The Phenomenon of Literature [Reprint 2018 ed.] 9783110890976, 9789027934697

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Maior, 36

THE PHENOMENON OF LITERATURE

by

BENNISON G R A Y University of Hawaii

1975 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 74-77353

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent.

... every work of literature has both a fictional and a thematic aspect. Northrop Frye Our survey of the modern historical method has led us to the concept of poetry in the sense of a narrative produced by the imagination ("fiction"). This is an elastic formula which comprehends the antique epic, the drama, and the novel of ancient and modern times. Ernst Robert Curtius ... 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 reference is to a world of fiction, of imagination. The statements in a novel, in a poem, or in a drama are not literally true. René Wellek So it was left for Aristotle to state explicitly what his countrymen were vague about or had forgotten; that philosophy or history versified are not poetry, that literature is essentially stories. ... we cannot possibly go into the complications and ramifications of what Aristotle meant by [mimesis] ('representation', 'portrayal', 'fiction', etc.). But the confrontation of Homer and Empedocles gives a first rough indication of what it includes (stories about men) and what it does not (exposition, argument about elements, principles, or things). Gerald F. Else Do you want a fox story or the other kind? Araucanian storyteller

FOREWORD

Three possible titles suggested themselves for this work: "The Elements of Fiction", "The Phenomenon of Literature", and "Theory of Literature". The first is the most modest and the most accurate reflection of what the bulk of the pages are devoted to. But more is intended here than a catalog of elements. Systematic information about the nature of fictionality is clearly lacking in literary scholarship, but the great need in the field cannot be met by inventories of literary elements divorced from a precise conception of literature itself. Not until there is at least a working hypothesis of the phenomenon as a whole cap systematic analysis of constituent elements be fruitfully undertaken. In addition to analyzing the elements of fiction, this work argues that a fictional conception of literature is the most adequate one - the most precise, the most in accord with ordinary usage, the most fruitful for future study, the most inclusive of works usually wanted included, the most exclusive of works usually wanted excluded. Viewed as a phenomenon, as an object of dispassionate study rather than as a source of values, literature is fiction. Yet, what would be the explanation of literature as such an all-pervasive human phenomenon and as such an eagerly pursued subject of study if it were not so undoubtedly a source of values ? Anyone who manages to attract and retain an audience for a discourse on the phenomenon of literature will surely lose it before he has concluded if he disclaims any interest in explaining in some larger intellectual context what accounts for the central place of literature in human society. In short, any study of phenomena, whether it calls itself a science or not, is open to the legitimate

VIII

FOREWORD

charge of naivete if it assumes that there is a world of objectively existing phenomena independent of the theories we construct to make study possible and to justify our interest in studying. Knowledge for its own sake no more accounts for the study of literature than it accounts for the study of nature. Much is gained, however, by heeding Northrop Frye's admonition that "Valuejudgements are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgements." 1 The data of literary study must include indiscriminately the work of Blackmore as well as Milton, the American Western as well as the Icelandic Saga, the oral epic of the Dyaks as well as the written epic of the Greeks, the lyrics of Tin Pan Alley as well as the lyrics of Provence. Literature as a phenomenon is oral as well as written, Eastern as well as Western, popular as well as sophisticated. The present work concludes with an attempted explanation of literature as such a human phenomenon. But presenting a fullblown theory of literature is not its primary concern. In defending its hypothesis that literature is best defined and analyzed as fiction, this work will of necessity be making some rather speculative statements about Man and Society. In keeping with the modern distrust of and distaste for metaphysics, however, these statements will be of the more low-keyed epistemological sort - about the nature of knowing and the possibilities and limitations of human cognizance. 2 "The Elements of Fiction" was rejected as too modest; it obscured the basic argument that the elements of fiction are the elements of literature. "Theory of Literature" was rejected as too ambitious; it overshadowed the effort simply of demonstrating the possibility that fiction can provide the basis of rigorous, systematic, objective, non-evaluative study. 1

"Polemical Introduction", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 20. 2 David Daiches has been reproached for using the word "epistemology" on the first page of his A Study of Literature: For Readers and Critics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1948; New York, 1964). However, such appearances are a sign of the times in literary study. More recent manifestations of this epistemological concern are Trevor Eaton's The Semantics of Literature (The Hague, 1966) and Knut Hanneborg's The Study of Literature: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of the Humane Sciences (Oslo, 1967).

FOREWORD

IX

The present work may or may not be accepted as a contribution to the field of literary study as presently conceived. If, as Wellek maintains, "the task of criticism will be a phenomenology of literature", 3 then the present study is squarely in criticism. The recent widespread use of the term "criticism" for all literary study makes it difficult to understand precisely who one is writing for: even Wellek has come to use "criticism" generically.4 But whatever they call themselves, The Phenomenon of Literature is addressed to those, like Wellek, who think that: If we want to arrive at a coherent theory of literature, w e must d o what all other sciences d o : isolate our object, establish our subject-matter, distinguish the study of literature f r o m other neighboring disciplines. It seems obvious that the work of literature is the central subject-matter of a theory of literature: not the biography or psychology of the author nor the social background nor the affective response of the reader. 5

The emphasis must indeed be on literature qua literature; however, it is possible to overemphasize the notion of independent disciplines. Fields of study come and go; they divide and recombine in different patterns. But the scholarly goal remains the same - to discern with maximum clarity a phenomenon for study. "What is it?" is the primary scholarly, scientific question. Only when this has been answered can answers be provided for such secondary questions as "What is it good for?" and "How can it serve as the subject of a formal discipline?" The key term in the title The Phenomenon of Literature is "phenomenon", and this term was chosen to emphasize the fundamental concern with delimiting and describing an object of universal human occurrence.

3 "Some Principles of Criticism", The Critical Moment: Literary Criticism in the 1960's (New York, 1964), 43. 4 Cf. his Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New York, 1956); and A History of Modern Criticism, 5 vols. (New Haven, Conn.), 1955-. 5 "Some Principles of Criticism", 40-41.

CONTENTS

Foreword

VII

I. The Problem of Literary Study A. The Call for a Discipline B. The Response 1. Literature as Language 2. Literature as Fiction

1 5 18 20 37

II. The Nature of Fiction A. The Problem of Definition B. A Definition 1. Statement 2. Event 3. Moment-by-moment 4. Unverifiable

47 49 59 65 72 94 117

III. The Literary Work A. The Mode of Existence of the Work B. The Mode of Existence of the Event C. The Limits of the Statement

142 150 154 170

IV. The Forms of Literature A. The Problem of Taxonomy B. A Taxonomy 1. Unmediated a. Monolog b. Dialog

191 194 210 222 223 236

XII

CONTENTS

2. Mediated a. Script b. Story c. Serial C. A Continuum (Not an event - Not a single event) .

249 250 262 271 279

V. The Elements of Narration A. Person 1. First a. Participant b. Non-participant 2. Third B. Time 1. Past 2. Present 3. Future 4. Durative

319 326 328 329 333 337 340 340 344 347 349

VI. The Structure of Narration A. Unification B. Integration C. Repetition D. Juxtaposition

354 361 381 402 418

VII. The Interpretation of Literature A. Analogousness B. Theme C. The Limits of Interpretation VIII. Theory of Literature A. Truth 1. The Truth of Literature (Statements vs. Pseudo Statements) 2. The Truth of Literary Study (Epistemological vs. Ontological) B. Value 1. The Literary Values

431 449 459 497 515 516 518 525 532 534

CONTENTS

a. Consistency of Event b. Consistency of Narration 2. The Value of Literature

XIII 536 543 549

Appendix : Sample Diagrams of Narrative Structure . . .

567

Index Topics Names Primary Sources Literature Non-literature

577 579 583 586 586 592

I THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

The basic problem of literary study, the one to which all others in the field can be traced, is the lack of a precise conception of the thing being studied. Indeed, one could argue that there can really be no field at all until there is an agreed-upon definition of literature. What makes for a field or discipline is not instances of interesting and valuable studies but a whole body of interlocking scholarship, based upon common principles and cumulative in its results. A precise definition of a subject does not of course constitute a discipline, but it is difficult to see how a discipline could exist in the absence of some principles of recognizing appropriate data and excluding inappropriate data. On the one hand, there can be no scholarly field where individual scholars are free to ramble arbitrarily among subjects that happen to strike their fancy. On the other hand, afieldis equally lacking when individual scholars can offer no more rationale for their inclusion and exclusion of data than that such distinctions are traditional. The proof of a scholarly discipline is the ability to articulate the principles that govern the traditional distinctions and procedures. Specifically for literary study, the proof, as Northrop Frye argues, "is the ability to write an elementary textbook expounding its fundamental principles". And page one of such a textbook must of necessity be devoted to defining the subject, but alas: "It would 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

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THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

as 'background', or have simply got into a university course of 'great books'." 1 The present work lays no claim to being a textbook for the simple reason that a textbook is the reflection of maximum basic agreement in a field - elementary principles so well understood that they can be systematically reduced for the uninitiated. Frye's verdict here is uncompromising: If criticism could ever be conceived as a coherent and systematic study, the elementary principles of which could be explained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old, then, from the point of view of such a conception, no critic now knows the first thing about criticism. What critics now have is a mystery religion without a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or quarrel, only with one another, (p. 14) Such a radical judgment about the profession from a ranking member of it is not an isolated instance, in this generation or in previous ones. A generation earlier (in 1922) another Frye expressed an equally outspoken condemnation: In comparison with the age and the pretensions of the subject, is it not astounding that there is yet so little substantial agreement with regard to the significance and rationale of the simplest literary phenomenon? It is scandalous that at this time of day a man may make any statement about the rudiments of literature without fear of shame or ridicule. Is there another subject of consequence in which such recklessness would be tolerated, much more applauded as though it were an admired qualification in an authority?2 The "time of day" is even later now, but literature as a "phenomenon" remains undiscovered, or at least unformulated. Because literary study still lacks a "conceptual framework" (in Frye's terms) and an "organon of methods" (in Wellek and Warren's terms), the first order of business is not to provide textbooks of the already accepted but to provide detailed hypothetical formulations for possible acceptance. A conceptual framework and organon of methods are not arrived at simply by redoubling the efforts at empirical investigation. This begs the very question, which is, What are we to study and how are we to study it? A literary scholar cannot immerse himself in his data if he does not 1 2

"Polemical Introduction", 13. P. H. Frye, Romance and Tragedy (Boston, 1922), 19.

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

3

understand literature precisely enough to define it - to recognize it when he sees it and to justify his recognition. At this stage it is not so much a matter of literary scholars as a body being consistent among themselves about the nature of literature; it is an accomplishment for an individual scholar to be consistent within his own work. His conception of literature may eventually prove inadequate for the field as a whole, but his consistency will make useful the lesson of his work, if only as a negative experiment. A negative experiment is useful only in relation to the specific hypothesis that gave rise to it. Before there can be an answer for the question "What is it?" there must be provided some consistently worked out hypotheses as to what it could be. The present study is not an attempt to prove how things really are but to explain how they can be consistently and systematically understood in one set of terms without recourse to paradox and cross-classification. The challenge will then go out: can literature be as consistently and systematically understood in any other set of terms ? The field of literary study very much needs vigorous, responsible debate; and vigorous, responsible debate demands advocates to work out the best possible cases for alternative conceptions. As in law, so in scholarship, informed judgment depends on having all reasonable interpretations argued in systematic detail. This is especially true when the issue at hand is a constitutional one - about the very framework within which all other issues must be resolved. Thus, as Wellek notes, "we need not deplore the fact that much of literary scholarship ... has become polemical. Knowledge advances through refutation, thought is incited by opposition, the whole history of scholarship (and not only scholarship) is one of thesis, antithesis and a temporary or faraway synthesis."3 There is no proof for the true nature of literature and literary study; there are only more or less adequate arguments, depending on what goals we are pursuing and what sacrifices we are pre3

"De Quincey's Status in the History of Ideas", in Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1965), 152. This essay first appeared in 1944.

4

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

pared to make to gain them. Attempts to have one's cake and eat it too result in the failure to achieve either. Thus the first order of business is to establish the primary goal. And if our goal is systematic, verifiable, cumulative knowledge, there seem to be just two possible ways of defining literature as an objectively existing phenomenon - linguistically (as a kind of language) and fictionally (as a kind of meaning). These two conceptions have proven to be irreconcilable alternatives, but they still reflect an important measure of agreement: Literature is not simply the best that has been thought and said; it is not the collected great books; literary study is not simply cultural transmission and explication; literature as a phenomenon must be recognizable by certain definite characteristics that are not merely matters of taste or evaluation, characteristics that can be objectively studied so as to yield verifiable knowledge. Frye's point is worth emphasizing: "criticism as knowledge is one thing, and value-judgements formed by taste are another". 4 An instructive place to see these two conceptions of literature (the linguistic and the fictional) laid out, albeit unreconciled, is in the second chapter of Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature - "The Nature of Literature". Wellek and Warren's seminal work is the logical starting point for any analysis of the phenomenon of literature. Though now a quarter of a century old, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949) remains the most ambitious and successful attempt to analyze the problem of literary study and to provide the kinds of theoretical distinctions that must figure as part of the eventual solution. Whatever its inadequacies, and we shall have occasion to examine these at length, its virtues have placed it in a class by itself. Neither before nor since have the problems involved in establishing a theoretical framework for the discipline of literary study been analyzed with such learned thoroughness. Theory of Literature preempts the field; one must either accept it or challenge it. Yet for all this, Wellek and Warren are only representatives of the growing uneasiness among twentieth century students of 4

"Polemical Introduction", 28.

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

5

literature about the state of their discipline. As a full-length analysis of the problem, theirs is preceded by Thomas Clark Pollock's The Nature of Literature: Its Relation to Science, Language and Human Experience,5 and as an outspoken critique of the field, theirs is superseded by Northrop Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism. The call for a discipline as represented by these three works will introduce the present work, which, however, will differ fom its three predecessors by focusing more on the characteristics of literature and of specific works of literature and less on the characteristics of literary study.

A. THE CALL FOR A DISCIPLINE

The rise of science as the unchallenged intellectual Weltanschauung is rather tardily manifested in literary study. Our examination of the call for a discipline could take us back into the nineteenth century by seeking out works like J.-J. Ampère's Discours sur l'histoire de la poésie (1830), which expressly characterizes "science littéraire" as consisting of literary theory and literary history. The large body of work by Taine and Brunetière would of course be included as documenting a trend toward the transfer of sociological and geographical concepts to literary study. And in 1888 appeared Émile Hennequin's small but provocatively titled La Critique scientifique. In Germany, where "Literaturwissenschaft", (science of literature) became the established term for literary study, our examination would go back at least to 1887 when Ernst Grosse lectured on Die Literaturwissenschaft, ihr Ziel und ihr Weg. And a year later appeared Wilhelm Scherer's Poetik - with its older term but much more aggressively scientific attempt to make literary scholarship an inductive, deterministic science. "He wished to prove that 'the general lawfulness of nature extends also to poetic productions' - otherwise, 'every caprice of the imagination would constitute an exception to the scheme of things.' " 6 In 1897 appeared the first volume of Ernst Elster's two-volume treatise 5 6

Princeton, 1942. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, IV, 298.

6

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

Prinzipien der Literatur, which systematically applied the principles and terms of Wundt's psychology. Similar attempts in England to found literary study scientifically on psychological or biological principles could be exemplified by Eneas Sweetland Dallas's Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852), which includes an elaborate classification of genres in a triadic scheme. His two-volume, but unfinished, The Gay Science (1866) is a further elaboration of the same "incongruous mixture of psychology of the unconscious with insistently symmetrical schematization".7 Russia is represented by Alexander Veselovskij (1838-1906), whose authoritative work in comparative literary history and the methodology of literary research are still visible in the work of Wellek. Not unexpectedly, the most interesting of these is the most recent - Veselovskij, who wanted to establish literary study as a distinct scientific discipline, with closely defined aims and methods. More conspicuous in him than in any of the others is an "insistence on the necessity of defining the actual subject of literary scholarship, his recurrent attempts to answer the question: what is literature? Time and again Veselovskij reverts to his fundamental query. And characteristically, with each new answer the frame of reference shifts substantially."8 Finally, in one of his last methodological pronouncements ("Iz wedenija v istoriceskuju poétiku", 1894) the tendency to include within literary study everything that the cultural historian finds interesting is overcome: the need for sharply delimiting the province of literary scholarship is clearly recognized. In an apt phrase which foreshadows the Formalist attacks on traditional literary history, Veselovskij likens the latter to a "no man's land (res nullius) where there comes a'hunting the cultural historian along with the esthetician, the philologist and the student of social ideas". In order to remedy this chaotic situation it is necessary to differentiate between creative literature and 'writing' in the broader sense of this word (slovesnost'). (pp. 27-28)

7 Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, IV, 145. For these and other examples see not only Wellek's History, III and IV, but also "The Term and Concept of Literary Criticism", in Concepts of Criticism. 8 Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague, 1955, 2nd ed. 1965), 27.

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

7

Yet his ultimate aim of constructing what he called "historical poetics", embracing world literature as a totality, oral as well as written, was unfortunately formulated in terms of a narrowly conceived cause and effect science. And in any case, the project never advanced beyond the programmatic stage as theory or beyond fragmentary studies as scholarship. With the possible exception of Veselovskij, these representatives of nineteenth century literary science strike the modern student as rather naive, both scientifically and literarily. And even of Veselovskij, Wellek is forced to admit that he "bears the stamp of his time too strongly to be still relevant with his concrete solution". 9 Furthermore, to judge by what Pollock, Wellek and Warren, and Frye say about the current state of the field, their nineteenth century predecessors failed to provide workable principles (scientific or otherwise) for a productive discipline. And not to confine our twentieth-century examples to these three, here is I.A. Richards' famous judgment of the field : A few conjectures, a supply of admonitions, many acute isolated observations, some brilliant guesses, much oratory and applied poetry, inexhaustible confusion, a sufficiency of dogma, no small stock of prejudices, whimsies and crotchets, a profusion of mysticism, a little genuine speculation, sundry stray inspirations, pregnant hints and random aperçus-, of such as these, it may be said without exaggeration, is extant critical theory composed.10 Half a century later, the problem that Richards saw remains the same. Thus we will not be at any great disadvantage in confining our attention to recent analyses. Furthermore, it is only since Richards that the call for a discipline has succeeded in emphasizing equally the scientific and the literary; calling for a study that would be scientific in precision of definition and method and literary in subject and independence. And for the sake of establishing a cut-off point between earlier conceptions that could not maintain the two in equal focus and later ones that came close to succeeding, let us draw the line between Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Pollock's The Nature of Literature (1942). As Wellek 9 10

A History of Modern Criticism, IV, 279-80. The Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924), 6.

8

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

shows, Richards is very much indebted to late nineteenth-century positivistic psychology.11 We shall have occasion to examine Richards in the final chapter when we analyze the problems created in literary study by the encroachment of positivistic theories and methods, but in the present chapter we shall be content to note that for Richards, the call for a scientific discipline refers not to literary study but to psychology, and ultimately to neurology. "We shall endeavour in what follows to show that critical remarks are merely a branch of psychological remarks." 12 And insofar as there is a field of criticism apart from psychology, it is not a field of knowledge but a field of therapy. "The critic, we have said, is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body" (p. 60). Only with Pollock, building though he is on the work of Richards, is the discipline that is being called for unequivocally literary scholarship as a field of knowledge in its own right. In his article on Richards, Wellek expresses surprise at the continued exaggeration of the significance of Richards' work. He is at pains to show that judgments like Stanley Hyman's ("... more than any man since Bacon, Richards has taken all knowledge as his province, and his field the entire mind of man ..." and that he "... created modern criticism in the most literal sense ...") are "wildly exaggerated" (pp. 534, 554). But at least as surprising is the neglect that has plagued Pollock's The Nature of Literature ever since its publication. Initial reviews were few and unfavorable, and to this day few students of literary theory can do more than remember the title.13 The clearest evidence of this is to be found in Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature, published six years later. 11

"On Rereading I. A. Richards", The Southern Review, n.s. Ill (1967): 533-54. 12 The Principles of Literary Criticism, 23. If it be objected that these quotations from the "Early Richards" fail to do justice to the important revisions of the "Later Richards", here is a quotation from "Emotive Meaning Again" in Speculative Instruments (Chicago, 1955): "In rereading Principles..., I am more impressed by its anticipations of my later views than by the occurrence of anything to retract" (p. 53). 13 A second printing finally appeared twenty-three years later (New York, Gordian, 1965). For early reviews cf. W.F. Bryan, Modern Language Quarterly IV (1943): 252-53, and J.C. Bryce, Modern Language Review XXXIX (1944): 64-65.

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

9

The similarities between the two works are more striking than the differences (the one exaggerates the significance of Richards; the other minimizes it). Yet in the chapter "The Nature of Literature" Wellek dismisses Pollock in a single sentence, and he is never mentioned again. None of our three examples is introduced here because of what it has succeeded in resolving or establishing. The three have the same claim to fame - an awareness of the basic inadequacy in literary studies and a commitment to establishing the field as a rigorous, systematic, scientific discipline, distinct from neighboring fields and possessing its own rationale, its own conceptual framework and organon of methods. Frye is the most outspoken; Wellek and Warren are the most thorough; but Pollock is the first.14 And as such, The Nature of Literature deserves to take its place with the much more well-known and influential Theory of Literature and Anatomy of Criticism. Pollock at his best - in calling for a discipline and analyzing the criteria of productive, scientific scholarship - deserves to be better known at first hand. Thus, our examination of him will include more examples of his argument than would otherwise be justified. But the primary reason for quoting the following passages is that they express the postulates of the present work just as much as they express the postulates of Pollock's. The subject of both works is "knowledge of literary phenomena". First and foremost, Pollock contends, there can be no discipline, no "organized cooperative scholarship", without some kind of fundamental theory, and no theory without preliminary formulation of hypotheses: The need for an adequate fundamental theory of literature is especially urgent. ... (p. xiv) ... the comparatively rare efforts of writers to organize a general theoretical basis for the study of literature which is consonant with our knowledge of linguistics and science have been sporadic and inadequate, (p. xiv) Literary theory is generalized knowledge of the nature of certain types of human communication, especially those types which ... have been increasingly referred to as literature. It holds, or should hold, the same 14 Wellek and Warren's claim notwithstanding: "We have written a book which, so far as we know, lacks any close parallel" (p. 7).

10

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

position in relation to the study of literature that physiological theory holds to the study of medicine, linguistic theory to the study of language, and musicology to the study of music. It should be developed inductively, and should be objective rather than evaluative. Only as it is entirely objective can it hope to be of unquestionable usefulness. ... (p. xviii) The attempt to create such a theory, it should be emphasized, is an intellectual adventure whose success or failure cannot be judged a priori. It may be added that only to the degree that such a theory is possible is successful organized cooperative scholarship possible, (p. xviii) The most urgent need now is for a basic hypothesis ... sufficiently general to serve as a basis for our present more specific generalized knowledge of literary phenomena. ... (p. xviii) P o l l o c k is n o t deceived, h o w e v e r , by t h e c h i m e r a o f a distant, a l l - p o w e r f u l t h e o r y , the d i s c o v e r y o f w h i c h will m i r a c u l o u s l y solve all o u r p r o b l e m s , b e all things t o all m e n , a n d require n o sacrifices.

Specifically, P o l l o c k recognizes t h a t there c a n be n o t h e o r y

o f literature t h a t will b o t h create a discipline a n d a l s o p r o v i d e a satisfactory g u i d e t o literary v a l u e ; e v a l u a t i n g literature a n d u n d e r s t a n d i n g its n a t u r e a r e t w o different e n d e a v o r s : The making of a theory is like the making of a map. It does not discover new territory; it analyzes certain existing relationships. ... A n d like a map, a theory must disregard all details irrelevant to its main purpose. A l l the points it touches have been explored before, else the map could not have been drawn. ... It may well be that a mountain loved by many does not appear at all. The laws of cartography permit but one purpose for one map; the critical question is, are the major relationships adequately indicated? (pp. xxii-xxiii) T o o often even well-informed and highly intelligent writers have not made up their minds whether they are trying to evaluate literature or to understand its nature; and trying to ride two untamed horses at once, they have not unnaturally met trouble, (p. xix) A definition in terms of degree of quality or value, though it may facilitate literary loose talk about personal preferences, is of little use for that study which attempts to examine as objectively as possible the very important branch of human activity we frequently call literature: the value-definition simply avoids the central problem of defining the class in which the special quality or value occurs, (p. 10) T h i s theoretical p r o b l e m o f defining literature is n o t t o b e dismissed as simply a semantic p r o b l e m ; it is n o t primarily a b o u t t h e

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

11

word and concept "literature" but about a certain discernible kind of linguistic phenomenon. Thus "the problem of human knowledge" remains, regardless of how one decides to dispose of the word "literature". Pollock contends that this still unformulated body of knowledge is most adequately referred to as "literature", but his analysis is not dependent on the acceptance of this term: There is danger in putting much weight on ... the word literature ... the mere fact that this term has been increasingly used in a specialized sense does not prove that there actually exists one distinctive group of writings to which the specialized sense refers. I do suggest that the restricted use of the term in recent decades is significant, and that there is an important division within the entire body of writings to which literature refers more clearly than any other word now in general use. Nevertheless, if this word had never developed its restricted modern meaning, the problem of human knowledge which the present inquiry faces would remain, (p. 11)

Moreover, just as this basic theoretical problem cannot be bypassed with a semantic sleight-of-hand, neither can it be bypassed with a renewed commitment to exhaustive research. Without "the preliminary formulation of hypotheses to control research", the research is futile: ... modern literary scholarship has one subtly serious weakness, of which the more obvious characteristics which are usually criticized are merely symptoms. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it took over many of the methods of German scholarship, which were in turn based on the inductive-scientific method of hypothesis, verification, and generalization. But it overemphasized one of the least important, though necessary, details of that method, and underemphasized or neglected one of its essential features. It emphasized exhaustive investigation of factual detail; it too often minimized the preliminary formulation of hypotheses to control research, (p. xvi)

As Pollock clearly sees, the existence of a subject matter alone, without a corresponding 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 defined class of things or realm of experience. Unless we label every study as scientific, we cannot say that every study of animals is zoology.

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The pagan priest may have been a student of magic, but his dissection of animals and diagnosing of entrails was not scientific and is not called zoology. Not even responsible empirical study 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 cataloging of species, were necessary precursors of more ambitious efforts to structure experience, but they remained necessarily limited because they attempted to classify without 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 inconceivable 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 materials, the masterpieces of literature, are not yet regarded as phenomena to be explained in terms of a conceptual framework which criticism alone possesses. They are still regarded as somehow constituting that framework or structure of criticism as well." 15 Frye contends that literary research is floundering in a slough of "background" studies that 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 solution, 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 to date. He is not, of course, seeking to emulate a narrowly conceived "scientific method" in the positivistic sense or to borrow from the physical sciences a watered-down version of mathematical analysis and controlled experimentation. He is calling only for a clearly defined subject matter and a consistent method 15

"Polemical Introduction", 15-16.

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of literary classification and analysis to replace the current Tower of Babel.16 It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based o n the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; s o is phonetics; s o is philology. Either liteiary criticism is scientific, or all these highly trained and intelligent scholars are wasting their time o n s o m e kind o f pseudo-science like phrenology. Yet o n e is forced t o wonder whether scholars realize the implications of the fact that their work is scientific. In the growing complication of secondary sources o n e misses that sense of consolidating progress which belongs t o a science, (p. 8)

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 that 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 that is common to all things called literature, and if there is a particular literary function the fulfillment of which constitutes literary value, then we have failed to understand a part, and perhaps an important part, of human experience when we divide literature up among the other and nonliterary studies. It is clear to most students of literature that the sum of the psychological, sociological, linguistic, and economic aspects 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 criticism has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines have moved in" (p. 12). Indeed, it is proper that they should do so. 16

This epithet is a recurring one in modern criticism, especially in Wellek's Concepts of Criticism (see 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. See "An Outline of Poetic Theory", in R.S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago, 1952), 546.

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The psychological, the sociological, the linguistic, 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." This maxim could well stand as the epigraph of Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature, a work whose illumination comes less from what is argued for than from what is argued against. Not what literature is but how it has been erroneously conceived, not how literary study can succeed but how it has failed - these are the strong points of Wellek and Warren's argument. The confusion arises when they attempt to define precisely what literature is and to delimit how it is most profitably studied. But their call for a discipline and for literary theory as the necessary basis for that discipline is at one with Pollock and Frye: Literary theory, an organon of methods, is the great need of literary scholarship today. This ideal does not, of course, minimize the importance of sympathetic understanding and enjoyment as preconditions of our knowledge and hence our reflections upon literature. But they are only preconditions. To say that literary study serves only the art of reading is to misconceive the ideal of organized knowledge, however indispensable this art may be to the student of literature. Even though 'reading' be used broadly enough to include critical understanding and sensibility, the art of reading is an ideal for a purely personal cultivation. As such it is highly desirable, and also serves as a basis for a widely spread literary culture. It cannot, however, replace the conception of 'literary scholarship', conceived of as super-personal tradition, as a growing body of knowledge, insights, and judgements, (p. 19, 3rd ed.)

