Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the
immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and
space of choice, or in the space and time of language itself.
Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris,
Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a
motivation different from how names were given to real cities,
to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually
identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become
part of our environment, constituting the markers for the
context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the
experiences from which they result. In each name of a person,
place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in
fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of
human self-constitution creeps in.
When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a
poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place,
characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something
(however limited) about the practical experience involved in
constituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they
really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is
a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know
because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to
literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in
language. They take the world for granted because words describe
it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when
they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some
things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic
accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More
often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where
Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore
undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some
ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident
has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A
picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and
Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and
the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in
Jerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with the
name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction
between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the
fiction of fiction, and reality.
There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or
not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians
of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In
the experience of writing, authors constitute themselves by
projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map
between the world they live in and the world of language. In the
experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand
language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same
world in which writers constitute their identity. The process
comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words,
ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the
uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an
infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed
book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made
possible. The history of literature and language is well known
for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary
critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book
marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we
learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode,
and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and
whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and
reading.
The history of literature is connected to the diversification of
language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us
to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be
better understood if we consider the practice of literature in
relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not
to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak
explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and
literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and
document that various relations between spoken and written
language and the language of literature lead to various writing
conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the
relation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms of
language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions
in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the
self-constitution of the human being through a language that
captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for
conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was
acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.
The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer
here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as
remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing
stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold,
conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today
whatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is an
experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a
specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist,
philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer
recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are
considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong
ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience
is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty
connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience
of transcending the borders between human practice and
establishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seems
grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old
Testament, Tao) are also examples.
The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not
really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started
crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf.
"Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination.
She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts,
or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or
trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this
is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and
appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as
painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical
equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a
convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not
confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may
decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do
not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying
with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at
somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some
lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect,
rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives.