What is Literature?

It is curious that a given art form seems simple to define until you try to define it. It then starts to dissolve into grey areas, ambiguities, contradictions… Sometimes there is a word, added to the description of the art form, that appears to limit the field: for example, the word ‘visual’ in the term visual arts. Nice and unambiguous: literature is not visual art.

Or is it? What of a poem, printed in the middle of a page? Is that in any way different from the same poem printed to the left or right of the page? Printed to the left, many cultures would take it as a standard position for the words, a familiar starting point for the reader, as if it were a novel. Printed to the right would give pause to that same reader; what is the significance of the uncommon position? Printing it in the middle gives space around the poem, as if it were floating off the page. One step further is to give the poem dimension by designing it in the area of the page:

It could be argued that the visuality of the layout adds nothing to the sense of the words. This however would be to ignore two essential points in the design: the writing moves down the page, as an owl might drop from the sky; and the space between the lines evokes the silence of which the poem speaks.

Thus sound poetry breaks the barrier between literature and music, and often removes sense completely. Here is an example, a single line from a poem by the french poet Michel Couturier:

qui a été l’été était

which translates to ‘the one who has been the summer was’. This literal translation loses the principle motivation behind the composition of the line, the insistent repetition of the sound ‘eh’, and a good translator would look, not for the literal sense of the words, but for an equivalent insistence in the new language:

What some are the sun of summer was

What I have written here may seem to imply that the sound of verbalized literature has only a marginal importance, and is largely limited to sound poetry. Not so. Sound is an integral part of written literature, and has caused the development of several literary devices – alliteration, rhyme, malapropism, and many more. This is largely why translation is such a difficult task. To capture the sense, that is one thing – to capture the sonority, ah, there’s the problem!

Literature is therefore dependent on writing; may have a visual aspect; and may have a sound aspect. Can there be literature without writing? Yes, although anything unwritten – stories, poems, songs, invocations,… – is in a category of traditions rather than one of literature (there is a wonderful science fiction story that shows a society where the only literature is oral: read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

I have managed to get right through this blog without answering the question I posed in the title. I could say, glibly, that the intent was to show that the question is unanswerable (which is probably true), but it would be more accurate to say that I want to leave the stage ready for act II, a follow-up or a follow-on that someone else will write. Use the comment form below and send your refutation or confirmation of the ideas here!