Behind this call for a distinctly literary discipline with its organon of distinctly literary methods is a revolution in the field that is still taking place. By far the greater part of literary scholarship has been that which was not distinctly literary, either in subject or methodology. What Wellek and Warren relegate to a tiny subsection of "Preliminary Operations" was for many, and still remains for a few, the basic concern of the field. This is "the ordering and establishing of evidence", or, more precisely, the editing of texts. The discovering, collecting, deciphering, translating, annotating of old texts that have been dimmed by time and alien dialects and

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languages is an endeavor that was already well-established in Roman antiquity. Even the modern version of it is consciously traced back to the medieval renaissance. This is literary scholarship as bibliography, as philology - where the cultural, linguistic value of the texts themselves, rather than organized knowledge for its own sake, provides the rationale of the endeavor. This is what Wellek means by "literary culture". Here is a summary of this conception of literary scholarship reflecting the strength of the appeal even today: The medieval and humanist scholar's concern - after grammar and rhetoric - was to establish a pure text when the text (if it existed) was illegible, fragmentary, or corrupt; he wished to preserve the ippsissima verba of texts made sacred by time, or worship, or delight. After the text, his concern was for understanding the text. This was not criticism perhaps in the present meaning of the word, but an activity of unfolding and interpreting in the light of all that was known; the cumulative shedding of light upon writings too adamantine to alter, too powerful to ignore, too fugitive in spirit to dominate. ... A fully annotated classical text, in which to the unappreciative eye the notes crowd the text to death, is an impressive - even moving - performance: it brings into single compass a great store of miscellaneous relevancies drawn (it may be) from many centuries and many sources, all sifted and at ranged by some final editor, who ideally is learned, urbane, and tactful.17

And now that modern quasi-scientific methods of reconstructing texts and their histories, especially early printed texts, have seemed to solve some long-standing problems, a small but outspoken body of editors, of textual critics, continue to think of this endeavor as the essence of literary study - certainly the most scientific part of it: "It is the Cinderella of literary science. But it is at the same time the most fundamental. ... A knowledge of the true text is the basis of all criticism; and textual criticism is thus the root from which all literary science grows."18 But quite apart from the disagreements as to the actual scientificness of modern textual editing, this conception has proved to have 17

George Whalley, "Scholarship and Criticism", University of Toronto Quarterly XXIX (1959): 34-35. is w/W. Greg, "The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism, Illustrated in a Study of the Text of King Lear", Neophilologus XVIII (1933): 242-43.

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serious limitations as "the basis of all literary study" (p. 243). First, there is nothing essentially literary about its subject, unless literature means simply everything written. Texts of law, history, philosophy, theology, etc., are as much the data of textual editors as works of literature in any precise sense. Second, their results are aptly characterized by Whalley as "miscellaneous relevancies". Whatever can be related to a part of the text, for whatever reason, no matter how unsystematic the final product, has a claim for inclusion. Third, as the basis for an open-ended discipline, the editing of old texts is a very finite, indeed rapidly diminishing, field of endeavor. New editions of Sophocles and Shakespeare cannot come out forever, and it is difficult to see how more recent works, surviving in hundreds of printed copies, can sustain full employment in the field. The attempt continues to be made, however, as the Modern Language Association's giant 258-volume series of nineteenth century American works shows. But criticism of the project has been loud and clear - not just for what Lewis Mumford termed the "barbed wire" notes that crowd the text to death, but for the very lack of rationale. Unlike earlier editing projects, there is no language barrier here, no cultural barrier, no lack of clear available texts. The increasing scientific claims of textual critics (even as they assume that the science of criticism is "one and indivisible", in which editing "expands insensibly into interpretation, just as interpretation passes insensibly into apprizal")19 have not been enough to stem the tide of literary scholars seeking a firmer scientific basis for their discipline. This led, first in the nineteenth century, to what is characterized in Theory of Literature as "the extrinsic approach to the study of literature". If science is the empirical search for cause-and-effect relationships, then literary science can be no different. To understand literature is first and foremost to determine the causal laws that govern it. Quite apart from the embarrassing development in twentieth century science that downgraded, and perhaps eliminated, the concern with causality, and quite apart from the embarrassing 1»

Greg, 243.

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fact that no objective, empirically verifiable cause-and-effect relations, no "general lawfulness" (pace Scherer) could be established for literature - the extrinsic conception of literary study failed for its very extrinsicness. Although it too has its contemporary proponents (those who advocate the biographical, the psychological, or the sociological approaches), they have consistently failed in the first order of business. They never established the precise nature of that which they were going to find the causes of. This explains the increasing recognition in the twentieth century of the need to return to the works themselves. The goal of the extrinsic approach was to be rigorous and objective. But whether or not it succeeded in this, it did not succeed in being at the same time literary. The rise of criticism in the modern sense that is often associated with the school of "New Criticism" is a clear and avowed reaction against that nineteenth-century, positivistic literary science that never quite got around to saying very much about the literature qua literature. Unfortunately, however, this admirable return to the text, to the individual work, did not succeed in being more than the explication of individual works in and of themselves. No orderly body of knowledge, no systematic set of principles, no organon of methods ever evolved out of this great preoccupation with the texture of individual works. It never developed into that final stage envisioned by Wellek and Warren - "the intrinsic approach to the study of literature". Such an approach must be both rigorously systematic and literary. The basic inadequacy of criticism has proven to be the same as the basic inadequacy of textual editing and extrinsic analysis - no precise conception of the thing to be studied. One of the great virtues of Theory of Literature is the forthright acknowledgment of this need to define the subject matter: "The first problem to confront us is, obviously, the subject matter of literary scholarship. What is literature? What is not literature? What is the nature of literature ? Simple as such questions sound, they are rarely answered clearly" (p. 20). And, one should add, rarely asked. The lesson to be learned from Wellek's monumental five-volume History of Modern Criticism - though he does not

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emphasize it - is the preoccupation in critical theory with literary apologetics, with questions of value and evaluating, almost to the complete neglect of questions of objective definition. Wellek rightly refers to the work as a history of criticism and critical theory, because there has been so little attempt to develop literary theory. If Theory of Literature is literary theory and the book "lacks any close parallel" (p. 7), then one would hardly expect that even one volume, let alone five volumes, could be written on the history of the enterprise. Wimsatt and Brooks are on safer ground with their one-volume Literary Criticism: A Short History,20 which by going back to Aristotle's Poetics at least takes in the one unequivocal instance of early literary theory - unequivocal because of its concern with problems of defining and classifying.

B. THE RESPONSE

Like Aristotle, Wellek and Warren have a basic concern with problems of defining and classifying. Their first chapter, "Literature and Literary Study", is the call for a discipline; their second, "The Nature of Literature", is the natural response - an attempt to define the subject. But first they examine what literature has sometimes been erroneously thought to be: "One way is to define 'literature' as everything in print" (p. 20). "Another way of defining literature is to limit it to 'great books', books which, whatever their subject, are 'notable for literary form or expression'" (p. 21). Though we will not here attempt even a summary of their arguments, we will note for future reference one aspect of their objection to the definition of literature as great books - that it confuses defining and evaluating. When applying this definition, "By saying that 'this is not literature', we express ... a value judgement; we make the same kind of judgement when we speak of a book on history, philosophy, or science as belonging to 'literature' " (p. 21). What then is literature, if neither in general everything in print nor more restrictedly the great books of a culture ? To this Wellek 20

N e w York, 1962.

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and Warren provide two seemingly different answers but with the implication that somehow the two amount to the same thing: [1] The simplest way of solving the question is by distinguishing the particular use made of language in literature. Language is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paints of pictures, or sounds of music. But one should realize that language is not mere inert matter like stone but is itself a creation of man and is thus charged with the cultural heritage of a linguistic group. ... Compared to scientific language, literary language will appear in some ways deficient. It abounds in ambiguities. ... it is highly 'connotative'. Moreover, literary language is far from merely referential. It has its expressive side; it conveys the tone and attitude of the speaker or writer. And it does not merely state and express what it says; it also wants to influence the attitude of the reader, persuade him, and ultimately change him. ... the sign itself, the sound symbolism of the word, is stressed. All kinds of techniques have been invented to draw attention to it, such as metre, alliteration, and patterns of sound, (pp. 22-23) [2] But the nature of literature emerges most clearly under the referential aspects. The centre of literary art is obviously to be found in the traditional genres of the lyric, the epic, the drama. In all of them, the reference is to a world of fiction, of imagination. The statements in a novel, in a poem, or in a drama are not literally true; they are not logical propositions. (p. 25) Here is the crux of the problem. Is a linguistic conception of literature the same as a fictional conception, or are there works to be included and excluded by one conception that would be handled differently by the other? And Wellek and Warren (quite typically) complicate the problem even further by injecting the notion of "aesthetic function" as a further defining feature: "... we must realize that the distinction between art and non-art, between literature and the non-literary linguistic utterance, is fluid. The aesthetic function may extend to linguistic pronouncements of the most various sort" (p. 25). Does all language that abounds in ambiguities, that is highly "connotative", that draws attention to itself by means of metre, alliteration, and patterns of sound have an aesthetic function? Does all fiction have an aesthetic function? Does all fiction use language that abounds in ambiguities, etc. ? The call for a discipline elicits two basic responses: that literature is a kind of language

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(highly connotative) and that literature is a kind of meaning (fiction). If we cannot demonstrate the essential identity of the two conceptions, we will be obliged to choose one and reject the other. Though he was hardly thinking of a linguistic versus fictional conception of literature when he said it, T.S. Eliot has wisely pointed out that eclecticism and pluralism have their limits, that "there are definite positions to be taken, and that now and then one must actually reject something and select something else". 21 1. Literature as Language When asked for examples of literature, both the man in the street and the literary scholar are most likely to provide instances of fiction. But insofar as literary theorists can be said to agree on the nature of literature, they assume that it is a special kind or use of language. Nevertheless in practice they have not succeeded in constructing a consistent, workable linguistic definition. And even if they could construct such a definition, the ultimate consequences of literature being a kind of language would be inconsistent with two other of their basic assumptions: that literature is analyzable as a kind of meaningful statement relevant to human experience and that literary study can and should be an independent discipline. The only notable dissenters to a general commitment to a linguistic conception of literature are the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians, and to them we will turn in our discussion of literature as fiction. They do not, however, provide much positive support for defining literature as fiction because one of the cardinal points of their doctrine is that literature cannot be defined. For them literature cannot be defined as a kind of language but neither can it be defined as fiction. Those who do take up the task of definition think largely as Wellek and Warren do, that "the simplest way of solving the question" of what is literature "is by distinguishing the particular use made of language in literature". And not only literary scholars but also aestheticians like Susanne Langer and linguists like C.F. Hockett would quite agree with Wellek and Warren's assertion 21

"The Function of Criticism", Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York, 1932).

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that "Language is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paints of pictures, or sounds of music", while they themselves think so much of this statement that they repeat it even more unequivocally in their chapter on style and stylistics: "Language is quite literally the material of the literary artist. Every literary work, one could say, is merely a selection from a given language, just as a work of sculpture has been described as a block of marble with some pieces chipped off" (p. 174). Despite Wellek and Warren's fondness for it, however, the analogy is a poor one, and they are obliged to admit this when they first draw it, for they immediately add qualifications: "But one should realize that language is not mere inert matter like stone but is itself a creation of man and thus charged with the cultural heritage of a linguistic group" (p. 22). Language is not after all the material of literature as stone is of sculpture because it already exists in use when the poet makes use of it. Stone exists apart from any use made of it in a statue or in anything else, but there is no language apart from the use made of it - whether in a work of literature, a conversation, an advertisement, an encyclopedia. One could argue just as well that a literary work is a source, therefore, of language rather than that it makes a selection from it. Yet because literary scholars usually are and urge others to be also linguists, they find it easy, almost natural, to commit the linguists' fallacy of thinking that their abstract systematization of a language is the thing itself. This fallacy constantly recurs despite the lip service paid to Ferdinand de Saussure's strictures, published more than half a century ago, against mistaking la langue, the creation of the linguist, for la parole, the language itself. Of course Wellek and Warren know the distinction between langue and parole, "the system of language and the individual speech-act" (p. 152), but they use it to make a distinction "between the poem as such and the individual experience of the poem". That is, they identify the poem (or literary work) with the system of the language rather than as an instance of it. Then it is much easier for them to think that a literary work - what they think of as a system of the language - is abstracted from the system of the language, just as a stone statue is hewn out of stone. Neverthe-

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less, the analogy of langue and parole with poem and individual experience of the poem is also a poor one, for two reasons. On the one hand, a poem is not analogous to la langue, the system of language, because a poem is not an abstraction. Rather, a poem is an instance of la parole-, it is a publicly observable verbal object or speech act. On the other hand, the individual experience of the poem is not analogous to la parole, the individual speech act, because it is not such a publicly observable object or act but an individual mental perception. This individual mental perception is not available to analysis and systematization as la parole is, while a poem differs not at all from other instances of la parole. Poems, or literary works, conversations, advertisements, encyclopedias, are all instances of the use of language; they are all la parole, and it is from them that la langue is derived, or abstracted, by the linguist. If for the sake of argument, however, one were to grant that language is the material of literature, he would still not be very far along on the road to solving the question of what literature is. One is not obliged to distinguish all the other uses of stone in order to arrive at its use in sculpture, because stone is not a defining characteristic of sculpture. But if language is a defining characteristic of literature, and because language exists only in use and has other uses than the literary, one must distinguish all the other uses from the literary use. Wellek and Warren simplify this procedure : "The main distinctions to be drawn are between the literary, the everyday, and the scientific uses of language" (p. 22). Contrary to their original assertion, however, the distinctions are not simple, much less "the simplest way of solving the question" of what literature is, for they go on to say, "The problem is crucial and by no means simple in practice, since literature, in distinction from the other arts, has no medium of its own and since many mixed forms and subtle transitions undoubtedly exist." To begin with they claim that "it is fairly easy to distinguish between the language of science and the language of literature. ... The ideal scientific language ... aims at a one-to-one correspondence between sign and referent. The sign is completely arbitrary. ... The sign is also transparent; that is, without drawing attention to itself,

