account of an event which the narrator witnessed or participated in and those which purport to be only a retell ing of an already existing account or else the actual making up of a story. Modern literary convention has been predomi nately realistic and participant rather than non-participant, but this has not always been the case. Much if not most older literature in the West and much recent folk and "prim itive" literature employs the convention (which is actually closer to the real nature of literature) of the storyteller. The second kind of non-participant convention appears to be a relatively recent one and one found only in highly sophis ticated literary traditions. Here the narrator is a first- person, refers to himself, addresses the reader, etc.; how ever, he does not claim to be retelling a story already in 196 existence but to be in the process of working up a scrap of information he has run across into a story. This account, though it will not be "true" in the scientific sense, will, it is claimed, be more "true to life" or "true to art" than the model, because there will be no limits on the kind of relevant information which can be included. When, where, and how these conventions arose are historical questions, however, and as such beyond the scope of this study. A narration qualifies as first-person non-participant if the account possesses any of the first-person character istics and no indication in the story that the narrator was either a participant in or a witness to the event. Most of the stories in The Canterbury Tales (IIC3)are of this type. The nun's priest's tale, for instance, contains occasional first-person pronoun references to the narrator, but there is nothing in the story of Chanticleer which indicates that the nun's priest was either a witness or a participant. There are, however, no disclaimers on his part as there are in Eugene Field's non-participant account of the battle be tween the gingham dog and the calico cat ("The Duel," IlAle): (I was n't there; I simply state What was told to me by the Chinese plate!) (The old Dutch clock it told me so, And that is how 1 came to know.) The lays of Marie de France are often like this in that the narrator acknowledges the second-hand nature of the story. For example, the tale of Eliduc (IIBlc) begins (in Patricia 197 Terry's translation): I'll tell you all there is to know About a story long ago Rhymed in ancient Brittany, As it is understood by me. Less an explicit admission of non-participance than these but more so than the nun's priest1s tale are those works which employ the oral and pseudo-oral convention of prefac ing the song or story with a formal first-person address to the Muse. The Odyssey. The Aeneid. Paradise Lost (IIBlc), "The Rape of the Lock" (IIAle), are of this type; and so, indeed, though without reference to the Muse, is Cummings' "I Sing of Olaf" (IIAle). A more unusual kind of non-participant account occurs in Hawthorne's "Wakefield" (IIAlf) and Browning's The Ring and the Book (IIC2). In each of these works the narrator begins with an account of how he stumbled upon a short pro saic item of old news and how it was so provocative yet so unsatisfactory that he feels compelled to write a story of what must or might or could have happened in all its unveri- fiable human detail. In The Ring and the Book the narrator actually creates an introductory event around the finding of the prototype story in a Florence bookstall. This is not the case in "Wakefield," but in essence the works are the same. A first-person narrator asks the reader to join him as he explores, discovers, creates, recreates, the details of the event which he himself does not know about until he has laid them out for us. The statement of Browning's plan 198 is too elaborate to quote, but we can see from the first page of Hawthorne’s story what is involved in this kind of non-participant account: In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man— let us call him Wakefield— who absented himself for a long time from his wife. . . . This outline is all that I remember. . . . If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield's vagary, I bid him welcome; trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done up neatly, and condensed into the final sen tence . Browning’s story was based upon the transcript of an actual trial several centuries past, and The Ring and the Book is therefore narrated in the past. Hawthorne's story, on the other hand, was based on a recent incident and on only the barest recollection of it, so this, coupled with his desire to construct a parable rather than to develop a history seemed reasonably to demand a present-tense narra tion. Time is the second of the two principles for distin guishing species, and we need to examine now the relation ship in time of the events to the statements which create them. Perhaps the most important point to make about the time of a narration is what it is not. It is not the time of the event in relation to the present time. If this were the case 1984 (IIB3b) would be future and A Fearful Joy (IIB2e) would be past. Obviously in 1965 a story which takes place in 1984 is in the future and a story about a life which began in the 1870's is in the past. And, since eventually every story ends up in the past, we would be left with an unstable and ultimately unusable criterion. But in relation to the narrating of the statement, the event in 1984 is, always has been, and always will be, past. It is a past- tense account of something which is completed, over and done with, before the account is made. On the other hand, A Fearful Joy, in relation to the narrating of the statement, is, always has been, and always will be, present. It is a present-tense account of an event just as it is happening. An unmediated lyric, a play, a novel like A Fearful Joy, does not purport to be an account of an event which happened when the statement was written but to be happening contem poraneously with every reading of it. That is, the reader or hearer of a present-tense story is getting an account of an event mediated only by person, but of the event in a lyric there is no account and therefore no mediation of either person or time. The reader gets a running account of A Fearful Joy (not unlike that of a sportscaster); he over hears "Felix Randal" (I). Tense, whether of a literary statement or not, is a grammatical device for locating in time the subject of the statement. And the time of a literary work is usually the result of the tense, or prevailing tense, of the constituent statements, but time and tense are not synonymous. For example, the quite legitimate, though slightly paradoxical grammatical notion of the "historical present" reflects the recognition that verbal conjugation may indicate one rela tionship to the subject and the general sense of the state ment another. When we Know from other evidence that the subject of a statement occurred before the statement, we are not misled by the prevailing use of present-tense into thinking that the statement is contemporaneous with the sub ject. Often the historical present is used, both in and out of literature, to heighten the sense of immediacy and rele vance of an event in the past. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" (IIAlg) is an example of this. The first twelve of fourteen lines are a present-tense account of the rape of Leda by the swan; the event is this rape of Leda; but the account of it is past rather than present. There are two reasons for thinking this. First, the poem makes it clear that Leda is the Leda of prehistoric Sparta and the swan, God Zeus of Mt. Olympus. The incident is of course unverifiable but one which unquestionably purports to be a past event. Second, the last two lines are not a present-tense account but a past-tense question about the results of the rape. Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? The prevailing grammatical tense of the fourteen lines is present, but to account for a well-known past-time subject and for a past-tense question we conclude that the statement as a whole purports to be an account of an event which oc curred before this statement of it. 201 This distinction between tense and time, however, does not alter the fact that the time of a literary event is gov erned by the statement of it. The subject of a non-literary statement is not. A present-tense account of something which is happening coextensively with the statement is true once, but the same statement ceases to be true when the hap pening ceases. A non-literary event can be first the sub ject of a future-tense statement, then of a present, then of a past. But the event of a literary statement, because it has no existence except as it is stated, is. governed by the statement of it. Once present, always present; once future, always future. There will never, for instance, be a time when the future event of this anonymous lyric will be realized, even in fiction, and thus become present and then past: When in my pilgrimage I reach The river that we all must cross And land upon that further beach Where earthly gains are counted loss, May I not earthly loss repair? Well, if those fish should rise again, There shall be no more parting there— Celestial gut will stand the strain. And, issuing from the portal, one Who was himself a fisherman Will drop his keys and, shouting, run To help me land leviathan. (IIAle) The account is future and will always be so, and the event is no more, or less, hypothetical for being in the future than any other unverifiable event which is past or present. However, works set in the future, that is, whose events 202 have not yet occurred when the statement is made, are under standably a rarity. The only other examples discovered to date are Kipling's "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted" (IIAle), Millay's "Moriturus" (IIAle), and Robinson's "Leonora" (IIAli). Not so rare but more complicated are those works whose time I have termed "durative." The narration of a work is durative if part of the event occurs before the account begins and part of it occurs after the account begins but is completed by the end of the statement. The narrating then, unlike any other kind of account of an unverifiable event, is always part of the event. The most common kind of dura tive work is the epistolary or diary story; however, this distinction like most of the others we have made, cuts across the traditional genres, and not all epistolary works are durative. Two such works which are durative are Lard- ner's You Know Me A1 (IIAlj) and "A Caddy's Diary" (ZIAld). Some which are not durative are Richardson's Pamela (IIB2c), Montesquieu's The Persian Letters (IIC2b), and Stoker's Dracula (IlClb). The criterion for deciding when an epistolary work is durative is similar to that which we applied to dialogue literature to decide when the dialogue was itself the mode of narration and when it was presented by another more in clusive narration. An account is durative when all the information about the event is included in the one or more 203 character narrations. The three-year correspondence which constitutes You Know Me A1 is all that there is to the work (except for the detachable title). All the information of what happened to Al, of where he was and when the letters were composed/ are part and parcel of the series of unintro duced/ uncommented upon letters which constitute the work. The letters give a running commentary of Jack Keefe's base ball career from Terre Haute to the White Sox. The part of the event which is written about in the first letter is com plete when the letter is written, but what is written about in the second letter, though it too is completed when that letter is written, had not yet occurred when the first one was written. By the time the narrative is complete— at the conclusion of the last letter— the event as a whole is com plete. But when the first letter is complete, the event as a whole has only begun. Each letter is a past-tense account of an action which is complete before the account begins, but the event of the work as a whole is not any one single episode but the sum total of them. And, since the event is the life of Keefe over a three-year period, it of necessity includes all his letter writing, even when in given letters there may be no reference to the act of writing. We are obliged to infer that Keefe does sit down with pen in hand at some particular time and place when we are confronted with a letter which purports to be by him and about him. The act of narration is part of the event but not, as with 204 unmediated works, coextensive with it. The limits of "Felix Randal" are the limits of the utterance? the limits of You Know Me Al are not the limits of Keefe1s letter writing but include everything which is written about in the letters. But, as we shall discuss in the next chapter, there is not always the absolute distinction between mediated and unmedi ated events which we have heretofore assumed. In You Know Me Al not all of the letters are from Keefe to Al; we see an occasional reply from Al. And therefore the work is an instance of compound narration. There are, as it were, two first-person participant durative accounts of this three-year period. In "A Caddy's Diary," however, there is only one narrator. The fact that