The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry,
novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in
a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The
languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ
drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many
a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or
long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose
is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose
by any other name...") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a
nose is a nose..." (or "A nose by any other name..."). Although
the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a
certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify
both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a
literary quality that distinguishes them.
The art of written words, usually called literature, involves
using language for practical purposes other than projecting our
common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov
once told his students that literature was not born on the day
someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf
ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased
that person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in
the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That
go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is
the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the
definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear,
nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language.
By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature
outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded
as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.)
Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language,
of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language,
a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient
because to understand language is not equal to using language
creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no
literature without literacy. However, language use in literature
is not the same as language use in daily life, in the
self-constitutive experience of living and surviving.
When human experience is projected in language and language
becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in
the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is
formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the
syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages.
Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of
self-constitution is segmented and various forms of labor
division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The
scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is
reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in
turn, determines distinctions in human expression and
communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human
practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the
experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited,
of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy
hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to
fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as
instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an
animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of
slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first
reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the
second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to
another. So does the perceived need to share and expand
experience.
In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the
immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical
addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same
language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as
examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics
pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of
humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were
conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later
in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the
expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience
separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is
running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's
imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is
in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these
situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis
symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric,
astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of
language symbols is structurally identical to the use of
astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it
uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign
processes (generation of new symbols, associations among
symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).