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it directs us unequivocally to its referent" (pp. 22-23). Yet it is not long before they are admitting that "there are ... poems and ... novels which approximate, at least occasionally, to the use of scientific language" (p. 23). Indeed, later on, in discussing quite a different topic, Wellek and Warren take this distinction that they made between scientific and literary uses of language and employ it to distinguish between two kinds of literary men: "The literary man ... uses words as his medium. ... For the poet, the word is not primarily a 'sign', a transparent counter, but a 'symbol', valuable for itself as well as in its capacity of representative", while on the other hand "Some novelists may use words as signs (Scott, Cooper, Dreiser), in which case they may be read to advantage, translated into another language, or remembered as mythic structure ..." (p. 88). Clearly then, according to Wellek and Warren's conception of language, some authors of literature are using scientific language and yet just as clearly they are creating literature. If there really are literary works that use language as science does and literary works that use language in exactly the opposite way, then the question of what literature is cannot be resolved by distinguishing the particular use made of language in literature. "More difficult to establish", say Wellek and Warren, "is the distinction between everyday and literary language." So difficult is it in fact that they never do succeed, and at the conclusion of their attempt they finally admit that "we must realize that the distinction between ... literature and the non-literary linguistic utterance is fluid. The aesthetic function may extend to linguistic pronouncements of the most various sort." This is the first time that the term "aesthetic function" has entered into the discussion of the kinds of language. What does it mean? Is it the same as the literary use of language ? We are never told. But in any case the attempt to distinguish literature as a particular kind or use of language has failed because the distinction is so fluid that it may pertain to all kinds of linguistic instances. Works that are not literature may nevertheless have literary or "aesthetic elements, such as style and composition". And there are "scientific treatises, philosophical dissertations, political pamphlets, sermons" - not to mention

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"propaganda art", "didactic and satirical poetry", and "transitional forms like the essay, biography, and much rhetorical literature" (p. 25) - that the linguistic-aesthetic conception (it is hardly a definition) obliges us to include as literature. Wellek and Warren are no different in this respect from everyone else who has tried to define or even just to describe literature in terms of the use it makes of language. Pollock devotes a whole book to attempting just this and still does not succeed. He starts out with the same assumptions: "Whatever else literature may be, it is unquestionably something which occurs linguistically; and we may state as two essential requirements of a satisfactory literary theory, first, that it be grounded on the best knowledge we have concerning the nature of linguistic phenomena, and second, that it make a satisfactory discrimination between uses of language which are literature and uses of language which are not" (p. 12). The best knowledge that Pollock has concerning the nature of linguistic phenomena is the Ogden and Richards semantic triangle: "In referential symbolism, one person uses words to direct the attention of another to certain referents: if this is his controlling purpose, the use is pure referential: if his purpose is also to arouse attitudes or actions in connection with the referents, the use is /?ragw0i/c-referential" (pp. 195-96). If literature is to be distinguished from these, it must provide some referential relationship between the persons communicating, which is not, however, either purely or pragmatically referential. So Pollock develops the notion of evocative symbolism in which "one person uses words to evoke a controlled experience in another". In order to be referential the words must refer to an actual experience. Without a referent the words cannot be symbolism, whether evocative or otherwise. Therefore, if a person uses words "in order to express an experience of his own, the use is literature; if his concern, however, is only to evoke an experience in the other, the use is /wewfifo-literature" (pp. 195-96). In brief, what makes an instance of language literature is that the author of it is attempting to evoke in the perceiver of it an experience the author has had. If the author has not had the experience he is talking about, then no matter what he says about it,

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this is not literature but only pseudo-literature. This conception pretty well rids us of most everything that has been called literature, leaving only eye-witness accounts on the one hand and lyric cries on the other. And you really cannot be sure with lyric cries, since you have only the author's word for it and have no way of making certain that he has felt the emotional experience he seems to be responding to. 22 Thus Pollock's definition of literature falls apart quite of its own weight. It is not necessary to take up the vexing question of how one would go about evoking one's own experience in another person. It has still not been possible to "make a satisfactory discrimination between uses of language which are literature and uses of language which are not". The discrimination that Pollock has made between literature and pseudo-literature is not on the basis of what is in the language but only what is in the user of it - an experience. Consequently, the most glaring inadequacy of the conception of language as literature is its proponents' total inability to provide a definition of literature. They are not even able to isolate some literary elements that would be present in all literary works to a greater or lesser degree, even if also present in some non-literary works. In short, they have not provided even a description of literature, much less a definition. If, again for the sake of argument, however, one were to grant that literature is a kind or particular use of language, what would be gained by such a conception of literature ? It is extremely doubtful that the very proponents of it would be willing to accept its 22

"In May 1773 Goethe sent to Kestner, the bridegroom of Lotte Buff in Wetzlar, his great poem Der Wanderer with the words: 'In the allegory you will recognize Lotte and me and what I have felt a hundred thousand times about her.' Consequently, 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 interpretation. 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 occasion. The poem substantiated precisely the thesis of the stimulus of experience because of the biographical confession 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 [Bern, 7th ed. 1961], 46-47.)

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logical implications for literary analysis and evaluation. A linguistic conception of literature, whatever its specific formulation, logically requires that literary language be differentiated from other language, and this differentiation must obviously add up to a deviation in some way from the prosaic uses of language. The conception of literature as language requires therefore that literary language set itself off from the rest of language and, in effect, be opposite to it. There are differing interpretations as to the way in which this deviant character is supposed to manifest itself in literature. By exaggerating the sound qualities of words literary language may be supposed to call attention to itself rather than to the meaning it conveys. Or the meaning may be the very facet wherein lies the deviation; the purpose of literary language may be to confuse meanings or to combine them or to bring out every possible meaning and therefore no one, with the resultant famous seven types of ambiguity. Or it may be that literary language is distinctive by virtue of having no meaning at all. Thus one of the Russian Formalists is quoted as saying, "A consideration of the facts forces one to wonder whether words always have a meaning, not only in meaningless speech, but also in simple poetic speech - or whether this notion is only a fiction resulting from our inattention." 23 Needless to say, the application of such ideas to literary analysis raises insurmountable obstacles. Is any instance of language that calls attention to itself, such as an obscenity, or that is inadvertently ambiguous or meaningless thereby literature? A foreigner's mispronunciation of a language is no less systematic for being unintentional. He does not intend to mispronounce, but he is predictably imposing his native language's pronunciation on the related sounds of the foreign language. Yet, says Jan Mukarovsky, "The violation of the norm of the standard language, its systematic violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language."24 Mukarovsky is a Czech Formalist whose doctrine, ac23

Quoted from Victor Shklovsky in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method' ", in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, tr. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), 109. 24 "Standard Language and Poetic Language", in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, tr. Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), 18.

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cording t o Wellek, "has an originality and a systematic coherence and clarity which can rarely be paralleled in the history of literary theory". 2 5 By virtue of this systematic coherence and clarity Mukarovsky's doctrine points up with admirable consistency the logical implications of a theory of literature as language. These implications, worked out by Mukarovsky in his lecture, "Standard Language and Poetic Language", may be summarized as follows: [1] Without the cultivation of a highly standardized language a culture can have no poetry. This is not because the standard language should be the medium of poetry. Quite the contrary, it is the violation of the standard language that constitutes poetry. Without a standard there can be no violation, consequently no poetry. "The more the norm of the standard is stabilized in a given language, the more varied can be its violation, and therefore the more possibilities for poetry in that language. And on the other hand, the weaker the awareness of this norm, the fewer the possibilities of violation, and hence the fewer possibilities for poetry." (P- 18) [2] All poetry and poetic language become obsolete. As soon as certain specific distortions of the language are accepted as poetic, then these distortions and the poetic tradition that carries them cease to function as poetry because they cease to be violating the standard that has incorporated them as "poeticisms". [3] It follows from this that the test of new poetic creation is its capacity for offending those who accept the former - now standard - violations of language. "Proof of the intensity with which a new trend in poetry is perceived as a distortion of the traditional canon is the negative attitude of conservative criticism which considers deliberate deviations from the canon errors against the very essence of poetry." (p. 22) [4] Indeed, the literary work or poem can in time change its entire character or even cease entirely to be literature if the norm in opposition to which it was created changes: "the structure of a work of poetry can change completely from its origin if it is, after a certain time, projected against the background of a norm of the standard which has since changed." (p. 27) [5] Therefore, the essential effort of those who create and use a specific poetic language is to prevent its being used or adopted in any way, f o r if poetic linguistic creations "were formed in view of their general usabili25

"The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School", Discriminations : Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1970), 279.

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ty, their esthetic function would be endangered thereby; they are, therefore, formed in an unusual manner, with considerable violence to the language, as regards both form and meaning." (p. 28) Conceiving of literature in terms of its particular use of language does not lead to the isolation of a literary language but to the espousal of anti-language: a distorted, transient, useless creation of the rebellious to offend the conservative. This is doubtless fair enough as a characterization of much modern poetry, but it leaves the rest of literature out of the question. Obviously Mukarovsky is offering an apologia for modern poetry, though he never says so. Wellek, however, provides corroborative evidence: "In 1932 the Prague Linguistic Circle organized a whole series of lectures attacking the editing of the journal Nase Rec (Our Language), which advocated the most extremely puristic and archaic standard of language."26 It was on this occasion that Mukarovsky gave the lecture summarized, "defending the view that poetic language is a special language within language which has its own rights and norms. The sharp distinction between different 'functional' languages upheld there was mainly devised to save poetry from the impositions of grammarians judging by norms of correctness and purity from foreign words and neologisms." But as Wellek recognized, the lecture did much more than this: "it also served as a weapon for a concept of poetry free from any obligation to comprehensibility, logic, and social relevance" (p. 285). What Wellek has failed to recognize is that this must be the ultimate consequence of every attempt to conceive of literature as a kind of language. There is nothing new about considering literature a kind of language; that is what it has been thought of for centuries, because for centuries the study of literature has been the province of the grammarian. And unlike the modern philologist or linguist, the grammarian had as his linguistic province not all of language or even all of one language but only the best language. What qualified as literature was not a matter of comprehensibility, logic, or social relevance but of arbitrary taste. Literature was that language 26

"The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School", 284.

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considered to be worthy of preserving in writing and being incorporated into one's own writing.27 The editors of the Czech Our Language were merely taking the age-old conservative position in this regard, and Mukarovsky is merely taking a contemporary position pushed to its reductio ad absurdum. He thinks that the best language is new language, but other than this he shares the basic assumptions of his opponents that literature is language and that literature is, by whatever criteria, the best language. Modern poetry's ambition "to purify the dialect of the tribe" (T.S. Eliot's borrowing of Mallarmé's assertion) is no different in kind from the Renaissance humanist's desire to purify the Latin of the Medieval Schoolmen. One of the contributions of modern philology and linguistics has been to show that living languages are continually changing. The grammarians of earlier generations had been somewhat aware of this and had responded to it by trying to stop the change. A modern linguist like Mukarovsky, realizing that this is impossible, embraces the mutability of language and its five general implications (noted above) for literature as a kind of language. There is no escaping these implications. Wellek wishes to dismiss them while retaining the premise. Obviously the only way to dismiss the unacceptable implications of a premise is to dismiss the premise. As long as literature is conceived of as a kind of language it will be "free from any obligation to comprehensibility, logic, and social relevance". The conception of literature as a kind of language would make sense, would have a rationale, if - but only if - literature were confined to verse. For verse is a kind or particular use of language. And verse is, as the Russian and Czech Formalists saw, a distortion of language and does distort by drawing attention to the sign itself. Verse deviates from ordinary language by imposing upon discourse a non-semantic pattern of sound-repetition. Of course sounds are repeated in everyday and scientific language - in all language that is spoken. And these sounds are patterned. For example, intonations such as in English the rising inflection on the words at the end of a 27

See the author's "Stylistics: The End of a Tradition", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXI (1973): 501-512.

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question are sound patterns that recur in sentences whose particular words are entirely different. But intonation here is a semantic sound feature, just as much as is the difference in pronunciation between "this" and "these". The difference between a sentence's being a question or an assertion is a difference of meaning. But the difference between a sentence's being in trochaic tetrameter or iambic pentameter is not. A verse pattern regularizes the sounds of a language quite regardless of the meanings that they carry. 28 It may be a general principle of skillful verse-making to try to put the semantically decisive words into the rhythmically decisive positions. This is only a working principle, however, never possible of more than partial realization, especially when also a line of reasoning has to be argued or a story told. The maximum amount of sound-patterning can be achieved only by eliminating the progression, whether logical or chronological, of meaning entirely. The progression of meaning is eliminated and the maximum amount of sound-patterning achieved by repetition - by saying the same thing over and over again. But this limits the sound-patterning to monotony. Variety in the sound-patterning can be achieved, however, by eliminating meaning entirely, that is, by combining verbal sounds as musical beats without regard to whether they go together semantically. We can now understand why the Russian Formalists experimented with nonsense verse and were capable of wondering "whether words always have a meaning", especially, "in simple poetic speech". To pattern language solely according to its sounds is to make music out of it. Why then should people want to put what they mean into a form that to some extent conflicts with meaning and certainly makes the task of conveying it, because of the restrictions imposed by the sound-patterning, much more difficult ? The advantage of verse is that it makes what is said memorable, or, more precisely, "rememberable". The rationale of verse is not that it is meaningful in and of itself but that it is without meaning. As a rhythmic sound28

Pace even W.K. Wimsatt's notion that the value of rhyme lies in juxtaposing words of opposite meanings with similar sounds, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason", The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky„ 1954), 153-66.