he is writing dated journal entries instead of dated letters in immate rial. The event is a month in the life of a country-club caddy as he records it day by day. Each entry is past- tense, but the event as a whole is hot complete before the account of it begins. All that is completed then is what is recorded in the first entry. Durative works are not as common as the prevalence of epistolary type narrative would lead one to believe. There are two reasons for this. Many epistolary narratives, those of Richardson for example, are too complex to be told en tirely by letters or journal entries, and there is a corre sponding need to put the durative accounts within a more inclusive past-tense account. This may result in the 205 creation of a first-person editor (The Persian Letters), in the use of script-like labeling (Dracula), or simply in the occasional unaccounted for reverting to omniscient narration (Pamela). The durative character of these works is not sustained, and they must, therefore, be labeled according to the most inclusive form of narration— however minor it may seem in comparison to the durative accounts. On the other hand, durative accounts shade off into unmediated events when the acts of narration are themselves consistently made 5 an event. The Fall (IIA2a) is an example of this. The Persian Letters is a collection of letters from 0 nineteen different correspondents whose general subject is the sojourn in France of two Persians, the adventures they have in France, and the situation they have left behind them in Persia. The event covers nine years (1711-1720) in the lives of old Usbek and young Rica as they journey to and reside in France, and it includes the life and death strug gles which occur contemporaneously in Usbek's harem back in Ispahan. The letters are a running account of the event and are part of it, but the narrative is neither durative nor compound. The reason for this is that Montesquieu has cre ated in the Introduction and in a series of footnotes throughout the work an anonymous unverifiable editor at whose home the Persians lodge and who thus gains access to the letters. It is he who has translated, arranged, and **Cf. pp. 255-259 below. 206 published the letters, and thus it is he, rather than the nineteen first-persons, who is, in the most inclusive sense, the narrator or source of the event. If You Know Me Al had been treated in this way the diagram of it would have been not (IIAlj) but 1 (IIB2a). That is to say, in stead of a single level of multiple narration there would have been two levels of simple narration. The accounts of the event given in the various letters would not be the most inclusive narration of the event but would instead be only instances of characters within the event contributing infor mation about parts of the event. The nineteen correspond ents in The Persian Letters could, collectively, have been, but are not, the narrators of the event as a whole. Instead, they only constitute another level of narration. However, we have yet to touch upon a further complicat ing feature of the work— the fact that in four consecutive letters Usbek gives Mirza a first-person, non-participant, past-tense account of the Troglodytes. And in this story different Troglodytes are quoted as giving information about the event. Therefore, instead of being diagramed b <- 1 The Persian Letters is M The kphas re- placed the because it is on the same level of narration and leads, unlike the , to even further levels. 207 This is a crucial principle of the taxonomy. What is being diagramed is not amount of complexity but degrees or levels of complexity. As far as levels of narration are concerned, Paradise Lost is exactly the same as the ballad "Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires" (UBla). They are both first-person, non-participant, past-tense accounts of an event which includes characters giving information about the event in their own words. However much more detailed the event in Paradise Lost is and however much more involved and discontinuous the ordering of the different episodes may be, the number, kind, and arrangement of the tellings is the same. Here again we are confronted with conspicuous but superficial differences which do not constitute differences in kind. The giraffe is no more complex and no different in kind than the mouse. They have the same number of neck ver- tibrae, the same organs, the same kinds of cells, the same biological requirements. The fact that they are different in size, in color, and in total number of cells is only a difference of species, not of phylum and not of complexity or evolutionary proximity. The Canterbury Tales (IIC3) would have the same degree of narrative complexity, would have the same number of levels of narration, would be dia gramed the same way if only the nun's priest had told his story. Dozens of tales in The Arabian Nights (IIEb) could be eliminated and the diagram would remain unchanged. Nor is the taxonomy based upon levels of events. The different levels of events are represented in the diagrams only 208 insofar as they establish different tellings. For there to be tellings there must be something told, and since this is an analysis of literary tellings, that which is told is an event. The telling may encompass the entire event, in which case it is noted outside and on top of the event; or its subject may be only part of the event, in which case it is noted inside the event. In any case it constitutes a dis tinct level and is a further complicating factor. The key to locating any work in the taxonomy is discovering what the event is and then determining how many different tellings (if any) the event, or the most removed part of the event, is filtered through in the process of becoming known to the reader or listener. The Species Problem Neither our analysis of durative narration nor our ex position of the general principles of literary taxonomy is by any means completed, but we have reached the point of diminishing returns and need to re-establish contact with the correlative concern of any successful taxonomy— the in dividual things which must be analyzed before there can be any systematic classifying. Just as our definition had to provide both a characteristic nature and a characteristic function, so our taxonomy must provide both principles of classification and criteria for analysis. And this distinc tion between the characteristics of groups and the charac teristics of individuals brings us up against another 209 ontological problem, one far more legitimate and crucial than that of the ontological nature of a work of literary art. This is the problem of universals and specifically the problem faced by all taxonomists— to what extent do the dif ferent levels of classes really exist independent of the taxonomy? The question has been of central concern to biologists, because the principle of classifying groups of organisms is not entirely coextensive with the criterion for identifying individuals and assigning them to a primary group (i.e. to a species). An individual is identified as a member of a given species if he does, or has the physiological and ana tomical capacity and the environmental opportunity to pro duce, fertile offspring. Because of this clear and by and large determinable condition, most animal taxonomists agree that the concept "species" reflects a real or natural group. Such a state of affairs (continual, widespread, but rigidly determined reproduction) is one of the more obvious and common-sense facts of our experience. But this ability to reproduce, while it can be subsumed under the general taxo nomic principle of common ancestry by virtue of being the most recent, most obvious, most immediate kind of ancestry, is not defined by quite the same criteria. Common ancestry and proximity' of descent beyond the species level is not determined by studying creatures which can and do breed or which have a high degree of physical similarity and environ 210 mental requirements but by studying creatures some of whom have long since ceased to breed, who usually have a small degree of physical similarity, and Whose existence may be separated by thousands of years and the furthest extremes of environmental requirements. No one is suggesting that the phylum reptilia. for instance, is not a reasonable grouping, but many do ask how much of an actual historical event is being reflected by postulating an actual common ancestor for the dinosaurs and winged reptiles of a bygone geological age and today's snakes. The consensus seems to be that while the principles of biological taxonomy and the criteria of species identification are the same—-and this is what evolutionary theory demands— the superspecies groups do not have the justification in nature that species do. The more removed a group is from the species which are said to compose it, the more hypothetical it is and the more it re- 6 fleets the study of nature rather than nature itself. The basis of this literary taxonomy is not common an cestry and proximity of descent— since in the strict sense works of literature, unlike organisms, are genetically inde pendent of each other— but proximity of reader and event. 6For the purpose of introducing a summary of literary taxonomy this critique of animal taxonomy is adequate, but for any other it is of course grossly over-simplified. I refer the reader again to Simpson's excellent work, which I have found to be not merely a definitive treatment of animal taxonomy but a provocative approach, perhaps more so than the author realized, to the ancient philosophical problem of universals. 211 In biological taxonomy the attempt is made to determine the relation between species by documenting the mediating spe cies and genera. In literary taxonomy the goal is to deter mine relationship by documenting the mediating levels of narration. And, as in biology, there is a need to relate the criteria for distinguishing species (person and time) to the principles of constructing superspecies groups (number and arrangement of levels of narration). The basic hypothe sis of biological classification is that the factors in volved in the reproduction of individuals are in essence the same ones involved in the origin of species. In literary classification the assumption is that the factors which mediate within a level of narration are the same ones which mediate the levels themselves. What stands between an unverifiable event and the reader of the statement of that event is not only different tellings (levels) but different kinds of tellings (i.e. dif ferences in person and time). And one of the implications for later and more detailed classification than will be attempted here is that not only do levels of narration ar range themselves in a hierarchy of mediation but that dif ferences within levels do so too. Just as we have demon strated that a first-person present-tense utterance presents the reader with an unmediated event, we could make a good case, I think, for taking first-person narration to be, by its very nature, less mediated than third-person and 212 present-tense narration less mediated than past, future, or durative. Participant would be less mediated than non participant; durative would be less mediated than past and past less than future. But how we would rank combinations of person and time I am not yet in a position even to specu late on. The point now is simply to emphasize the essential similarity between determining levels of narration and labeling the kind of narration within individual levels. In both processes we are analyzing the ways in which a reader, or listener, comes to know of an unverifiable event. As to the ontological question of the reality of the groups in our taxonomy, we can now see that in some respects, at least, our taxonomy is on firmer ground than is the bio logical. In the strictest sense, any grouping, whether it seems to occur in nature or not, is an artificial construct imposed upon a world of discrete individuals. In this sense, no one's taxonomy reflects the real world. A less extreme position is one in which a class concept is said to reflect a natural grouping if it is possible to establish a documented series of changes which result in, and are a prerequisite-for, given individuals. In this sense, breed ing charts and family trees reflect a relationship which can be called a natural group. But even this conception of a natural group does not legitimize the great majority of species or any of the more inclusive classes. A third pos sibility is to say that a class is a natural one if it is 213 composed of naturally existing members who all share a com mon characteristic. Such a class might be all the feath ered, egg-laying bipeds, all the one-celled organisms, or all the works of literature which have three levels of nar ration. Indeed, all of the major classes and minor subdivi sions in this literary taxonomy exist as a result of a specific, defining characteristic admitting of no exceptions which is present in every work which belongs to that class. Some biological classes are also constructed this way but many are not. Such classes must resort to more or less complicated networks of family resemblances in order to account for every single organism and all the different spe cies. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, since biologi cal groups are in fact families and cannot escape the unpre dictability and idiosyncrasy which flesh is heir to. One might almost say that if a successful taxonomy can be devel oped for the almost infinite variety of living organisms, past and present, then there is no phenomenon which cannot be classified. The ability of our literary taxonomy to create classes without recourse to family resemblances is by no means a proof of a superior system, but rather is inherent in the nature of the subject. It reflects the fact that litera ture, as we have defined it, is a much more precisely and narrowly conceived kind of phenomenon than is life and one whose taxonomy, therefore, is predetermined to a much 214 greater extent. The task of classifying literature is more akin to cataloguing buildings in terms of the number of floors and the number and arrangement of the rooms on each floor than it is to making geological, ecological, chemical, physical, and historical sense out of the plethora of acti vated amino acids which did, do, and will inhabit the earth. The fact remains, however, that in one respect at least our taxonomy has a precision which Linnaeus' lacks. Every single work of literature and every single species and superspecies of literature is definable in terms of precise, unvarying criteria. And whatever difficulties may arise in the actual practice of applying these criteria to individual works, the criteria themselves involve no ambiguity and no overlapping. In the previous three chapters we developed the criteria for literature in general; in this chapter we have developed the criteria for the various classes of a literary taxonomy; and in the next and final chapter we will develop the criteria for analyzing individual works. CHAPTER VI THE CRITERIA OP LITERARY IDENTIFICATION To identify a work of literature we must determine first what the event is and second how the event is narrated. Therefore the analysis of any work provides answers to two different sets of questions. Ultimately these answers are the same, because the work itself is one thing, not two. It is a narrated event, not a narration plus an event. But for the purposes of analysis the two are distinguishable. Now of events we need to know whether they are single or multiple. If they are multiple, the subsidiary events are external to the main event (introductory or concluding) or they are internal. External events, like the main event, can be either mediated or unmediated, and both external and internal events will have either independent narrations of their own or be narrated as part of the narration of larger events. Then of narration we need to know if it is only exter nal to the event or whether part of the account is also internal. External narration can be either simple or com pound in any given level; it may be shared by two different events on different levels; and it may even occur within a 215 216 larger unmediated event. Internal narration is either single or double. Event Single Event Perhaps the best way to begin the analysis of single event works is to examine in some detail a species which has no complexity of event or narration. And for this the first species of the first paradigm of the first level of narra tion (IIAla) will serve our purpose. Species "a" is first- person participant past. That is, the event is narrated by a particular person; his account is based upon first-hand experience; and the event occurs before the account of it. Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," Wordsworth's "The Daffodils," Shelley's "Ozymandias," Joyce's "Araby," are examples of this species. "The Darkling Thrush" is a straightforward account of a man who once leaned against a gate on a bleak winter day and was startled by the cheerful song of a weather-beaten old thrush. There is no dialogue, nothing quoted, so there can be no question of another level of narration within the poem. The event begins when the man leans against the gate and ends when the song of the thrush is completed. The man at the gate is the narrator of the account and thus the nar ration is firsthand or participant. "The Daffodils" and "Because I Could Not Stop For 217 Death" raise minor questions about the extent of the event, but on closer inspection are seen to be identical to the Hardy poem. The event in Wordsworth's poem is a man wander ing alone beside a lake and suddenly coming upon a host of golden daffodils. The poem concludes, however, with an ex tension of this experience: I gazed— and gazed— but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. The question is, does the event encompass only those moments when the wanderer chanced upon the daffodils or does it ex tend to the later moments of recollection? The same problem confronts us in the Dickinson poem. Here the event is a gentleman and lady going for a drive in a carriage. They pass a school, fields of grain, and finally stop in front of a house. But the poem concludes with what might be an ex tension of this one day's experience: Since then 'tis centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity. The answer to our question is obtained by analyzing these proposed extensions and determining whether or not they could stand by themselves as statements of events. First we need to know, is there an event there? Second, if there is 218 one, is it sufficiently particularized to constitute an account of the moment? In each of the concluding stanzas the narrator is tell ing about something which has happened to him, and there fore, in the broadest sense, about a space-time event. But in "The Daffodils" the account is merely a generalization of the kind of thing which often happened to him after, and as a result of, the encounter with the daffodils. There are no details of a particular act of reminiscence at a particular time and place, and therefore the closing lines, while part of the narration, are not part of the event. In "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" the last stanza summarizes the narrator's experience since the carriage stopped but does not give a single instance of it except to note that the centuries feel (whether felt then or feels now is not clear) shorter than the day on which the ride was taken. It would of course have been possible to construct an event out of the telling, and the poem would have been someone sitting in eternity giving an account to someone else of how he got there. But in this case that was not done. There is ample evidence that a particular person is speaking, and we may even assume that he is speaking in eternity, but there is no evidence for interpreting the poem as an act of utterance. Therefore, we must conclude that the final stanza, although part of the narration, is not part of the event. There is no such thing as an account of an event which gives nothing 219 but the "facts," and we must be prepared with every mediated work to distinguish in the narration between statements "about1 1 the event qua event and statements "about" something else. "Ozymandias" and "Araby" have in common the fact that they contain verbatim accounts of characters talking. None of this quoted material, however, provides us with detailed information about the event or part of it, and therefore there is no additional level of narration within the event. More often than not, a mediated work contains as part of the event one or more characters talking, and in each case it is important to determine whether such dialogue is merely part of the event or whether it also is a source of information about the event. The species in paradigm two of the second level (IXBla-k) are distinguished from the works we are dis cussing now only by the fact that not all the information about the event is in the words of the first level of narra tion. Some of the information is first spoken by a charac ter and then quoted in another, more inclusive, level of narration. In a work like Lord Jim (IlClb) the event as a whole is presented in a third-person narration, but part of our knowledge comes from one of the characters (Marlow) quoted as directly telling about part of the event. But in addition, further information comes from Marlow quoting Jim telling about another part of the event. Jim's narration is part of Marlow's narration is part of the third-person 220 narration— three levels or three degrees removed from the unmediated event. But, as the diagram shows, only the third-person narration is of the event as a whole; the ac counts made by Marlow (|) and Jim (2) are only of parts of the total event. p3-.tr 1 2 The diagram allows us to tell at a glance not only how many levels of narration there are in the complete work but whether what is narrated in each case is part of a single inclusive event or is a discrete but subsidiary event. As the outline in the previous chapter indicates, three levels of narration can exist in at least three different para digms, and for this taxonomy the number of narrative levels is the primary consideration. However, there is an alter nate way of arranging the paradigms which also has its value— an arrangement based upon the number or levels of events irrespective of the narrative levels. A chart based upon event as well as narration occurs on the following page, but a discussion of the very interesting possibilities of cross classification is beyond the scope of this disser tation.^ The point here is simply that the paradigm for Lord Jim is not only one of three three-level narrative ^Cf. for example the biologist's increasing use of eco logical classification (organisms of the sea, of the rain forest tree tops, of the desert, etc.) to supplement the evolutionary system. 30H*rtOIKJHCP»E S 221 Event 222 paradigms but also one of five single-level event paradigms. A single-level event may be unmediated, may be narrated by one external level, two external levels, an external and an internal level, or an external and two internal levels. But more of this later. The point at hand is that "Ozymandias" and "Araby" contain the direct words of charac ters but that these do not constitute another level of nar ration. And the question is, how does one distinguish, among works containing direct quotation, those which have an added internal level of narration from those which do not? Is it because "Araby" has so few lines of dialogue or be cause it has such a small proportion of dialogue that there is no internal narration? How can "Ozymandias" with twelve and a half lines of quotation out of a total of fourteen have only one level of narration while Frost's "Not to Keep" (IIB2d) with only five lines out of twenty-two has two levels? The answer, of course, is that neither amount nor pro portion of quotation has anything to do with determining internal narration. The criterion is whether or not the direct words of anyone other than the narrator is the reader's source for some information about the event. What is said in "Araby" constitutes part of the event but is not also about the event. The event in "Ozymandias" is the meeting of two people, one of them a traveler from an antique land, and the account which the traveler gives of 223 what he has seen. The event lasts only as long as it takes for the two to meet and the traveler to give his account; it does not include anything which he talks about. Nor does the traveler's account constitute a discrete unverifiable event within the larger event, since the account is a gen eralized description and not a moment by moment account. I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive (stamped on these lifeless things), The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. On the other hand, what the man says in "Not to Keep" not only constitutes part of the event, it is also about that event. The event is the return home of a soldier for a week's rest and recuperation after being wounded. It in cludes a dialogue, and that dialogue is our source for the crucial information about the soldier's wound and about the necessity of his returning in a week. They sent him back to her. The letter came Saying . . . And she could have him. And before She could be sure there was no hidden ill Under the formal writing, he was in her sight, Living. They gave him back to her alive— How else? They are not known to send the dead— And not disfigured visibly. His face? His hands? She had to look, to ask, 'What is it, dear?' And she had given all Wasn't she glad now? Everything seemed won, 224 And all the rest for them permissible ease. She had to ask, 'What was it, dear?1 'Enough, Yet not enough. A bullet through and through, High in the breast. Nothing but what good care And medicine and rest, and you a week, Can cure me of to go again.' The same Grim giving to do over for them both. She dared no more than ask him with her eyes How was it with him for a second trial. And with his eyes he asked her not to ask. They had given him back to her, but not to keep. Like the traveler's account in "Ozymandias," the soldier's account does not constitute a discrete event within the larger one, but unlike it, the soldier's account refers directly to a part of that event— to the health and pros pects of one of the participants— and thereby constitutes an additional level of narration. However, our concern here is not primarily with narration but with events, and having examined single event works we turn now to those with multi ple event. Multiple Event Just as a sentence, which is defined as a unity, can be composed of independent but subordinated clauses, so a statement of an unverifiable event can be composed of inde pendent but subordinated events. These subordinated events are related in one of two ways to the main event; either they are outside of it introducing, or, rarely, concluding it, or they are inside of it. External events are not shown as part of the paradigm because they do not figure in the main event and the chain of narration which leads to the 225 most removed part of that event. Zn a more detailed tax onomy than we are attempting here works with external events would constitute subspecies within a species. We can, how ever, see now the different kind of external event works by pulling out representative species. An unsustained introduction, if it were not an adjunct to a larger, more developed event, could stand alone as an independent work. That is, in and of itself it fulfills the definition of literature. However, it does not stand alone, nor does it include the other event or events within it as is the case with the frame story in works like The Canter bury Tales. An unsustained introduction creates an unveri fiable event which is unrelated as an event to the main event, but which is too obviously related to the statement of that event to be ignored or explained away as an entirely separate work. Introductory events are narrative devices which serve to justify or to provide a setting for a narra tion and then are completely dropped without further men tion. It may be, as some scholars conjecture, that the text of Shakespeare's version of The Taming of the Shrew comes down to us in an abridged form and that the play should re turn, as does an anonymous earlier version, to the opening scene where the beggar is watching a play. Such might have been the case, but the text as we have it does not warrant 226 diagraming the play as an event within event but as a single main event with an unsustained introduction. Not all intro ductory events, however, bear the same relationship to the main event. A work may have a discrete external event and yet have no independent level of narration for it— either because that event is unmediated or because the narration of it is the same as the narration for the event as a whole— or a work may have a discrete external event with an independent level of narration. The first species shown above, repre sented by The Taming of the Shr6w (IIB2i), has two events which share the same narration. The second, third, and fourth— The Turn of the Screw (IIB2j), The Ring and the Book (IIClc), Alice in Wonderland (XIC2f)— have external events with independent narration and thus two different narrations on the same level. This is not to be confused, however, with compound narration, which is multiple narration of a single event. The Taming of the Shrew has a tangential event but no tangential narration of it; these three have both a tangential event and a tangential narration for that event. The fifth and last diagram, represented by Through the Looking Glass (IIC2h), has a tangential external event which is unmediated and therefore has no narration. These diagrams reveal a further difference which, although it be longs in our discussion of internal narration, needs to be mentioned here. The second diagram differs from the other 227 four in having not just a tangential event, not just a tan gential narration for that event, but also an extra internal narration for that event. And like external narration for that event, the internal narration is also tangential to the main sequence of narrative levels and is not counted sepa rately from it. The narration of the external, or tangen tial, event is not an addition to the narration of the main event but runs parallel to it. In the strictest sense it is neither included within the narration of the main event nor does it include within itself the narration of the main event. Narration which is distinguishable from though sub sidiary to the primary chain of narration does not affect the total number of narrative levels— unless by some freak an event could be both introductory and have more levels of narration than the main event. In this case we would list the work under the greatest number of narrative levels re gardless of where they occurred. But in no instance is the number of narrations added to the number of narrations of the main event. A similar kind of problem is that of classifying those works in which the event as a whole is unmediated but in cludes as part of that unmediated event an account of another discrete event. Does such a work have no levels of narration or one level? The cardinal principle is the num ber of degrees which the event or the furthest part of it is removed from the reader, rather than the nature of the 228 event, and therefore works like "Haircut" and The Fall are classified as mediated and one degree, or level, removed rather than unmediated. The further question of whether such works do not thereby lose their character as utter ances is an important one and is treated below in the sec tion on narration. Through the Looking Glass differs from its companion volume Alice1s Adventures in Wonderland and from all our other examples of external events in having an unmediated introductory event and a concluding event. The six-stanza poem which introduces Through the Looking Glass is the statement made by an unnamed adult to a young girl about ready to trundle off to bed offering to retell or to finish a familiar tale. A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing— A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of our rowing-- Whose echoes live in memory yet Though envious years would say 'forget.' Come, harken then ere voice of dread, With bitter tidings laden. Shall summon to unwelcome bed A melancholy maiden! We are but older children, dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near. The characteristics of an utterance seem obvious enough here, but there is a problem in that the speaker, though unnamed, seems also clearly to be the first-person non participant narrator of Alice's adventures in Looking Glass World. Why then are we not obliged to say that the narra- 229 tion of the two events is the same? Actually# there are no alternatives to this diagram, as a few trial attempts will demonstrate. We cannot say that the introductory event is narrated first-person non-participant because the speaker in the introduction is not giving an account of any unverifiable event. The passing reference to the telling of a tale while rowing is a general description of an event and not a par ticularized account which is created. Nor is there an account of a bedtime scene. Rather we infer such a situa tion from the statement which we interpret as an utterance in the act of being uttered. Therefore, if there is any introductory event at all, it can only be an unmediated one, that is, one with no narration. Another possibility is that there is no introductory event but rather an event within an event. The main event would be a bedtime scene in which the adult tells a child the story of Looking Glass World, and this story would be an internal rather than an external sub sidiary event. To be sure the context of the story telling is particularized enough to constitute a frame event, but this interpretation is ruled out by the fact that once the introductory poem is concluded no mention is ever made of a bedtime scene nor is there any need to infer such. In short, the introductory scene, though it definitely consti tutes an event, is unsustained in relation to the much longer and more detailed narrative. Therefore, we diagram 230 the work as a first-person non-participant account which is prefaced by a narration-related unmediated event. The only alternative to this interpretation is to say that we have here not one work of literature but two. And this is not an indefensible position. The problems involved in deciding whether related but discrete events are differ ent works despite their juxtaposition and linking by titles are often quite complex. However, the factors for .deciding stem both from event and narration, so our discussion of these problems is best postponed until we have examined narrative techniques. The concluding event of Through the Looking Glass might well have been a return to the bedtime scene of the intro ductory event and thereby have sustained it. But such is not the case. As an event it is as independent of the introduction as it is of the main story. Interestingly enough, however, both of these external events are "related" to each other and to the main event by virtue of a common relationship to the subject of the concluding poem. The introduction refers to a story-telling incident on a rowing excursion; the work itself is that story; and the conclusion is an account of the rowing excursion. For this reason and because the three statements .of unverifiable events are always printed together rather than separately, it seems reasonable to conclude that taken collectively they consti tute the statement of a single event; that the event is 231 Alice's adventure in Looking Glass Land; and that the intro ductory and concluding events are essentially narrative de vices for telling and commenting upon that adventure. If such an interpretation is not convincing, the only alterna tive is to consider that what has heretofore passed as a single work of literature under one title is actually three distinct and independent works of literature. When a discrete event appears within another event, however, there is no such alternative. Whatever we decide about the external poems, there is no question that Alice's song "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," Tweedledee's poem about the walrus and the carpenter, the White Knight's song "A- Sitting on a Gate," Humpty Dumpty's poem "I sent a Message to the Pish," and the third-person manuscript account of the Jabberwock are part of the statement as a whole even though their events are not the event of the work. The telling of them, but not what is told, is part of the event. On the other hand, the telling or narration of the concluding poem is not part of the event, only part of the statement or work as a whole. The event in Through the Looking Glass is ap proximately a day in the life of young Alice, beginning and ending at her home in front of the fire and the mantel mir ror. The event in Tweedledee's account of the walrus and the carpenter, for instance, as an event has nothing to do with the event in Through the Looking Glass except for be ing told by one of the characters in that work. The event 232 in Tweedledee's untitled poem is a stroll along a beach by a walrus and a carpenter who are joined by several oysters who are then dined upon by the walrus and the carpenter. In the course of conversing with Alice, Tweedledee does provide information about the event of which he is a part, but his telling of this story is not an instance of it. As a comprehensive example in this discussion of mul tiple events, let us examine the four concentric levels of event in Melmoth the Wanderer. The main event in this novel takes place as Melmoth Hall in Ireland over a period of a few weeks during which young Melmoth comes up from Trinity College to tend his dying miserly uncle. The uncle dies, and then young Melmoth, who is the sole heir, meets a bearer of strange tales who is cast up on the shore during a vio lent storm which carries his ship and all the other passen gers to the bottom. This is level one. Level two is represented by three different stories which are read, heard, and dreamed in Melmoth Hall during these few weeks. The first of these is the autobiography of a man named Stanton who was persecuted for years by a centuries-old fiend named Melmoth. This account is found by young Melmoth in an ancient manuscript among his uncle's papers. In the second of these the man washed up on the shore, Moncada the Spaniard, tells the story of his life to young Melmoth. He too, and more recently, has been the victim of Melmoth the wanderer. In the third of the second- 233 level events Melmoth the wanderer, having returned to Melmoth Hall, has a strange dream about his coming death and descent into Hell. Level three is also represented by three different stories, each contained within one of the second-level events. The first is part of Stanton's manuscript. One of the characters in it, an old Spanish lady whom Stanton meets, tells him about a marriage thwarted by the fiend Melmoth. The second is part of Moncada's account of him self. He repeats to young Melmoth, in the very words of the man who told it to him in a monastery dungeon, the story of the nailing up of two lovers in that same dungeon. The third of these three-level events is also told by Moncada. He relates the story which he read in the Jew Adonijah's manuscript while hiding from the Inquisition. This is the long ghoulish fantasy of Immalee called "Tale of the Indians." In level four there are two stories, each contained within one of the third-level accounts. In the first one, which is part of Adonijah's manuscript, a stranger tells Immalee's father about the life and death of the Guzman family. In the second, also part of the same manuscript, another stranger, Melmoth the wanderer, tells Immalee's father about the two doomed lovers, Elinor and Sandal. Aside from the narrative connections, all these stories are related by the appearance in them of Melmoth the wanderer. And while a similar novel could have been written with just one event— the centuries*-long life of Melmoth— the author chose to tell the story of those weeks in Melmoth Hall and to present as discrete events only half a dozen scenes from Melmoth's life and these primarily in terms of the victims rather than the victimizer. Finally, within each of the two fourth-level events, characters are quoted as providing part of the information about the event, thus creating a final, fifth, level of narration. As the following two diagrams demonstrate, however, there is sometimes a significant difference between the dia gram of the narrative complexity of a species (in this case IIEa) and the diagram of an individual work in that species (Melmoth) : 3 ..± 7 .____ „ ______ 2_ In the majority of works, especially the less complicated ones, the diagram of a work is identical with the diagram of the species to which it belongs, but with Melmoth this is not the case. The diagram of a species does not indicate more than one event on any given level nor more than one instance of narration (with the single exception noted be low) . Its purpose is to show how far removed from the 235 reader is the most distant part of the event and how that part is funneled through different levels of narration to him. Therefore, the diagram of species IlEa disregards two of the three second-level events (Stanton's autobiography and Melmoth's dream) and two of the three third-level events (the account of the thwarted marriage told by the Spanish lady to Stanton and the story of the nailed up lovers told to Moncada in the dungeon). However, since the two fourth- level events are identical, the single designation of event and narration applies to both. If they were identical in these respects but were both the same distance removed from the reader, the diagram would have to reflect this ad does, for example, the diagram of The Arabian Nights. 2 <- The slash mark is not to be confused with the dash used in diagraming compound narration of a single event, rather it indicates that two events with different narrations lead equally to a most removed part or level of the work. The criterion for recognizing internal and external events is the same: that which occurs within the same limits of space (place) and time is part of the same event; that which occurs at different places and different times is 236 not. However, if an event purports to encompass another event (e.g. The Turn of the Screw). we apply an additional criterion and ask if this event is sufficiently sustained to actually encompass or whether it simply introduces. As a bare minimum "sufficiently sustained" should mean at least one reference back to the encompassing event after it has been initially created and then dropped. And of course if we do decide an event is sufficiently sustained to include within it an account of another event, there is no external event because that event has become the main event and the other a subsidiary internal event. There are three possi bilities for interpreting a work which begins with one event and then drops it to concentrate on another. If reference continues to be made, however minimally, to the first event it can be an encompassing event of a multi-leveled work (e.g. "Youth," IIC2a). If no reference is made back to the opening scene then there is either an unsustained— but fully created— introductory event (e.g. The Turn of the Screw) or an inconsistency. A work has an inconsistent event— and thus is not literature— if we are unable to determine which embryonic event is the event of the work and/or what rela tion these events bear to each other (e.g. "Kubla Khan"). External subsidiary events are tangential to the main event of a work. Internal subsidiary events are encompassed by the main event and thus more obviously a part of that event than are the external. But the criterion is still limits of space and time. What makes "Youth" two events rather than one is the fact that the only link between a year in the life of young Marlow sailing to Bankok and an evening in the life of old Marlow twenty-two years later back in England is Marlow himself. To make a single space time event out of "Youth" we would be forced to say that the event was Marlow's uninterrupted life from the time of his first voyage as second mate to his retirement from the sea, even though we are told about only a year and a day of those twenty-two years. To be sure, we say that the story Marlow tells is a single space-time event whose limits in space run from England to Bankok and whose limits in time are approxi mately a year when he was twenty, although we are not given an account of all 365 of those days or of every minute of every hour. Yet Marlow makes it clear that the subject of his tale is the entire voyage and the many months of delay which preceded it, and he creates incidents from every month to give a sense of continuity to his subject— that is, to unify it. No account of any space-time event is complete, but this does not prevent us from determining what the sub ject of an account is and whether or not it is relatively .complete and consistent or whether it is only one or more relatively isolated incidents. In terms of Melmoth.'s. centuries-old life, the half dozen episodes in that novel are not a relatively complete and consistent account, and therefore the single unifying space-time event is the encompassing two-week event in Melmoth Hall when Melmoth comes home to die. The accounts of his past life are related to the main event not primarily because they concern Melmoth but because they are told as a part of the Melmoth Hall event. As far as being a statement of an unverifiable event which includes discrete but sub ordinated internal events, Moncada might just as well be telling the story of the three bears which includes Goldi locks telling the story of the three little pigs which includes the wolf telling the story of Little Red Riding- hood. The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales may be less intricately interrelated than is Melmoth, but they are not any the_ l.ess unified space-time events for containing stor ies which have no direct link with each other. The telling is all, and the fact that Marlow is talking about himself is not sufficient to link as a single event a twenty-two year period for which we have information on only a year and a day. We are told that Marlow spent the time at sea7 how he did it, what the moment by moment details are, we can only speculate on. And to do that would be to write another story which would not be "Youth" as we have it. Equally unwarranted is to analyze the story as a single main event (young Marlow's voyage to Bankok) with an unsus tained introduction (old Marlow's telling of the story in England). "Youth" differs in two essential respects from The Turn of the Screw; the introductory scene is periodi- cally returned to, that is sustained, and it includes the actual act of telling. The Turn of the Screw opens with a short scene in which a man who years before had known the governess and had received from her a manuscript account of her ghostly adventures is persuaded to read it to a small group of friends. However, he does not actually read it and the words of the story are the governess's not his. There are no quotation marks around what the governess says to indicate that there is an intermediary between the governess speaking and what we read; there is no colon at the end of the introduction to link what Douglas says in his own right by way of introduction to what he reads from the manuscript. In effect, we are not listening to Douglas read; we are reading what Douglas read. And once the governess's tale begins, there is no further mention of Douglas and his friends sitting around the fire. That event ends when Douglas begins to read, not when he has finished. The introduction is important for interpreting the theme and for helping to answer the crucial question of whether the ghosts are real or imagined, but it is unrelated as an event to what happened many years before at a certain country estate. There is no narrator in the act of narrating the adventures on the estate— not Douglas, whose talking does not include a reading of the manuscript, nor the governess, who makes no effort to create a particular time and place for the writing down of her story. But with "Youth" it is different. 240 Quotation marks are used throughout to distinguish when Marlow is speaking and when the unnamed listener to his tale is recounting the scene around the mahogany table when Marlow spoke. This unnamed first-person participant creates an event in which Marlow is telling a story, and even though the great bulk of "Youth" is Marlow recounting his Bankok adventure, the unnamed narrator sustains the encompassing event by occasional references to Marlow's act of narration. Therefore, the subject of Marlow's narration is an internal subsidiary event which is part of a much shorter and less detailed— but sufficiently sustained— encompassing event. The only way that a statement of an unverifiable event can consist of multiple events, either internal or external, is for there to be a definite subordination to one main event. Discrete events which are simply juxtaposed with no common limits of space and time, or which are so distant in space or time as to demand a tenuous extension of these limits beyond what the details of the work will support, are different works of literature. We must decide of Winesburq Ohio; A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life, for example, whether the individual "tales" are independent accounts of events which occur in different places and at different times or whether they are overlapping episodes within the same limits of place and time. The former would be inde pendent works of literature which are simply juxtaposed for a variety of non-essential reasons— like a collection of dog 241 stories. The latter would be chapters of a single encom passing event which, unlike an event encompassing subordi nate internal events, is nothing more than the sum of its parts. As far as I can determine, we are about as close to a borderline case here as it is possible to get. Very little modification of fact and emphasis could tip the scale in either direction. And the problem is further complicated by "The Book of the Grotesque," which prefaces the work but is different in kind from any of the individual tales and not sufficiently related to them even to be an unsustained introduction. Insofar as Winesburq Ohio is one event, then it is a separate and independent work of literature with its own title and with no connection as an event with "The Book of the Grotesque." Insofar as Winesburq Ohio is a series of related but independent works, then there are twenty-three works set in Winesburg and one set in some other unnamed place. There is no question that all twenty-three can be located easily within the same limits of place and time— a half dozen years in Winesburg, Ohio, around the turn of the » century, those years when George Willard is growing up. He appears in most, but not all, of the tales, and the day he leaves town is the terminal date of the collection. How ever, there is little attention given to organizing the individual episodes into a single account with a clearly defined chronological relationship. When Anderson has an interesting character to sketch, a provocative incident to relate, he is only secondarily concerned with relating it in space and time with the other episodes. Thus the question arises whether these limits of place and time are not more inclusive than delimiting. The wider the limits of time and place the more clearly must the episodes be related in order to constitute a single event. Seventy years of A Fearful Joy and ten thousand miles of "Youth” are clearly unifying factors in these works, but a few square miles of Ohio and half a dozen years may not be sufficiently unified by the many characters and incidents in Winesburg Ohio. In the strictest technical sense, however, Winesburg Ohio does delimit a space-time event which does include everything which is portrayed, and this seemed to me sufficient for classifying it as a single work and "The Book of the Gro tesque" as an independent unsubordinated "companion" work. But such a classification can only stand with the assumption that the very notion of a small midwestern community implies a natural unity, which needs only to be lightly sketched to be accepted. A similar problem is that of classifying serial works— the novels of Trollope and Faulkner, the Tom Swift and Sherlock Holmes stories, etc. But these can only be ap proached by analyzing whole canons, and that is a project in its own right, quite beyond the scope of this study. There is no reason why an account of a single event cannot fill a 243 dozen volumes, but neither is there any reason for assuming that the same characters are necessarily part of the same event. Without going into the details, it might be men tioned here that the collected