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pattern it helps fix in the mind the words that it patterns, even when their meaning is not understood. Plato resented this power of verse to imprint notions in the mind regardless of their triviality or even meretriciousness. Nevertheless the regularity of the sound-patterning is invaluable for its function in preserving the particular meaning of a discourse. When memory of the words themselves fails, the verse pattern enables one to recover them by seeking for words that will fit both the sound pattern and the meaning. Since such possible candidates are few in number, reconstruction of the original is very probable. Thus there is always a tension in verse between the significance of what is conveyed and the advantage of conveying it in a "rememberable" form. The more regular and repetitive verse is, the more memorable it is, for by virtue of this recurrence there is less to remember. On the other hand, the more precise is the meaning to be conveyed, the more difficult is the maintenance of sound regularity, for the possible choices of words that will supply both the sound and the sense desired in a particular context are much reduced. The Muses after all are not the daughters of Athena or Philosophy but of Mnemosyne - memory. Among the Muses of Poetry and Song, however, are also those of History and Astronomy. That is, literature is not the only kind of matter in language that has been thought important or desirable to remember. Therefore verse is not restricted to literature and cannot be its defining characteristic. If literature were confined by definition to verse, it would exclude all prose fiction and include all versified fact. No literary theorist is really willing to accept this, and yet verse is the only kind of language that literature could be. The hope runs through the works of literary theory that somehow the assumed unique linguistic characteristics of literature will turn out to be just what account for or create or substantiate literature's unique reference to reality - its fictionality. Wellek and Warren remark in passing from their linguistic to their fictional characterization of literature that "Art imposes some kind of framework which takes the statement out of the world of reality" (pp. 24-25). But Wolfgang Kayser in his oft-reprinted introduction

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to literary science, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk, actually tries to show

how the language of literature is responsible for its fictionality and to produce a definition of literature according to it. To begin with, however, Kayser specifically rejects verse as the defining characteristic of poetry or literature. And he does so for good reasons. Schiller still designated the novel-writer "half-brother" of the poet, but Shelley asserted that "The distinction between poets and prose-writers is a vulgar error." Today novelists are on a par with poets. Moreover, some works of literature, including the plays of Shakespeare, contain both verse and prose. On the other hand, versified essays and medieval chronicles "are not for us thereby legitimized as real poetry". The aspect of language that does account for the differentia of literature lies in the fact that words and sentences 'mean'. Here the point is reached where the character of the literary-poetic text is revealed in contradistinction to any other. 'Heavy clouds, autumn breeze' - these two sentences we could consider as part of a recorded ordinary conversation, perhaps between two men who spoke together about the weather and the season. The meanings conveyed by these sentences would relate then to facts that are independent of the existence of the speakers, that belong to reality. ... If, however, we read the lines in their real place, namely, as the first lines of the poem 'Autumn Resolution' by Nikolaus Lenau, then we have to take them quite differently or we will mistake their 'meanings' completely. There the meanings draw no more upon real facts. ... The reality exists there only as the reality of these poetic sentences. And conversely, the sentences of the poem create their own reality. About the real weather innumerable assertions can be made. The reality in the lines of the poem is constituted only by the sentences conveying it... . 29

Here then seems to be a definition of literature as fiction; however, the last sentence quoted does not end where we left it but concludes rather with the non sequitur: "and the connection in this case is so close that the world of the poem, that the work, would become something else if we only changed something in the language, perhaps the sound, the stresses,

the pauses, the lengths

of the lines" (p. 14, italics added). Kayser now seems to be saying 29

Das sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einführung in die (Bern, 1948, 7th ed. 1961), 13-14.

Literaturwissenschaft

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that if we changed che sound of the poem we would be changing its meaning. No wonder then that he goes on to talk about "the special powers of literary language to call forth a reality of a unique kind". He is trying to make the purely linguistic, verse character of the language account for the fictionality of the literary work. No wonder, too, that verse, which had been dethroned as a criterion of literature, "can now be reinstated in its office. For the affinity that literature possesses for verse, so much so that verse is usually sufficient to designate the character of poetry, is explained by its containing special eneigies that assist in the calling up of a particular reality" (p. 15). Finally Kayser admits that, although no sharp distinction can be drawn between poetry and literature, "unquestionably the nature of the poetic appears at its purest in poetry" (p. 16). And thus he comes full circle. Kayser is unusual among literary theorists in his willingness to follow out this conception of the power of literary language to evoke a unique reality to its logical conclusion - the exaltation of verse as the most purely literary literature. Most theorists wish to have a linguistic conception of literature that will include prose as well as verse on a par. Clearly verse possesses linguistic characteristics that prose does not; yet it is prose literature, where the special features of language supposedly responsible for creating a fictional world are absent, that is most consistently designated by the label "fiction". In the attempt to do away with this paradox while retaining the conception of literature as language, all literary theory today has had to have recourse to the concept of style. What is style? Style is those linguistic features of a discourse that make it literature. What these linguistic features are no one knows or at least none can agree on what they are. But everyone agrees that literary works have style and that it can be observed and studied in them. Otherwise there would be no way in which many of these literary works could satisfy a conception of literature as language. Style then is an empty concept employed to fill the obvious linguistic gap between verse and prose. Whatever the eoncept itself is fleshed out with varies from instance to instance of its application. In Style:

The Problem and Its Solution (The Hague, 1969) we

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have gone into great detail to show that style is an empty concept and that it never has had nor can have any systematic application in literary study. Moreover, in "Stylistics: The End of a Tradition" 30 we have tried to give an historical accounting of why style should seem to literary scholars such a self-evident concept despite its manifest conceptual and analytic inadequacies. Here it should suffice to point out what part style plays in the currently predominating conception of what literature is. This is wellexemplified in David Daiches' A Study of Literature. Daiches begins by asking the straightforward question that he intends to answer of why does one "spend time reading and discussing books which tell of events which never in fact occurred ?" (p. xi). This is an interesting question and clearly indicates that his conception of literature is "books which tell of events which never in fact occurred" - that is, fiction. But already in the first chapter he becomes equivocal: "Imaginative literature" is "the formal presentation in language of what may not be literally true or true in the simplest scientific sense ..." (p. 3, italics added). And when he tries by means of the concept of style to combine this conception of literature as accounts of untrue events with that of literature as language, he manages to cancel out the first definition entirely. He starts out with the premise that "To express something is to have that something in some way determined by the expression" (p. 26). In other words, what you say is determined by how you say it. Even recast like this the premise still seems incapable of interpretation. Yet style is defined as just that "some way" that determines whether something is literature or not: "... style is the result of the ability to choose and order words in such a way that what is described becomes not merely something existing, something which happens to be in a particular place at a particular time, but something that is linked with man's wider fate. ... And then it becomes irrelevant whether what is described exists in fact in the real world or not" (p. 32). That is, what is described may very well be true. What is important is whether or not the description has style. 30

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXI (1973): 501-512.

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Daiches is to be credited for occasionally recognizing the inconsistency of his own position, for he finally asks at one point, "If by an adequate use of language we can make an account of anything rise from journalism to literature, where does the fiction writer come in ...? (p. 34). That is a good question and it cannot be answered. If truth plus style makes literature, why would anyone bother with fiction? Daiches cannot tell us after all why we continue to seek out accounts of events that never in fact occurred. And not only does untruth go by the board once style is introduced, but also the fictional event is dropped. It turns out that with style you don't even need an event: "The literary equivalent of the melodic line need not be narrative: it can be speculation, rhapsody, description, discourse of any kind." Discourse that does not present an event will be carried along as literature by style: "In nonnarrative literature the burden falls more heavily on the technique of expression as such" (p. 45). Thus we are still left with two distinct kinds of literature - that which narrates untrue events and that which has style. Even though the new concept of style has been introduced, we still have not got very far from the old verse/prose distinction. There are still two conflicting definitions of literature and all the argument in the world about style is not going to make them one. No matter how we try to use both, one will, as in Kayser and Daiches, always cancel out the other. As Eliot said in the remark quoted above, "Now and then one must actually reject something and select something else." Despite the manifest inadequacy of the conception of literature as language, literary theorists have been quite unwilling to reject it. The time has come not only to reject it but also to select something else - the conception of literature as fiction. Considering the tenacity with which literary theorists persist in trying to make literature a kind of language, one would suppose that there was some unique advantage to be gained from it. On the contrary, at least one of the major goals sought by the literary theorists would be canceled out by such an achievement. That is the goal of creating an independent discipline of literary study. Boris Eichenbaum in his apologia for the Russian Formalists, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method' ", declares, "The basis of our posi-

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tion was and is that the object of literary science, as such, must be the study of those specifics which distinguish it from any other material", 31 and stresses the Formalists' accord with Roman Jakobson's declaration of independence: The object of the science of literature ... is that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have ... used everything - anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines - the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc. - and that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only as defective, secondary documents, (p. 107) This is all very well and good as criticism of past efforts, but what happens when the Formalists go on to distinguish literature as a kind of language? As Eichenbaum says, "the contrast between poetic and practical language ... served as the basic principle of the Formalists' work on key problems of poetics". But the consequence of adopting this principle as basic is that, "the Formalists did not look, as literary students usually had, toward history, culture, sociology, psychology, or aesthetics, etc., but toward linguistics ..." (pp. 107-8). So rather than establishing a literary discipline, the Formalists merely discarded anthropology, psychology, philosophy, etc., in order to subordinate literature to another non-literary discipline - linguistics. This is the inevitable and logical consequence of treating literature as a kind of language. There can be no literary discipline then, for literary study becomes part of the science of language. One other consequence, which the advocates of literature as language could not have foreseen but which has become commonplace now, is that if literature is a unique kind of language that runs counter to ordinary and scientific language, then computers can write literature. To some people the idea of computers composing poetry comes as a shock; to others it seems quite an obvious, even desirable possibility and they eagerly accept as poetry what comes out of the computer. These latter are the same people who accept as poetry what is proffered as such in the modern manner - juxtaRussian Formalist Criticism, 107.

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positions of words, without rhythm, rhyme, or meaning. No great difficulty lies in programming a computer to produce the same kind of thing. If literature is a distortion of language that calls attention to itself and thrusts meaning into the background, a computer can handle that just as well as a person. It might even be that with effort a computer could be programmed to produce a poem possessing metrical regularity. But what a computer cannot be programmed to do is to tell a story. If students of literature were willing to define literature as fiction, they would at least avoid running the risk of being put out of business by computers. The point is not as facetious as it may first appear. Modern technology is forcing us to re-assess age-old human activities in order to discern what is uniquely human about them. Photography challenges painting; the Moog Synthesizer challenges music; and the computer challenges literature. When it is asserted that a computer can compose poetry, one can deny it - not on the basis of what the computer has done but on the basis of what poetry is. Modern technology thus demands that we return to the Aristotelian task of definition. 2. Literature as Fiction

The conception of literature as fiction is not new by any means but occurs at least as far back as Aristotle. Aristotle considered literature (what he called poetry but which included both prose and verse) to be imitations of men in action. Homer is a poet according to Aristotle not because he composed in verse but because he presented by imitation in his verse men in action. Empedocles, though he too composed in verse, is according to Aristotle not a poet because he did not present in his verse men in action. On the other hand, although Sophron, Xenarchus, and the writers of Socratic discourses because they wrote prose were not in Aristotle's time called poets, he insists that they are poets because their prose dialogs imitate men in action. 32 Moreover, by imitations of men in action Aristotle clearly 32

Poetics, tr. Gerald P. Else (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967), 16-17. Cf. Else's comments on this passage in his Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 52-53.

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meant fictional actions (though not necessarily fictional personages), for he adds: From what has been said it is also clear that the poet's job is not to report what has happened but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the rule of probability or necessity. Thus the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their utterances being verse or prose (it would be quite possible for Herodotus' work to be translated into verse, and it would not be any the less a history with verse than it is without it); the difference lies in the fact that the historian speaks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen, (pp. 32-33) Thus Aristotle provides a precedent for conceiving of literature in terms of fictionality. And his prestige as a thinker has allowed this option to be kept open while for millenia literary study has been based almost exclusively on the conception of literature as language. However, this is the extent of Aristotle's contribution to basic literary theory, because he never completed his definition of poetry by specifying what species of imitation it is.33 A genus without a species is not a definition. Despite this glaring inadequacy in Aristotle's poetics, the only fictional conception of literature to be pursued in recent years has come from a group of literary scholars and critics at the University of Chicago who derive their literary theory avowedly from Aristotle. It is no wonder then that, although these Neo-Aristotelians like to emphasize the fictionality of literature as opposed to its linguistic character, they undercut this emphasis by insisting that literature as a whole cannot really be defined. Since Aristotle did not or could not define it, how can anyone else ? According to the Neo-Aristotelians all that can be defined are the literary kinds. This is a puzzling exercise in which, instead of the genus (imitation) with no species (literature), we now have the sub-species (drama, epic, lyric) with no species. This exercise is all the more puzzling in that, although the NeoAristotelians deny in theory that literature can be defined, they know in practice very well what it is. Moreover, R.S. Crane, 33

See the author's "Aristotle's Poetics and Elder Olson", Literature XV (1963): 164-65.

Comparative

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one of the most prestigious members of the group, has defined literature and in a way not differing essentially from the way that it shall be defined here in the next chapter. But the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing. Crane's definition of literature is offered in an essay whose purpose is to distinguish among literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas in order to determine what is the appropriate province of the history of ideas. Therefore the definition of literature is presented subordinated and unemphatically, merely as a way of indicating the role that ideas play in it. Perhaps Crane's admission that literature is, at least centrally, fiction is more revealing just for the fact that it is offered as obvious and more or less self-explanatory. "I want", he says, "to be as matter of fact as possible and hence to start with a minimum of commitment as to the essential natures and interrelationships of my three fields." I shall assume at the outset, therefore, only very rough discriminations ... - such discriminations as we all make in common discourse when we classify Othello, Tom Jones, and the "Ode to a Nightingale", for example, as works of literary art primarily rather than of philosophy or intellectual history. ... 3 4

Inductive discriminations are sufficient to begin with, but at some point Crane had to say - despite his theoretical disavowal of definition - what exactly these three works have in common as literature if he was going to be able to say how at all they differed from philosophy and history of ideas. Ultimately one cannot choose not to define if one is going to discourse. One can only choose to admit the definition or, though still using it, not to admit it. In this instance Crane was compelled to make the de facto definition of the NeoAristotelians explicit because the whole purpose of his essay was to define and delimit the intellectual activities that were its topic. What Othello, Tom Jones, and the "Ode to a Nightingale" have in common according to Crane is that they exemplify "that large and much more central class of literary forms" which "may be called 'representational' forms, in the sense that in them the principle 34

"Literature, Philosophy, and the History of Ideas", Modern Philology LII (1954): 73-83.

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of continuity - what we are invited to attend to successively and to respond to - is not the stages of an explicit argument but the moments of an imagined human activity

. . . " (p. 80, italics added).

But it is not just that these kinds of works are the most numerous and centrally literary, for when he talks about the role of ideas in literature and about the "peculiarly literary value of literary works" he refers only to these, to works that depict "the moments of an imagined human activity". "It is essential to remark", Crane declares, "that the cogency achieved in a ... literary work is not, as in philosophy, a matter of adequate proof but rather of the sustained efficiency of what is done in the component parts of a novel, drama, or poem relative to the special quality of the imagined human activity that is being represented" (p. 83). If the "peculiarly literary value of literary works" derives from the cogency with which the moments of the imagined human activity are deployed, then only those discourses that do in fact represent the moments of an imagined human activity can be literature. This is a roundabout way of defining, but it is defining nonetheless. If this is what Crane thinks literature basically is, what it derives its particular value from and how it differs from other kinds of discourse, why is he unwilling on the theoretical level to define it as such and on the scholarly level to follow out the consequences for study of such a conception? The Neo-Aristotelians appear to hold no brief for the linguistic conception of literature. Writes Crane elsewhere, "It would be false, in the language of Aristotle's criticism, to say that a tragedy or any other poem is essentially a 'verbal structure' or that it exists primarily in a 'verbal universe'." 35 Yet Crane's equivocalness about the nature of literature shows him to be also an equivocal Aristotelian. At one point he raises the question of "what is the difference, if any, between the character and functioning of the ideas" in Lucretius' poem De rerum natura and that of ideas "of a generally similar philosophic order, in the treatises of Gassendi and Boyle ?" I suppose the best answer is that, whereas the shaping of the particular thoughts is determined immediately, in both the poem and the treatises, by the exigencies of a controlling and explicitly stated line of argument, 35

The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953), 76.

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... the ideas in the De rerum natura are also conditioned by a further set of necessities, deriving from the poet's choice of verse as his medium and, more especially, from his intention of using his argument to inculcate certain emotional states, such as freedom from superstitious fear, in his audience. It is thus a composite work, both philosophical and literary. ... (pp. 79-80) In light of what we have just seen Aristotle saying about the difference between Homer and Empedocles, the answer that Crane provides is decidedly non-Aristotelian. More important, however, Crane's answer contradicts Crane. For this notion of what constitutes the literariness of this composite work has nothing at all to do with the conception stated in the same essay that literature is discourse that presents "the moments of an imagined human activity". The use of verse and the intention to inculcate certain emotional states are nowhere shown to bear any relation to presenting the moments of an imagined human activity, and Lucretius' poem does not present such moments at all. Of course Lucretius' poem is only partly literary. However, says Crane, "There are many other works of discursive or 'philosophical' poetry, in all languages, for which the line separating literature from philosophy is much easier to draw. Consider, for instance, Pope's Essay on Man and Thomson's Seasons." Both, says Crane, are works of literature. Why? Because "The ideas and arguments are not in any important sense parts of a demonstration but simply materials and devices, modified by the stylistic principles of the two authors, for achieving the predominantly rhetorical ends of the two poems" (p. 80). But what have style and rhetoric to do with presenting the moments of an imagined human activity ? And since these works present neither the moments of an imagined human activity nor a philosophical demonstration, they must lack that cogency which literature and philosophy each in its own way is expected to have. What the Neo-Aristotelians' insistence upon the indefinability of literature in the face of their own de facto definition of it shows up is the unwillingness of literary scholars to exclude from literature any discourse that is not clearly something other than literature. However scientifically obsolete Gassendi's and Boyle's treatises

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may be, they are not therefore literature. But Lucretius and Pope and Thomson did not write literature, and they did not write philosophy or science; they wrote what we would now call propaganda. In expressing certain ideas they intended to induce certain emotional states. And they wrote up these ideas in verse so that they would be memorable - rememberable. Their ideas are no longer alive and their propagandistic intentions no longer achievable, and yet they are studied by literary scholars just as the works of Shakespeare and Homer are, with which they have nothing in common except that they are in verse. Of course sense cannot be made out of the category literature if you want to include in it everything that has been written in verse. This is always granted. Yet when it comes down to cases, that which is in verse or even just purports to be in verse or has some other pretensions to linguistic "style" will be accepted as literature and the opportunity to make sense out of a vast area of human endeavor - the composition of fiction - wasted precisely because of this verbal fetishism. Despite their protestations, the Neo-Aristotelians, as we have seen with Crane, are no different from their New Criticism opponents. And if philosophical propagandistic poems like Pope's Essay on Man induce the Neo-Aristotelians to reject the notion that literature can be defined, lyric poetry in all its meaningless heterogeneity induces even stalwarts like Wellek to balk at defining. Both epic and drama fit obviously into a conception of literature as fiction. Whether in verse or prose, epic and drama by definition present fictional human actions. The literary kinds designated by these terms could be made more precise and the difference between drama and theater more explicit, but there is no question that if a discourse is accepted as an epic or a drama it is necessarily literature. But not so the lyric because the lyric cannot be defined. The inability of literary theorists to say what the lyric is has finally compelled Wellek to reject the possibility of an exhaustive classification of literature and to return to the description of historic kinds. 36 For the Neo-Aristotelians epic and drama both 36

"Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis", Discriminations, 225-52.

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43

imitate actions and therefore have plots, but "Lyrics, it is plain, do not have plots. ,.." 37 Those works called lyric do not obviously imitate men in action. Indeed, some theorists have gone so far as to oppose the lyric to epic and drama and thus to a fictional - and unified - conception of literature. According to John Stuart Mill the lyric was the very opposite of men in action; rather it was the soul privately musing or feeling. And to him the lyric so described is the very essence of poetry. Indeed, in the last hundred years lyric has become almost synonymous with poetry as distinguished from prose. Yet this has occurred at a time when epic and dramatic verse has almost ceased to be composed and when experimentation with lyrical meters, always the most diverse of poetic meters, has gone so far as to obliterate metricality. Thus arises the irony that discourse that is neither fictional nor in verse has preempted the very name of poetry. No wonder no one can say what lyrics are. Like Wellek and Crane, one can only say what they are not. Lyrics do not have plots. But what do they have? And if it is insisted that the lyric is a species of literature, then no wonder that literature cannot be defined, for what could all the things called lyric have in common, and if this is not determinable, then neither is what the lyric would have in common with epic and drama. The problem of the lyric thus lies at the heart of the problem of literary definition. Nevertheless it must be admitted at once that the lyric can not be defined. The term "drama" at least comes from the Greek for "a thing done" and the term "epic" from "a thing told", but the term "lyric" simply meant "accompanied by the lyre". What has been put into this anomalous category, particularly beginning with genre theorizing in the eighteenth century and continuing with the decline of verse in the twentieth, is all short discourses that are either in verse or laid out on the page as verse. It is impossible that any common feature could emerge from such a grouping. Elder Olson has quite rightly declared that "The critic who seeks to discuss and the poet who seeks to construct a lyric poem are apt to discover all too quickly that in this particular province of literature, extensive and important as it is, little has been said which affords them any 37

Crane, The Languages

of Criticism,

161.

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THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

real guidance." 38 Since, therefore, neither the person who classifies nor the person who composes a lyric poem is likely to have any clear idea of what such a thing is, there can hardly be an essential similarity among all the things called lyric. Just because the lyric cannot be defined, however, this does not mean that a great many things called lyric are not literature. They are indeed, but what they have in common is not reflected in their being lyrics but in their being fiction. The term "lyric" is quite useless and ought to be discarded; many of the works designated by the term, however, are clearly literature and can be classified and studied as such. The "Ode to a Nightingale" fits Crane's definition of literature as fiction and will fit ours, too. But it is also clear that not everything called lyric is fiction and that therefore not everything that has been included in literary study by virtue of being called lyric can be classified and studied as literature. This is the real problem of the lyric. The literary theorists have shown themselves more willing to give up the opportunity to study literature in a disciplined systematic way than to give up studying those discourses that have been called literature by virtue of being called lyric but are not fiction. The concept of fiction could unify the discipline of literary study, could call attention to an important and as yet imperfectly understood phenomenon if we were willing to make a distinction between what we can define and what we cannot and accept and pursue the consequences of such a distinction. It turns out that for all their desire to have an independent discipline of literary study, literary scholars cannot conceive of how literature could be studied other than it has been in the past, and yet past study admittedly has not been a discipline. The root of the difficulty may after all be an inability to see not how literature could be fiction but how literature could be studied as fiction. Wellek and Warren, for example, give an unarguable definition of literature in their second chapter, "The Nature of Literature", but their first chapter is devoted to the nature of literary study, and the rest of Theory of Literature reflects this priority. Despite their definition 38

" 'Sailing to Byzantium': Prolegomena to a Poetics of the Lyric", The University of Kansas City Review VIII (1942): 209-19.

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

45

of literature as fiction, they have little to say about it, the one chapter solely devoted to it, "The Nature and Modes of Narrative Fiction", being the weakest in the book. The heart of their section devoted to "The Intrinsic Study of Literature" lies in the chapters on rhythm and meter, on style, and on imagery and symbolism. According to their conception of the mode of existence of a literary work, the sound stratum leads to the verbal and syntactic stratum, which in turn directs us to "the poet's world". The only kind of fictional analysis available to literary scholars has been that of interpreting this world, and such analysis is obviously not intrinsically literary because it takes one away from the work and into the world reflected by the work. To formalism (that is, linguistic analysis) is opposed realism (that is, the criticism of life that a literary work is taken to offer). This is why the older scholars were indeed guilty, as Jakobson charged, of having continually "strayed into related disciplines". If what the literary scholar ends up studying is the world reflected in the work, then "the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc." are entirely pertinent. These are precisely the topics that Wellek and Warren relegate to "The Extrinsic Approach to the Study of Literature". If literature is fiction, however, the linguistic approach is no less extrinsic, for Wellek and Warren admit that a work of rhetoric or philosophy or political pamphleteering "may pose problems of aesthetic analysis, of stylistics and composition, similar or identical to those presented by literature, but where the central quality of fictionality will be absent" (p. 26). That is, such works can be analyzed linguistically, and if this is so, there is nothing unique to literary study about linguistic analysis. The conception of literature as language is derived in large measure from the attempt to retain the only kind of literary study - extrinsic though it may be - that literary scholars have. As matters now stand, if literature were accepted as fiction, there would still be no independent discipline of literary study because there exists no systematic study of literature qua fiction. The bogeyman of modern literary study is Benedetto Croce, for he did dismiss linguistic analysis as irrelevant to literature qua literature, and, whatever reasons he may have had for doing so,

46

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY STUDY

nothing was left of literary study. "Croce consistently denies", says Wellek, "the validity of all stylistic and rhetorical categories, the distinction between style and form, between form and content, and ultimately, between word and soul, expression and intuition." If no such distinctions exist, then neither can literary analysis, because it is based on a dichotomy between a linguistic form and a reality-like content, the analysis deriving from showing how the two are distinct but related. In Style: The Problem and Its Solution

we have demonstrated not only how untenable this distinction is but also how impossible it has been for scholars to establish it. Does this demonstration lead us all into the Crocean impasse? For as Wellek warns, "In Croce, this series of identifications leads to a theoretical paralysis: an initially genuine insight into the implications of the poetical process is pushed so far that no distinctions are possible" (p. 184). And to Wellek the only possible route out is backwards; we have to return to these distinctions or there will be no literary study: "It now seems clear that process and work, form and content, expression and style, must be kept apart, provisionally and in precarious suspense, till the final unity: only thus are possible the whole translation and rationalization which constitute the process of criticism." But there is another way. Instead of entering the impasse, take another route. If one does not accept that literature is language, then one will not be caught in the impasse between a hypostatized linguistic style and a content to which it is reducible. Instead, accept that literature is fiction, define it as "the moments of an imagined human activity", as "a world of... imagination" in which "the statements ... are not literally true". Then show how these statements differ from those that are literally true, how these moments are presented, how they get to the reader or listener, what they mean, and how they function. This is what can constitute the study of literature qua literature; how it can is what the rest of this volume will show.

II THE NATURE OF FICTION

Our discussion of fiction has proceeded as far as it can go on the basis of general man-in-the-street agreement as to what sort of thing it is. If we are to avoid the impasse that Wellek and Warren quickly arrived at, we must provide a precise, if only tentative, definition. But definitions are not ends in themselves; to advance even one step beyond the realm of miscellaneous arbitrary characterizing, a definition must come provided with built-in taxonomic principles. Specifically, to be of any value to the analysis of the phenomenon of literature, a definition of fiction must lend itself to the classifying of species and sub-species. A serious but common error in defining - one that is conspicuous in most attempts to define literature - is to take as the data from which to extract the common elements classes of things rather than individual things themselves. Thus in literary study we very commonly find the question asked: What is it that drama, lyric, and epic have in common? Things already grouped into traditional or ad hoc classes are not very likely to have been defined in exactly the same fashion, and as a result only the most general common features remain as the basis for further classifying. It is an easy conclusion to come to that drama, epic, and lyric have nothing essential in common. But if we seek to discover what Othello, Tom Jones, and "Ode to a Nightingale" have in common, we have only to examine the data and to avoid the intermediate and possibly irrelevant or misleading intellectual constructs. At best, the concepts "drama", "epic", and "lyric" are the means of characterizing differences. At worst, these concepts are the traditional barriers

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to seeing fictionality as the unifying factor in widely divergent forms of literature: A recent discussion of genre theory [Theory of Literature, pp. 235-47] indicates how confused and confusing some of these problems are. ... If ... we reduce lyric, epic, and drama to "a common literariness," how shall we distinguish a play from a story ? Such reductions are in the interest of nobody. Yet it is proper to glance at the other extreme: if we multiply the genres indefinitely, we shall ultimately have to recognize a special genre for each art work, and if we make the larger genres watertight compartments, we shall end up with at least three separate "literatures," not one.1 The fundamental misconception exemplified here is that defining and classifying is possible only if we "reduce" differences to identity. Quite the opposite is true. The motivation for defining and classifying is to acknowledge and account for differences even as we group individuals together to make systematic study possible. Dogs and cats are not reduced to mammals; men and women are not reduced to human beings; bicycles and automobiles are not reduced to vehicles. Just as we shall be able to distinguish dogs and cats more precisely when we understand their common mammalian nature, we shall be able to distinguish plays from stories more precisely when we understand their common literary nature. The principles of a species derive from the individuals that are to constitute it, but the principles of the sub-species derive from the species. Definition and classification are two sides of the same coin, but they are not identical. Defining is basically an empirical process; it works from instances up to class. Classifying is basically a deductive process; it works from class down to sub-classes. The intellectual goal, of course, is to arrive at the knowledge that makes the results of the two processes identical. But short of the ideal, no one is privileged to say (as for example the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians have said about literature and the genres of literature) that because sub-classes yield no principle of class that there is no possibility of defining a class. The truth of the matter is quite the reverse: sub-classes are essentially meaningless 1

William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1962), 694.

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49

except in relation to the class of which they are part. Thus the primary task is to define the class.

A. THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION

To be of maximum value, a definition must point to a characteristic, a condition, or a relationship that all the members of the class possess and that nothing that is not a member of the class possesses. It must state, in the case of literature, for instance, that all works of literature are JC or have x, and that nothing else is JC or has JC. Often, of course, we are not dealing with a single isolable feature but at best with only a series of features that pattern in a recognizable way. Thus, any one feature may be absent in a given case, but the pattern is still identifiable. However, it is sometimes argued that the positing of even a pattern as a defining characteristic is not warranted by experience. Individuals are alleged to be related to each other but never so as to form a class. Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of such relationships as family resemblances and argued that language misleads us into thinking that there are natural classes based on common characteristics. But, he maintained, in fact there are only groups of individuals similar to each other but in different ways. His favorite example is games: 1 m e a n board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and s o on. ... If y o u look at them you will not see something that is c o m m o n to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series o f them at that. ... I can think of n o better expression to characterize 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. - A n d I shall say: games form a family. 2

Rarely, indeed, do we find in practice any particular thing that can be placed in one and only one class by virtue of precisely defined characteristics, and the looseness of our everyday vocabu2

Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York, 1953), # 6 6 , 67. For further references and a more detailed analysis of Wittgenstein's position, see the author's "The Problem of Meaning in Linguistic Philosophy", Logique et analyse XV (1972): 609-619.

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lary reflects this. But in scientific classification the attempt is made to reduce a shifting collection of family traits and vague overlapping categories to precise concepts based on specific characteristics. Members of a family may not possess any common physical characteristics by virtue of which they constitute a class, but to refer to them as a family in the first place presupposes some kind of unity simply in order for communication to take place. The notion of family resemblances only pushes the problem of definition one step back. It assumes the existence of a class in order to demonstrate that its members actually have nothing in common. Moreover, as far as "family" is concerned, there is an obvious defining feature that all members of a family possess and that 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. The ideal class is like "molecule", which is by definition "the smallest portion of an element or compound that 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" that does not also fit the facts, but if it is possible to have one that does both, with a minimum of arbitrary distinctions, this has an important advantage - it makes possible systematic knowledge of the world, not the Platonic world of logical ideas or the positivistic world of logical "sets" but the real space-time world. Problems of classification, then, do not manifest themselves 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. Reducing the problem 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 distinguishing feature is recognized in a particular work before the work is subjected to classification,

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51

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 ia 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 adequate 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 scholars 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 scholars could not agree that a specific aspect of the particular work was in fact the feature that both had agreed was the characteristic of literature. The more limited the area of dispute, the more likely is a question to yield to solution. Two difficulties confront the scholar who would define literature in terms of a characteristic common to all works that 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 that 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 student of literature who begins his examination with "metaphysical" poetry of the seventeenth century might decide that a certain unique "kind" or "style" of language 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 that, as to language, all that these poems and novels have in common is that they are linguistic.

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THE NATURE OF FICTION

The second difficulty 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 is an infinite number of pitfalls, and 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 characteristic is not likely to recommend itself to everyone, but it should not simply ignore a large body of works. If it does, the definition is likely to be suspect. For example, if in a definition of literature many works are relegated to a category labeled "didactic" and in effect dismissed as not really literature at all, 3 then this definition is suspect. Similarly, if much of the world's literary fare is labeled "pseudo-literature", we may lose more than we gain by defining. 4 If the critic chooses to deny the name literature 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 evaluating a system of classification. Two contemporary zoological 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 scientist 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 explanation that includes the greatest amount of experience with the greatest 3

Cf. the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians, e.g. Elder Olson's "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction", in Critics and Criticism, 65-68. 4 Cf. Pollock, e.g. 180-81.

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degree of coherence, consistency, and predictability. If empirical verification is ultimately only an approximation, even more so is the constructing of the conceptual framework within which verification must take place. The scientist does not classify in order to find out what the world really ontologically is.5 He does so in order to explain the similarities and dissimilarities that ars intuitively apparent even without classification, to organize experience for further study, and, hopefully, to reveal heretofore unnoticed similarities and differences. Classification is not the end of formal 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. Not until the publication of Evans-Pritchard's classic work on the Azande in 1937 was the fundamental problem really articulated: "Everything in the world is ultimately related to everything else, but unless we make abstractions we cannot even commence to study phenomena. ..." 6 And only in the last few decades, following the lead of Kroeber, have anthropologists begun to grapple systematically with these fundamental conceptual problems - including the problem of defining the subject itself.7 We do not have to accept cultural anthropology as an already fully established discipline to acknowledge that this field is more advanced than literary study in its recognition of the need for systematic defining and classifying. Literary scholars have, on the one hand, been so immersed in their 5

See Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science and History Since Hegel, tr. William H. Woglon and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, 1950), for an account of the battle in nineteenth century physics over the ontological nature of matter and space. And for the twentieth century conception, more epistemological than ontological, see Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 6 E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937), 2. 7 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 History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations (Berkeley, 1958).

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nebulously conceived data, and, on the other hand, so preoccupied with the infinite number of possible relationships, that few of them have recognized the need for and the problems of defining that data. To be sure, no class of artificially grouped phenomena, be it of animals or literature, is likely to arrange itself faultlessly without a few mavericks. The existence of viruses and the duck-billed platypus, however, does not invalidate present biological classification - we simply label these as 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 documented. No scientific classification, from the periodic table to sociological stratification, is without some 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 then only if we can replace it with something more adequate. Also, 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 impossible 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 classification judged as more or less successful. There are, however, two different activities that 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 phenomena 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 that arises out of a primary interest in studying something and the study of terminology itself. 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 patterns of usage. The

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non-linguistic scientist too begins by analyzing particulars - not particular instances of word use, however, but particular phenomena of other sorts. And instead of abstracting patterns of usage, he abstracts, defines, delimits, constructs, a class based on a common characteristic. 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 is not primarily concerned with fidelity to ordinary language because only rarely is the definition of a word the same thing as, and nothing more than, the definition of a class. The word "paramecium" is such a word; "horse" is not. "Horse" has other uses than to denote or refer to a specific class of fourlegged creatures, and even abridged dictionaries list more than a dozen meanings for the word. On the other hand, all instances of "paramecium" refer to a well-defined genus of ciliate protozoa and to nothing else. Those interested in the word "literature", its history and various uses, are referred to the work of Pollock 8 and R. Escarpit. 9 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 we have increasingly come to call "literature", this thing constitutes a definable and studiable phenomenon. 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 that 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 thing, or kind of thing, literature, and yet maintain that there is no consistency of usage or theory that does or can account for it. Elder Olson makes the point unequivocally for them:

8

The Nature of Literature, Chap. I and Appendix. "La Définition du Terme 'Literature' : Projet d'article pour un dictionnaire international des termes littéraires", in Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (The Hague, 1962). 9

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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. 10 W e cannot use "literature" or "poetry" as the key term 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 w h o want to have their cake and eat it too. It is impossible t o talk consistently about something that is assumed t o exist but that cannot be defined either linguistically or scientifically. This study is an attempt t o analyze not the uses of the w o r d "literature" but those works commonly

acknowledged t o

be

works of literature and to abstract f r o m them a c o m m o n characteristic. It attempts, as Aristotle advocated, t o classify a phenomenon in terms of genus and species. A n d if successful, it will have accomplished what the Poetics,

the one conspicuous attempt t o dis-

tinguish and classify literary phenomena, did not. F o r all his discussion of the class of things to which poetry belongs, and of the different kinds o f poetry, Aristotle never says what it is that characterizes all poetry and nothing else. He gives us the genus (imitation) and a wide 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 literature, but Aristotle will have been w r o n g in thinking that there is such a thing as literature that can be the subject of systematic study and classification. K n o w i n g what literature is qua literature is a prerequisite for all organized literary scholarship. Y e t , before proceeding with a study that purports to define "literature qua literature", perhaps a clarification of this shopw o r n phrase is in order. W h a t is not meant is literature qua art, literature qua aesthetic function or quality, literature qua beauty. 10

"William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction", in

Critics and Criticism, 58.

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Only if the other seven or so arts can also be defined, and only if they do indeed share a basic characteristic, will it be possible for literary theory to be a branch of aesthetic theory. But just as the emphasis on literary kinds obscures the fundamental problems of literary analysis, so the emphasis on art and aesthetics obscures the peculiarly literary distinctions. Wellek and Warren recognized this problem and called for the necessary formulations within the individual arts before the study of art 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 adaption 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 inductively. 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 postulated, works of art, and often seemingly non-artistic things (either natural or artificial), are judged in relation to this aesthetic standard and classified accordingly in a variety of categories: art/non-art, good art/bad art, true art/ pseudo-art, beautiful/ugly, etc. But the point to notice with this second approach to aesthetic study is that evaluation always precedes classification. Therefore, no one system of categories ever 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. A frequent attempt to find some common element in the "aesthetic" results in postulating a particular function or effect - not a verifiable, objective feature within the work that functions in a particular 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 relativity and disagreement. And a classification and definition is of limited value if it is not accepted as a workable convention to others in the field.

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Despite their disclaimer cited above, Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature suffers from an almost synonymous use of the terms "literary" and "aesthetic". To cite just one example: "It seems, however, best to consider as literature only works in which the aesthetic function is dominant...." 11 Theory of Literature presupposes an aesthetic theory, but such a theory is never furnished, and, as the authors admit, cannot be furnished 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 common characteristic. Wellek and Warren have involved themselves in an implicit contradiction when they say: "We cannot comprehend and analyze any work of art without reference 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 that is never defined. It is not just this lack of precision in terminology, however, that lies at the root of their troubles but also the resulting necessity of evaluating works aesthetically 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 that allows the criterion of evaluation to arise out of a study of the essential quality of a thing will be more adequate than one that imposes the criterion on a work as a condition of studying it. With this premise Wellek and Warren are in complete agreement: "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 objects 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 standard, and they have mistaken 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 evaluation" (p. 15). Indeed, if the study and classification of literature cannot be distinguished from evaluation, there can be no 11

P. 13; see also Chaps. II, XIV, and XVIII.

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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 classification of art and literature is distinct from and prior to evaluation.12 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, 360). He is right in admitting that we do not yet have a suitable aesthetic theory. But he must be wrong in believing that there can be no adequate theory of literature until we do. The point of all this is to indicate what is not meant here by "literature qua literature". What is meant is that we will confine our search for a common characteristic to works traditionally called literature, beginning inductively with a series of obviously fictional works, and contrasting them with similar but obviously non-fictional works. But to begin inductively is not to finish inductively. Definitions are heuristic considerations as much as they are factual ones. "Nature must be interrogated", as Kant so aptly phrased the code of the scholar-scientist. And the corollary to this maxim is that nature gives only answers; it does not provide the questions that will elicit these answers.

B. A DEFINITION

If we say that literature is fiction, we helpfully narrow down the possibilities of where to look for the defining feature of literature. For fiction comprises a good deal less than "that which is written". Etymologically, the term "fiction" is derived from the Latin fictio, a making, fashioning, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to touch, form, mold. Since fingere also gives us the English word "feign", it is interesting and somewhat tautological that the 12

N o more than Frye can claim that "value judgements are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value judgements", and then say that we need a conceptual framework to explain "the masterpieces of literature" (italics added, p. 15).

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editors of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language should use "feign" to define "fiction" as: "1. an event, statement, or occurrence that has been invented or feigned rather than having actually taken place. 2. The act of producing such inventions, a feigning. ..." Clearly the word "fiction" means something made up, something pretended, something not real, not true, existing only by virtue of invention. Yet this dictionary also offers the definition: "A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact" (italics added). Surely this italicized clause ought to read "necessarily not based on fact". A fact, from the Latin facere, means a deed, a thing done, whereas fiction means a thing not done but only pretended or claimed to be done. Fact and fiction are not matters of degree but opposites. The term "poetry" also carries from its origins in the Greek poiein, meaning to make or create, the idea of being made up. 13 When we have determined what it is that fiction - or poetry makes up, we shall have determined what it is that literature is. A customary way of undertaking such an inquiry is to begin with a series of broad but commonly accepted contrasts and then gradually refine them until the irreducible distinctive characteristic becomes perceptible. This is what R.S. Crane did in his essay on "Literature, Philosophy, and the History of Ideas", cited in the previous chapter. I shall assume at the outset ... only ... such discriminations as we all make in common discourse when we classify Othello, Tom Jones, and the "Ode to a Nightingale," for example, as works of literary art primarily rather than of philosophy or intellectual history; Spinoza's Ethics, Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and the Critique of Judgment as works of philosophy primarily rather than of literary art or intellectual history; and The Great Chain of Being and Essays in the History of Ideas as works of intellectual history primarily rather than of philosophy or literary art. There is no need, to begin with at least, for any greater refinement of definition than this: literature is simply what men do when they write works, whatever their special themes, that resemble more closely, in structure, method, and intent, 13

Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius' identification of "the concept of poetry" with "narrative produced by the imagination ('fiction')", European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), 8.

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the works in the first group than those in either of the other two. ... (p. 73)

Our task, of course, is to define only literature. We need to distinguish it from other, apparently similar phenomena, but there is no need to ascertain precisely what these others are. That may be done by those who wish to define philosophy, intellectual history, etc. We could do worse, however, than to begin our tentative, rough discriminations with Othello, Tom Jones, and "Ode to a Nightingale". Everyone would agree that these are literature and quite centrally so. There is nothing borderline about them. But the problem is: What should they be contrasted with in order to bring out their distinctive character or characteristic most clearly ? For no one would contend that Spinoza's, Hume's, Kant's, or Lovejoy's works are literature, and, indeed, none bears any obvious, if only superficial, resemblance to Shakespeare's drama, Fielding's narrative, or Keats's poem. What kind of discourse would most resemble Othello, for example, and yet clearly not be fiction, much less literature? No one has yet been known to claim that the transcript or minutes of a trial or hearing is either fiction or literature. Nevertheless there are certain formal or at least superficial resemblances between the script of a play and the transcript of a trial: both consist chiefly of exchanges of dialog with speaker tags and a modicum at least of "stage directions". Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan is transcribed in The State of Tennessee vi. John Thomas Scopes like this: - Can you answer my question ? A - When you let me finish the statement. Q - It is a simple question, but finish it. THE WITNESS - You cannot measure the length of my answer by the length of your question. MR. DARROW

(Laughter in the courtroom.) MR. DARROW - No, except that (Laughter

14

in the courtroom.)111

the answer be longer. .

World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution

1925), 149.