Sherlock Holmes does not con stitute a single event. Doyle devotes very little effort to unifying the adventures of Holmes and Watson around the life of either, and consequently the twenty-odd years of their detective work is known to us only through the cases, each of which covers only a few days. The ordering of the cases is not strictly chronological; the details sometimes change from story to story; and Watson continually points out that what he tells us is only a small part of what he knows and that what he knows is only a small part of what happened. In short, the life, as a whole, of Sherlock Holmes remains almost as much a mystery to the reader as does the life of Melmoth. What the collected works could provide is data for a unified "biography" of Holmes, but Doyle himself never wrote such a work. Narration In this, the final section of the dissertation, there is very little which is new because it has proven impossible to develop the definition, to construct the taxonomy, to analyze the nature of literary events, without at the same time also exploring rather thoroughly the various kinds of narration. We will review these narrative distinctions here 244 and then conclude with an examination of a revealing taxo nomic dilemma. The narrative notation which appears outside and above the box representing an event is called external narration. This means that the event as a whole and any event within it is narrated entirely by that level and kind of narration. Such an account may be, though it usually is not, part of the event narrated, and it may or may not relate additional internal or external levels of narration. But it is the medium through which everything that is diagramed below it reaches the reader. It may in turn be subsumed within a higher level of external narration, but it is nonetheless external by virtue of the fact that it is the controlling narration for a discrete event and not simply an internal part of an event which provides information about that event. In the diagram of Melmoth, for example, there are four external levels of narration for the four levels of events and one additional level of internal narration within the fourth, or most internal, event. Taken by themselves, most of the events in each of the other levels have internal narration, but the external narration of the next lower event takes precedence over the internal narration within the same event. As a result, the only internal narration to show up on a diagram is that which occurs in the most re moved event, because here there is no further external nar ration leading to a further level of event. 245 There are two types of external narration, simple and . compound, and theoretically twelve different kinds of simple narration which can combine in a wide variety of ways to form compound narration. |»<r l » f [>_> Kp<- 3<r- 3t 3-* 3*+ Two of these, |\P-> and KP<-> , have not yet been discovered in any work and may not exist. Aside from these, and from 3 ■*-* , the genus of species IIA1 which we discussed earlier in the chapter has a full complement of these narrativfe types, including one example of compound narration. No other genus is so well represented. Next to deciding whether or not a statement is litera ture, the most difficult kind of problem is that of literary classification involving the limits of an event. One such problem arises because of the similarity between mediated durative accounts and unmediated events which include as part of the statement an account of a discrete internal event. The Fall is such a borderline work and the disserta tion concludes with an analysis of it. A second problem arises because compound narration is not always clearly the narration of a single unified event; sometimes multiple ac counts are more adequately seen as accounts of multiple independent events and thus not compounded at all. And this difficulty in deciding between one work and more than one is 246 not amenable to capsule treatment, because only a detailed examination can reveal where the emphasis in a given work lies. Our discussion of Winesburcr Ohio did not so much de cide the question as lay it out for someone else to investi gate, and there the problem was not intensified by compound narration. One reason for thinking that it is an account of a single event is that the narration, third-person past- tense, is identical for all twenty-three of the "tales." But what about Dos Passos' USA (IIB3c)? The fact that it is . a trilogy is a minor problem compared to the fact that all three volumes have three different kinds of narration and three different series of events. Th$ many characters and episodes bear about as much relationship to each other as do those in Winesburq Ohio, but in addition the events fall into three interwoven series each with its own mode of nar ration. The great majority of the episodes are straightfor ward third-person past-tense accounts, but interspersed among these is a series of first-person present-tense "stream-of-consciousness" scenes. And in addition, the trilogy begins and ends with two scenes which are described in third-person present-tense narration. To defend the position that all this is actually the account of a single unified event would take at least a complete chapter— more than is warranted now. The point here is that if we do de cide that one event can encompass all the episodes, then the narration is unquestionably compound. 247 Knut Hamsun's Pan (IIB2h), subtitled revealingly enough "From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers," is another similar problem. There are only two episodes here, but two differ ent people are giving accounts of Glahn's life, and there is a conspicuous gap between the time covered in the two ac counts. Down There on a Visit (IXB2g) records several epi sodes separated in time, and although the same person is telling each one, the accounts are with no seeming consist- 2 ency sometimes of past events and sometimes of present. The only instances of compound narration so far recorded which present no problems of event or consistency are "You Know Me Al" and "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." The latter work will serve not only to clarify the notion of compound narration but also as a transition to the next point, shared narration. □ The main event of the poem is a young man in a country churchyard at dusk meditating in the present-tense on the dead buried there. As part of this meditation he imagines what may take place some day when he is dead and buried there. This future-tense meditation is itself a discrete event within the larger present-tense account of the church yard scene, but there is no separate level of narration for 2 Cf. the discussion of inconsistent narration below. it. The first twenty-three stanzas are the unnamed speaker telling about the scene of which he is a part. Stanza twenty-four begins an account of a hypothetical future event, but the same person is speaking and it is part of the same instance of narration. Yet the narration is compound because there are two different times, neither of which can be subsumed under the other— as was done for instance in "Leda and the Swan," where the present-tense was subsumed under the past. The speaker imagines that some kindred spirit will stop to inquire about his fate from some old "swain," and as part of this second-level event the swain replies with the third-level event. The account of this third-level event, which is in quotation marks, is about a young man who was accustomed to wander about in the area, how he was missed one day, and how the country folk saw him buried. The swain concludes by pointing out the young man's epitaph and enjoining his listener to read it. However, the epitaph is presented as part of the original level of narra tion, not as either the swain or his listener reading it. The work is an example of compound narration because there is more than one kind of time in one level of narration; it is an example of shared narration because there are two dif ferent events on two different levels which share the same level and instance of narration. In effect, the shared nar ration of internal events which we have discussed here is no different from the shared narration of external events 249 which we discussed above in connection with The Ring and the Book and The Taming of the Shrew. It is exactly the same as the shared narration which appeared in the diagram of not 3 the species but the work, Melmoth. And of course, no mat ter what the relation of the events which share a narration, the narration is always external. Those works which do not rely on character accounts within an event to provide any information about that event are narrated only by external narration. However, when there is internal narration, when characters within an event do provide in their own words information about the event of which they are a part, this does not appear on a diagram except in the innermost event— which may, of course, be the main event if there are no others. A paradigm, a species diagram, a diagram of a work, does not reveal instances of internal narration when within the same event a character gives an account of another discrete event. To make this clear and to distinguish between internal and external nar ration, the diagraming levels of internal narration is shown in numbers rather than in symbols for person and time. I Indeed, there is really no need to note the person of inter nal accounts because the account is always of necessity first-person, nor the time because the account is always 3 Cf. p. 234 above. 250 part of the event of which it is providing information. In theory there could be more levels of internal narration than one character quoting a second character providing informa tion about the event of which they are both participants, but in practice it is quite unlikely, and I have found no works with more than two internal levels. These, however, are relatively common, although they all occur in one para- digm— (IICl). Conrad's Chance and Lord Jim, Browning's The" Ring and the Book, Robinson's "Cassandra," Stoker's Dracula, and Doyle's "The Five Orange Pips" all have two levels of internal narration. In Chapter IV we dealt with the question of inconsist ent events and concluded that a work whose events were in consistently developed or related did not really qualify as literature. Of course we hasten to add that so far we are talking about only two works— ."Kubla Khan" and The Waste Land— the one an admitted stillbirth, the other conceded to be "fragments." Inconsistency of narration, on the other hand, is far less crucial and far more common. Insofar as there is a need to represent inconsistent events, they are shown as a box with an "x" in it. Inconsistently narrated works can usually be diagramed by ignoring an obvious de parture from an established pattern, but as a reminder an "x" is placed at the end of the main narrative notation. Such inconsistencies range all the way from a single first- person lapse in the six hundred pages of Nostromo to a 251 consistently inconsistent undercutting with footnotes of the unmediated nature of Sinclair Lewis's The Man Who Knew Coolidqe: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz. Constructive and Nordic Citizen. And while I have classified Nostromo, (IIB2d), I have not classified The Man Who Knew Coolidqe. because this would have necessitated creating a separate species for a single work whose narration was basically inconsistent. Because of Conrad1s ambitious attempts to create events out of the narrating of his stories, he has several incon sistently narrated works: "Gaspar Ruiz," The Nigger of the 'Narcissus.' Nostromo. among others. The most serious of these inconsistencies occurs in "Gaspar Ruiz" (IIC2a), in which an omniscient third-person account of Gaspar's life and death alternates with scenes in old General Santierra's house, where Santierra is giving a first-person participant account of Gaspar's life and death. In effect Conrad is letting the general tell the story except when there is information to impart which the general could not possibly know. Then the account slips into third-person omniscient. The work begins as a third-person account of what Santierra was accustomed to tell his guests whenever he had a chance. Then the generalized telling becomes a particular telling, and the third-person narration becomes, first, the account of a first-person who seems to have heard the general regu larly tell the story, and, then, one of the guests present 252 at a particular telling. The evidence for the main event being a scene in the general's house grows, and in the last pages, after the story of Gaspar is finished, there is a short episode with the general and Gaspar's now middle-aged daughter. This seems clearly to establish the work as basically a first-person (the unnamed guest's) account of an event in the old general's house. Within this event is another first-person (General Santierra's) account— the life and death of Gaspar. This clarification does not, however, remove the inconsistency. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (IIB2a) has more lapses than Nostromo but none so serious as those in "Gaspar Ruiz." The narration here also alternates between third and first- person. It seems to begin as third-person, but eventually the narrator introduces himself as having been a meipber of the 'Narcissus' crew. But as such he makes occasional in consistent ventures into Wait's mind and describes what Donkin is doing when alone. The same thing happens in Mobv Dick (IIC2b), where Ishmael ostensibly narrates the whole work, but actually only the opening and closing chapters are related by him as a character. Sometimes even the "I" is dropped, and there are some instances of omniscient third- person accounts— Ahab meditating alone, Starbuck, Studd, Flask, soliloquizing, etc. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Gentleman (IIC2c) Tristram narrates and intersperses his account of a past event with comments on himself at the time of writing, but he never seems quite to create a specific event out of it. He has inconsistent access to other characters' thoughts upon occasion and reports things which he, as a character, could not have known about. A further, though minor, inconsistency is the footnoting. Depending on which makes the better joke, the footnotes are either written by Tristram or by some unnamed "editor" without any other indi cation of there being an editor or way of determining for many of the notes who the writer was. Perhaps this confu sion is a deliberate reflection of the theme (the way theo retical precision is continually upset when confronted by the vagaries of actual experience), but nonetheless a narra tive inconsistency does exist. Now, finally, as a summation of this discussion of nar ration and of the principles of literary classification in general, we will conclude this prolegomena with an examina tion of a radical kind of dilemma which this taxonomy and all other taxonomies must face--the question of applying regular principles to sometimes irregular phenomena. For this taxonomy one of the most difficult of such questions is to determine whether a character speaking is a narrative device for a mediated work or whether the speaking consti tutes part of an act of utterance in an unmediated work. Nowhere is the line between mediated and unmediated works finer than between durative accounts (e.g. "A Caddy's 254 Diary") and thpse unmediated works (like* "Haircut" and The Fall) which contain accounts of discrete events. In both types the reader's source of information for the event is the words of a character whose writing or speaking them is part of the event. While the principle for distinguishing the two is clear enough, its application in some instances is not. In the case of unmediated works with internal events the question sometimes arises as to whether the in ternal event is really discrete or whether the limits of the external event are more properly broadened to include the subject of the internal. (A similar question arose with "Youth," and we decided that the event of Marlow's narration could not be broadened to include the subject of his narra tion.) If we do decide that a speaker's act of speaking is sufficiently particularized to constitute an event, and if he is giving, as part of his utterance, an account of an event which is sufficiently related to his act of speaking for the two to be part of a larger event, then this single larger event is a mediated durative account. The work is then an account of an event which began before the statement of it but which is not concluded before the statement be gins; the event extends up to and includes the act of narra tion. It is a short step from a durative work like "A Caddy's Diary" (IIAld), where the account or telling of an event is also part of that event, to a work whose event is an act of 255 utterance which contains a mediated account of a second, discrete, internal event. The only difference is that a durative account does talk directly about the single total event while with an utterance the encompassing event must be inferred from a statement which is a part of that event but not about it. Yet an utterance does not constitute, nor is an account about, an entire event? no matter what the kind of event, some part must always be inferred. If Lardner had consistently created an act or context of narration for the caddy's account of his country club experiences, the work would have had two events: (1) the unmediated act of utter ance taking place at a particular place and time and (2) the mediated experience which he talks about and which happened before the act of telling it. And this is exactly what Lardner does do in "Haircut" and what Camus does in The Fall. We discussed these works earlier and established the unmediated nature of their main events. However, a case could be made for thinking that they are not utterances which include accounts of discrete events but are durative accounts of single events. If this were true, we would N- diacrram The Fall, for example, not U but making this change we would be saying that the event was not simply the speaker's life as he is talking to a stranger in Amsterdam, but his entire adult life up to and including 256 this act of utterance. It is possible to say this because the subject of his five-part statement is his life in Paris and how he came to leave it and settle in Amsterdam. If there are two events, they are two parts of a man's life with an interval of time between them. In either case, we must make inferences about parts of an event which are not explicitly created. In diagraming The Fall our conclusion depends on the answers we give to two questions: (1) Is the gap between the speaker's life in Paris and the five days in Amsterdam too tenuous to be bridged by the details which the work provides? (2) Does the speaker's statement give an account not only of his life in Paris but also of the present situation in Amsterdam where he is conversing with a stranger? If the interval between the event in the narrative (the speaker's life in Paris) and the event which is the act of narrating them (five days in Amsterdam several years after leaving Paris) is no different than the necessary intervals which occur in the account of any long period and no differ ent than the intervals which do occur in the Paris account, then the event of The Fall is best considered as the unin terrupted adult life of the speaker up to the moment he con cludes his story. In this case, not only is the speaker giving an account of past occurrences which are complete before the account of them begins, but he is also giving a present account of himself and of the context of his telling. 257 We do learn much about this act, or acts, of utterance, and the speaker's words are our only source for this informa tion. So if we are not forced to infer an act or context of utterance from the existence of a statement but are given an account of that context, then the work is not unmediated but mediated. However, it is not clear how someone can give an account of himself giving an account when the two accounts are the same. In addition, the event of every work which we have analyzed as unmediated is known to us only through the words of the speaker. Thus it would seem to follow that every work would be by definition a mediated account— a con ception which would perhaps include The Fall but would ex clude works like "0 Western Wind" which no stretch of the imagination could turn into accounts. A similar problem arose in diagraming "Stopping by Woods," and we decided that this was a mediated rather than unmediated event because (1) the "speaker" was giving an account of the context of his statement and (2) there was no evidence that this statement was even being spoken. The poem was a present-tense account of a situation in which the speaker was a participant, rather than a statement which we inferred to be spoken by a particular person in a particular context. The notion of unmediated works is a means for per ceiving the essential literariness in works which may not obviously appear to be statements of unverifiable events. But how immediately obvious a statement must be before it is 258 classified as a mediated statement of an event is not cer tain. "Stopping by Woods" approaches the dividing line? The Fall may rest squarely on it. In the last analysis, the reasons I have diagramed The Fall as unmediated rather than mediated is that (1) the most conspicuous and significant feature of the work seemed to me to be the fact that every word in it was spoken by a single person in the context of a specific situation and that (2) the gap between the life in Paris and the five days in Amsterdam seemed too pronounced to be bridged by an occa sional passing reference in the detailed account of the one and detailed presentation of the other. In the light of the second reason, the fact that some information about the act or context of utterance is directly provided by the speaker himself seems in this case more a matter of degree than of kind. These two parts of the speaker's life are more tenu ously linked than are the different parts of his life in Paris; the fact that they are all connected by virtue of having happened to one man does not necessarily render them a single event. Space-time events, whether verifiable or unverifiable may or may not constitute a single larger event depending on how they are viewed. One man shoots another— this is an event. If several men are shooting several other men, these separate events can constitute a larger event— a battle. If several groups of men are shooting several groups of other men, these events can constitute an even 259 larger event— a war. And just as the subject of a verifi able account depends on whether the shooting, the battle, or the war is emphasized, so a work of literature treats a larger or smaller event depending on how the pie of experi ence is cut or presented. To say that the life of Melmoth extends through all the episodes of Melmoth the Wanderer is not to say that his life is the subject or delimiting factor of the event of that novel. The author has ordered his sub ject differently. And a complete analysis of The Fall would, 1 think, substantiate my view that Camus too has ordered his subject differently— that the work is two sepa rable groups of incidents forming two events rather than an undifferentiated all-encompassing single event unified around a man's life. The relationships which we infer be tween the component episodes of the life in Paris and be tween the component episodes of the five days in Amsterdam will only tenuously link the Paris episodes as a group to the Amsterdam episodes as a group. Thus we have, despite the obvious connection of a man's life, two distinguishable 4 or discrete events. Thus it is true that some works defined by our criteria as unmediated also exhibit characteristics supposedly 4See Simpson pp. 104, 116-119, 131, 164, 168, 190, 197 for diagrams of similar taxonomic problems. In whatever field, it is the same age-old problem of universals, of finding consistent principles for including some things in a group, and excluding others. That such grouping is possible scientific knowledge is the conclusive demonstration. 260 peculiar to mediated works, but this is only to be expected. This overlapping does, on the one hand, render the taxonomy less precise, but, on the other hand, it substantiates the definition more firmly— by showing that all those things called literature are more easily conceived as one thing than as two. The theory of biological evolution rests upon the existence of borderline cases; the fact that the classi fication of species is therefore never complete and never without exceptions only reflects the essential correctness of the theory. The primary function of taxonomy is not to create distinctions but to establish similarity and essen tial identity. Literary study is now in the process of changing from a largely undifferentiated pursuit of literary culture (read ing, writing, advocating, condemning individual works) to a more narrow but more rigorous pursuit of knowledge of a kind of phenomenon. Insofar as we can agree on a definition of literature, the subject is the same, but the methods and the goals are different and mutually exclusive. For the scien tist, whatever is is worthy of study, and as a scientist he has neither the right to make nor the criteria for making cultural judgments. To make a profession of "doing" culture is to create it— to write, sing, act, dance, play, paint, design, direct, produce it— not to comment on it. Commen tary or "criticism" is not a vocation but an avocation, and if the critic can find values an acceptable substitute for 261 consistent and verifiable knowledge and understanding, the scholar, the scientist, cannot. For him, Camus’ dictum is the only standard: "Where lucidity reigns, a scale of val ues becomes unnecessary." Since the early work of I. A. Richards the field of literary study has been the object of increasing scrutiny by those who seek to make such study as consistent and produc tive as the scientific disciplines. The reason, however, that Richards, Pollock, Wellek, Frye, have failed to estab lish such a discipline is not their many disagreements but their agreement that literary study is "criticism" and that "the two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest 5 are an account of value and an account of communication." What precisely it is that literature is supposed to be valu able for, what evidence there is for thinking that litera ture fulfills such an end, how exactly literature, or authors of literature, "communicates," are questions rarely raised and never satisfactorily answered. Not what kind of phenomenon literature is, but how to account for its reputed value is the concern of critics and criticism. It is no wonder that so little progress has been made in developing a discipline with established principles for expanding the realm of verifiable knowledge. Criticism, as thus conceived, is not literary scholarship. 5 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924), p. 25. 262 What literature is good for, what its primary function or "value" is, is its characteristic meaning as implied analogy. The desirability in any given instance of any spe cific literary analogue depends on a wide variety of per sonal and non-literary reasons. There is no science of ranking literature according to intrinsic merit any more than there is a science of ranking men, or dogs, or trees. Indians of the Andes are "better" mountaineers than are Indians of the Amazon because they have a respiratory system "better" adapted to survival in rarified atmosphere. They are not, however, better men for this fact. Value— the bet ter, the worse--has no meaning except in relation to postu lated goals and demonstrable means to achieving such goals. So it is with literary value. This dissertation has at tempted to demonstrate that all literature is good for achieving a certain kind of meaning, but what and whom indi vidual works of literature are good for is not deducible from the definition of the phenomenon. The only responsible alternative to doing, that is to writing, literature is studying it as a precisely delimited historical phenomenon, and to this end we have developed here a definition and taxonomy of the phenomenon literature. The final test of the definition and the primary use of the taxonomy will be to write a consistent and truly literary history. A P PEN DI X APPENDIX PRIMARY SOURCES Ben Jonson Entertains a Man From Stratford - Robinson Edward - Anonymous Felix Randal - Hopkins Fly, Fly, My Friends - Sidney Forget Not Yet the Tried Intent - Wyatt If I Shouldn't Be Alive - Dickinson I'm NobodyI Who Are You - Dickinson John Gorham - Robinson 0 Joy, Too High - Sidney Lord Randal - Anonymous The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot My Lute Awake - Wyatt 0 Western Wind - Anonymous Reason, in Faith Thou Art Well Served - Sidney Soul's Joy Bend Not - Sidney Spring and Fall - Hopkins Stella Since Though So Right - Sidney Virtue, Alas - Sidney Who Will in Fairest Book of Nature Know - Sidney Whoso List to Hunt - Wyatt With How Sad Steps, 0 Moon - Sidney The World is Too Much With Us - Wordsworth You That in Luck - Wyatt IIAla The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - Doyle Loving in Truth - Sidney Ozymandias - Shelley Prothalamion - Spenser They Flee From Me - Wyatt IIAlb Dejection - Coleridge Facing West From California's Shores - Whitman 1 Taste a Liquor Never Brewed - Dickinson 264 In a Station of the Metro - Pound My Galley Charged With Forgetfulness - Wyatt Once I Passed Through a Populous City - Whitman Sailing to Byzantium - Yeats Stopping by Woods - Frost These are the Days When Birds Come Back - Dickinson You, Andrew Marvell - MacLeish IIAlc Moriturus - Millay When Earth's Last Picture is Painted - Kipling When in My Pilgrimage I Reach - Anonymous IIAld A Caddy's Diary - Lardner IIAle Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town - Cummings The Duel - Field’ I Sing of Olaf - Cummings The Rape of the Lock - Pope IIAlf Wakefield - Hawthorne IIAlg General William Booth Enters into Heaven - Lindsay Jabberwocky - Carroll Leda and the Swan - Yeats Miniver Cheevy - Robinson Of this Time of that Place - Trilling Sir Patrick Spens A - Anonymous Sir Patrick Spens B - Anonymous The Witness - Porter IIAlh Old Pond - Basho Success is Counted Sweetest - Dickinson Sweeney Among the Nightingales - Eliot IIAli Leonora - Robinson IIAlj You Know Me A1 - Lardner IIA2a Adam's Curse - Yeats After the Storm - Hemingway The Fall - Camus Haircut - Lardner Spotted Horses - Faulkner IIA2b Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff - Housman IIBl Carl Hamblin - Masters IIB2a Alibi Ike - Lardner The Big Sleep - Chandler The Big Town - Lardner The Golden Honeymoon - Lardner Gullible's Travels - Lardner The Last of Mr. Norris - Isherwood The Nigger of the 'Narcissus* - Conrad The Real Thing - James Romance - Conrad & Ford IIB2b Goodby to Berlin - Isherwood IIB2c Eliduc - Marie de France Pamela - Richardson Paradise Lost - Milton Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires - Anonymous IIB2d Almayer1s Folly - Conrad The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper - Meredith Champion - Lardner The Farcical History of Richard Greenow - Huxley Lang a-Growing - Anonymous The Love Nest - Lardner Mr. Flood's Party - Robinson Not to Keep - Frost Old Mortality - Porter An Outpost of Progress - Conrad Poor White - Anderson The Return - Conrad Rhythm - Lardner Tomorrow - Conrad Typhoon - Conrad The Walrus and the Carpenter - Carroll Winesburg Ohio - Anderson IIB2e The Chimney Sweeper - Blake (Songs of Experience) The Glass Menagerie - Williams Hamlet - Shakespeare Jealousy - Robbe-Grillet The Matchmaker - Wilder Our Town - Wilder The Skin of Our Teeth - Wilder IIB2f Mr. Johnson - Cary IIB2g Down There on a Visit - Isherwood IIB2h Pan - Hamsun IIB2i The Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare IIB2 j The Turn of the Screw - James IIB2k The Idiots - Conrad IIB3a The Twa Corbies - Anonymous IIB3b 1984 - Orwell IIB3c USA - Dos Passos IIB4 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard - Gray IlCla Cassandra - Robinson Chance - Conrad The Five Orange Pips - Doyle XIC lb Dracula - Stoker Lord Jim - Conrad IIClc The Ring and the Book - Browning IIC2a Amy Foster - Conrad Baker's Blue Jay Yarn - Twain Falk - Conrad Gaspar Ruiz - Conrad Karain - Conrad Youth - Conrad IIC2b Moby Dick - Melville The Persian Letters - Montesquieu A Study in Scarlet - Doyle IIC2c The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Sterne The Virginian - Wister IIC 2d The Lagoon - Conrad The Mysteries of Udolpho - Radcliffe IIC2e The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Coleridge IIC2f Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll IIC2g She - Haggard IIC2h Through the Looking Glass - Carroll IIC3 The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer IID The Decameron - Boccaccio The "Gloria Scott" - Doyle IIEa Melmoth the Wanderer - Maturin IIEb The Book of the Thousand and One Nights - Anonymous Inconsistent Narration Down There on a Visit - Isherwood Gaspar Ruiz - Conrad The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Sterne The Man Who Knew Coolidge - Lewis Moby Dick - Melville The Nigger of the 'Narcissus* - Conrad Nostromo - Conrad The Virginian - Wister Inconsistent Event Kubla Khan - Coleridge The Waste Land - Eliot BI B LIO GR AP H Y BIBLIOGRAPHY SECONDARY SOURCES CITED Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Vol. 8 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. New York, 1869. Bagby, Philip. Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations. Berkeley, 1958. Bowers, Fredson. Textual and Literary Criticism. Cambridge* 1959. ________________. "Textual Criticism." In James Thorpe, ed., The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. New York, 1963. Bowra, C. M. Heroic Poetry. London, 1952. Brambrough, J. R. "Universals and Family Resemblances," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. LXI (1960-61), 207-222. Bronowski, J. Science and Human Values. New York, 1956. Burton, Frederick R. American Primitive Music with Especial Attention to the Songs of the Oiibwavs. New York, 1909. Cassirer, Ernest. The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglon and Charles W. Hendel. New Haven, 1950. Crane, R. S., ed. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago, 1952. . The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Toronto, 1953. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, 1953. 271 272 Day, Martin S. History of English Literature 1660-1837. New York, 1963. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Mankind Evolving; The Evolution of the Human Species. New Haven, 1962. von Einsiedel, Wolfgang. Die Literaturen der Welt in ihrer mundlichen und schriftlichen fiberlieferung. Zurich, 1964. Eliot, T. S. "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," Selected Essays 1917-1932. New York, 1932. Escarpit, R. "La Definition du Terme 'Literature's Projet d*article pour un dictionnaire international des termes litteraires," Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. ~ s'-Gravenhage, 196 2. Fitzgerald, Robert. "Postscript," The Odvssev. New York, 1961. Fraser, G. S. "Mythmanship," New York Review of Books. February 6, 1964, pp. 18-19. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, 1957. . Fables of Identity; Studies in Poetic Myth ology. New York, 1964. Gerould, Gordon Hall. The Ballad of Tradition. New York, 1932. Gray, Barbara B. "An Inquiry into the Problem of Style: A Negative Experiment." Unpublished doctoral disserta tion. University of Southern California, 1964. Gray, J. M. "Aristotle's Poetics and Elder Olson," Compara tive Literature, XV (Spring 1963), 164-175. Greenway, John. Literature Among the Primitives. Hatboro, Pa., 1964. Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds. The Complete Greek Tragedies; Volume I. Aeschylus. Chicago, 1959. Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York, 1958. Hill, Archibald A. "A Program for the Definition of Litera ture, " University of Texas Studies in English. XXXVII (1958), 52. 273 Hospers, John. "Implied Truths in Literature," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Fall I960), 37-46. Hough, Graham. Image and Experience; Studies in a Literary Revolution. London, 1960. Kayser, Wolfgang. Das sprachliche Kunstwerk. Berne, 7th ed., 1961. Krieger, Murray. "Contextualism Was Ambitious," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXI (Fall 1962), 81-88. . The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapo lis, 1956. Kroeber, Alfred L. The Nature of Culture. Chicago, 1952. __________________ , and Clyde Kluckhohn. Culture, A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Mass., 1952. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, 1962. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York, 1953. Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. New York, 1957. Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1962. McCloskey, H. J. "The Philosophy of Linguistic Analysis," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. XXIV (March 1964), 329-338. Olson, Elder. "An Outline of Poetic Theory." In R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism*- Chicago, 1952. : ________. "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction." In R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism. Chicago, 1952. Pollock, Thomas C. The Nature of Literature; Its Relation to Science, Language, and Human Experience. Princeton, 1942. Prior, Moody E. Science and the Humanities. Evanston, 111., 1962. Quine, w. V. "Science and Truth," New York Review of Books. July 9, 1964, p. 3. 274 Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1924. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Oxford, 1949. Saintsbury, George, ed. John Drvdent Three Plavs. New York, 1957. Shumaker, Wayne. Literature and, the Irrational: A Study in Anthropological Backgrounds. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960. Simpson, George Gaylord. Principles of Animal Taxonomy. New York, 1961. Smart, J. J. C. Philosophy and Scientific Realism. London, 1963. Toulmin, Stephen. Foresight and Understanding; An Inguirv into the Aims of Science. Bloomington, 1961. Twain, Mark. "Cooper's Prose Style," Letters from Earth, ed. Bernard De Voto. New York, 1964. Warren, Robert Penn. "Pure and Impure Poetry." In Ray B. West, Jr., ed., Essays in Modern Literary Criticism. New York, 1952. Wellek, Ren&. Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven, 1963. _____________, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 2nd ed. New York, 1956. Wellman, Francis L. The Art of Cross-Examination. New York, 4th ed., 1936. Wheelwright, Philip. "Mimesis and Katharsis: An Archetypal Consideration.1 1 In Alan S. Downer, ed. English Insti tute Essays 1951.' New York, 1952. Whiting, Bartlett Jere. Traditional British Ballads. New York, 1955. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. The Verbal Icon. Lexington, Ky., 1954. ___________________, and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York, 1957. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York, 1953.

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Creator Gray, James Michael (author)

Core Title The Phenomenon Of Literature: Prolegomena To A Literary History

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, General,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

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Advisor Christensen, Francis (committee chair), Arnold, Aerol (committee member), Engel, S. Morris (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-205326

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