Case (Cincinnati,

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Such are the obvious similarities. Because we classify the one work as fiction and the other not, however, there must also be some obvious difference between them that contrast will reveal. A similar kind of comparison can be set up with Tom Jones. Since Fielding's narrative purports to be The History of Tom Jones, or as we would say today, the biography, an appropriate work for comparison might be the biography of another eighteenth-century character. Carl Van Doren's biography Benjamin Franklin is a standard historical work. Even though Van Doren, like Fielding, is a known author of fiction, his biography of Franklin is not deemed to be among his fictional works; indeed one of its avowed purposes is to rescue the reputation of its protagonist from the legend-makers that seize upon such attractive historical figures. Now, what kind of obviously non-fictional discourse can be contrasted with "Ode to a Nightingale" ? That depends on what kind of discourse we think that the ode most obviously purports to be, and it does seem clear by the end of the first stanza that, whatever else the ode may be doing, it does directly address the nightingale that the speaker whose words the ode purports to be is listening to at the moment he utters them. What is needed for comparison then is an address or speech that, however it might be oratorical literature, is not fiction. That is, an appropriate contrast would be a real address, and one of the most famous and familiar as well as shortest of such addresses is that made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. To be sure, the Gettysburg Address is not in verse, and the question has been raised as to whether verse is a distinctive characteristic of literature, whether it makes a difference between literature and non-literature. Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is verse and fiction takes its theme of "all things change, yet never die" from a poet of the generation preceding Ovid's whose major work illustrates the same theme. Lucretius' On Nature, though in verse and sometimes classified as literature, is never considered fiction, and even Crane, who feels obliged to acknowledge "literary elements" in it, concludes merely that it is a "composite" of literature and philosophy. A comparison of The Metamorphoses and On Nature then should help us discern the difference between literature and

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philosophy and the role that verse plays in such distinctions. In order to really test the distinguishing character of verse, however, we ought also to throw in beside this august pair a couple of nursery rhymes, such as "Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been ?" and "Thirty days hath September", the first being fiction and the second not. We have now gone a long way towards establishing a set of what the linguists call "contrastive pairs" - two things that would be the same thing except for the one difference that makes a difference of kind. Once a set is begun, other such pairs of fiction and "non-fiction" readily suggest themselves, for example, two works by the same author, such as Benjamin Constant's autobiographical novel, Adolphe, and his autobiography, The Red Notebook, or such as Lady Murasaki's novel of court life, The Tale of Genji, and her personal diary of court life. We might compare works of different authors on the same subject, such as the Trojan War in the Iliad and in The Fall of Troy, a History by Dares the Phrygian; life in the American Far West, in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage and Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail; or mythology, as in Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the Maori as Told by Their Priests and The Golden Bough by James George Frazer. An epistolary novel could be compared with a real correspondence, Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al with Conrad to a Friend: 150 Selected Letters from Joseph Conrad to Richard Curie. A work that purports to be about a real event but is not, Albert Camus' The Plague, could be compared with a work that is about a real event, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. A work long thought to be history but that is not, The Saga of Hrafnkel, could be compared with a saga that is indisputably history, The Saga of Coe Ridge by William Lynwood Montell. Finally, to round off our set with "Eastern as well as Western, oral as well as written, popular as well as sophisticated", a work that sums up all these attributes - the Arabian Nights - may be compared with another very popular work that is equally representative of these diverse origins, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville as narrated by himself. Ha\ing established by superficial discrimination our set of

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contrastive pairs, we are now ready to put the essential question to them: By what term and by what criterion can and do we distinguish between The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare

&

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

&

Benjamin Franklin by Carl Van Doren

&

"Address at the Dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery, November 19, 1863" by Abraham Lincoln

The Metamorphoses by Ovid

&

On Nature by Lucretius

"Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been ?"

&

"Thirty days hath September"

Adolphe by Benjamin Constant

&

The Red Notebook by Benjamin Constant

&

The Fall of Troy, A History by Dares the Phrygian

&

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

The Iliad Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the Maori as Told by Their Priests and Chiefs by George Grey You Know Me Al: A Bushels Letters by Ring Lardner The Plague by Albert Camus

&

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer

&

Conrad to a Friend: 150 Selected Letters from Joseph Conrad to Richard Curie

&

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

THE NATURE OF FICTION

The Saga of Hrafnkel, Priest of Frey The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

& & &

65

The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History by William Lynwood Montell The Diary of Lady Murasaki Shikibu by Murasaki Shikibu The Travels of Sir John Mandeville by John Mandeville

and at the same time group together Othello, Tom Jones, "Ode to a Nightingale", The Metamorphoses, "Pussy cat, pussy cat", Adolphe, The Iliad, Riders of the Purple Sage, Polynesian Mythology, You Know Me Al, The Plague, The Saga of Hrafnkel, The Tale of Genji, and The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night ? 1. Statement Before examining in detail what the list includes, however, perhaps we ought to make clear what kind of thing it excludes. In the first place, this series of examples excludes even from consideration fiction that is non-verbal or, more precisely, fiction that is more than verbal. The most obvious examples are theater, comic strips, and movies. In order to be literature, fiction must be in language; it must be constituted out of words. This requirement is part and parcel of the basic conception of literature that all agree upon. Comic strips and movies may present feigned events by means of language as well as pictures. But again they may not, and in every case more than language is involved. This difference is obvious, but it is important nevertheless. Whatever literary fiction makes up, it makes up by means of words and words alone; a literary fiction is first of all a statement. The second kind of thing excluded from our list will doubtless appear less excludable, but the reason for its exclusion is the same - that a literary fiction mast first of all be a statement. Obviously, a statement is not just any verbal matter put together. A telephone directory, however useful and comprehensible, is not as a whole a statement but rather a list. It is organized - alphabetically - but

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it is not linguistically coherent because it does not consist of connected assertions. Similarly, the conjugation of a Latin verb, though it contains brief assertions as it were in the verb forms, is not a statement because these assertions are not joined together in a coherent sequence. A conjugation is a list, too, in this case a list of similar verbal forms with similar meanings. Therefore our list of literary possibilities does not include directories or grammatical paradigms or the like. If this were all there is to the exclusion of certain kinds of items from consideration as to their literary character, the representativeness of our list could hardly be disputed. But the fact of the matter is that this one requirement - that a literary fiction be a statement - already excludes even from consideration some works that are commonly deemed literature. For instance, possibly the oldest extant writing, outside of oracle bones, in China is the I Ching or Book of Changes. Herbert A. Giles includes a discussion of it in his History of Chinese Literature, which was the first history of Chinese literature in any language, even Chinese. Nevertheless, Giles concludes his discussion by saying, "... No one really knows what is meant by the apparent gibberish of the Book of Changes. This is freely admitted by all learned Chinese, who nevertheless hold tenaciously to the belief that important lessons could be derived from its pages if we only had the wit to understand them." 15 Chinese and non-Chinese both are continually coming up with new interpretations of the I Ching, but after 2500 years there is still no agreement as to the meaning of the work. Since it is a book of divination based on hexagrams, one doubts that the work was ever intended to be a statement - much less literature - and it certainly cannot be understood as such. Much the same goes for another Chinese classic, the Too Te Ching. Like the I Ching, it is frequently translated into European languages, but despite translation, it still eludes coherence. The Tao Te Ching purports to be a collection of the utterances of the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, and individual assertions in it are understandable; these are "sandwiched however between thick wads 15

New York, 1923 (first ed. London, 1901), 23.

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of padding from which little meaning can be extracted except by enthusiasts who curiously enough disagree absolutely among themselves" (Giles, p. 58). Yet even if these thick wads of padding were deleted, the Tao Te Ching would not constitute a statement, for a statement is more than a series of assertions, however meaningful in themselves. Some principle of coherence, whether logical or narrative, must govern their union so that they constitute the meaningful, unified sequence of assertions that is understood as a statement. Lest the Chinese be thought the only authors of such non-statements, the organization of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ought to be contemplated. Indisputably, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is meaningful in its parts, but though compiled by the author himself, joined under one title, and published together, the sayings, observations, and anecdotes of William Blake still have no more coherence as a whole than do those of Lao Tzu. It may be argued, however, that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell does not purport to be a statement but merely a collection of, to use Blake's own term, "memorable fancies" and newcoined proverbs. The problem is that one cannot really tell what it purports to be. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land does, on the other hand, seem to be put forward as a single statement - one poem. Yet, unlike The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is not indisputably meaningful in its parts, much less as a whole. Despite the fact that The Waste Land is already being taught in university literature courses, it cannot be considered as even a candidate for literature because it is not coherent. The case against The Waste Land might as well be admitted at once, for no definition of literature can be achieved in which it is necessary to include discourses that are not statement:». At least we are not alone in our skepticism. Graham Hough puts the case neatly: 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 ... it became ungrateful, almost indecent to ask of what sort of continuum these

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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 all the question of what really makes the poem a totality, if it is one at all.16 Hough requires modification here on only one point. He says that "we became satisfied with a level of coherence that we should never have found sufficient in any earlier poem", but this is not quite true. There is another canonical English poem whose level of coherence is on a par with that of The Waste Land — Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". To give Coleridge his due, he did not offer "Kubla Khan" as anything but a fragment. He did not erect his failure into a principle of poetic composition. But this has not prevented critics from doing so. They simply disagree with the author. Martin S. Day expresses the consensus when he declares, "In spite of Coleridge's statement ... the poem appears to be a complete and finished pronouncement." 17 This judgment is supported in the usual manner, that is, by interpreting the work allegorically. Allegorical interpretation, derived as it is from Biblical exegesis, is a method of providing a plot or argument for a discourse whose plot or argument we either cannot perceive or cannot accept but whose words we want to make use of. The method is a bit hardpressed in "Kubla Khan" since there is so little material to work with. The first 36 lines give a third-person, past-tense description of the khan's palace and pleasure dome midst the icy caverns of Alph, the sacred river. In the middle of this description two lines hint vaguely that the khan has heard prophecies of war (11. 29-30). But the description immediately resumes, only to be broken off in line 37 by an inexplicable shift to a first-person, past-tense assertion of having seen a vision once in which an Abyssinian maid was playing a dulcimer and singing of Mount Abora. What the maid of Abyssinia could possibly have to do with the Khan of China is not revealed. Yet the narrator feels that if he could remember the maid's song of Mount Abora he would be inspired to sing of that dome and 16 Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (London, 1960), 21-22. 17 History of English Literature 1660-1837 (New York, 1963), 363.

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those caves of ice, presumably the khan's establishment on the Alph mentioned in the first 36 lines. And if he did remember that song, everyone who heard him sing it (?) would see the dome and the caves and point him out as one especially blessed and to be feared. Both the geographical and the syntactical referents are impossible to sort out, and John Livingstone Lowes' success in The Road to Xanadu in finding sources in Coleridge's reading for the geographical ones only shows how they all ended up in Coleridge's mind; it does not show how they fit together either in the world or in the poem. In The Waste Land it is almost as if Eliot set out to compose a poem with the level of incoherence that Coleridge claims to have struck by the accident of having been interrupted. In any case, regardless of Eliot's notes accompanying the poem, his hints about the Grail myth, his declaration that "What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem", all the snatches of description, conversation, and literary quotation cannot be made to cohere into either a statement about the wasteland or a narrative set in it. The first two sections of The Waste Land contain possibilities for scenes, but these are never sufficiently sustained, and lines 19-30 and the quatrain from Wagner (11. 31-34) have no context at all, while none of the possible scenes are connected with each other. In the third section even these fragmentary possibilities are lacking, and the poem falls apart into quotations and images. The last section contains an utterance (of one of Christ's disciples to another on the road to Emmaus, we are told in the notes) with dramatic possibilities. But the rest is impossible to make out, merely to discern whose words they purport to be. The incoherence of the last ten lines is typical of the "whole". ... I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at Jeast set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quandofiamuti chelidon - O swallow swallow

Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

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Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih This is not an obscure statement; it is not a statement at all. There are of course various ways to achieve incoherence other than by juxtaposing unrelated expressions and assertions in different languages. The most ambitious of them is surely James Joyce's method of composition in Finnegans Wake. What Eliot juxtaposes Joyce attempts to integrate. Different assertions, including assertions in different languages, are superimposed upon each other. By this method it was Joyce's expressed intention to create a sense of everything happening at once. Not surprisingly, then, as Joseph Campbell and H.M. Robinson admit in their highly laudatory A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake", "The first impression is one of chaos, unrelieved by any landmark of meaning or recognition." 18 An implication of their remark is that the chaos is only a consequence of the first impression, and they go on to assure the reader that he will soon find that all is patterned. But being patterned is not the same as being coherent. To refer to some of our original examples of verbal non-statements, a telephone directory is patterned, very perceptibly and sensibly so, but it is not thereby a coherent statement. No more is a paradigm of a Latin verb. Either there are no assertions or the assertions are only juxtaposed. In the latter sense The Waste Land is much like a verb paradigm. Coherence of a statement requires that each assertion in it is joined to the preceding and following one by a semantic relationship. Despite the efforts of Eliot and Joyce on the one hand and allegorist critics on the other, coherence in language is still a product of making one assertion follow from another. Only in this way can a whole be constituted out of the diverse units. Readers of Finnegans Wake are assured by the commentators that there are all kinds of relationships among the assertions that are said to make up the book. Thus the first sentence reads: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." And the last sentence reads: "A way a lone 18

London, 1947,28-29.

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a last a loved a long the", which is supposed to bring the reader back to the first sentence. This is a relationship all right but not a semantic one. It is emblematic. It uses language to make a visual image of beginning in médias res and returning, just as in Mallarmé's " U n Coup de dés" the topic of the constellation of stars is imitated by the layout of the words on the page. These are patterns certainly but not of assertional coherence. Indeed one of Joyce's most sympathetic commentators, Harry Levin, is finally driven by Finnegans Wake to exclaim revealingly that "Every sentence is a wilful divagation from the expectations raised by the last." 1 9 In order to be coherent each sentence of a statement must fulfill at least one of the expectations raised by the last. That is how one knows that a group of sentences go together to form a statement and are not jast a list, say, of sample sentences in a grammar text. It does not matter that Joyce's divagations are patterned according to some principle. Finnegans Wake results in incoherence because each sentence actually counters the expectations raised by the last. One instance should suffice to make the point - if not Joyce's prose - clear. These are the first two clauses of the second paragraph of Finnegans Wake : Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens Country's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time. ... In spite of all the portmanteau puns, one can understand in the first clause something of what is being asserted - someone had just returned from somewhere in order to do something. The assertion is not exactly lucid, but its comprehensibility is on a p a r with Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" ; that is, one can tell that there is a narration here, what the subject of it is, and what in general is being asserted about the subject, though the details are obscure. Sir Tristram had returned over the sea f r o m N o r t h Armorica to this side of the isthmus of Europe Minor to fight his war. But what is to be made of the next clause? It is not just that the clause is full of 19

159.

James Joyce:

A Critical Introduction (London, 1944; 2nd ed. rev. 1960),

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neologisms and obscure geographical references; they are no more puzzling than the one little word at the beginning of the clause - "nor". In English the word "nor" is always preceded by a negation, either "not" or "neither", to which it adds another. Yet here "nor" is not so preceded. The first clause asserts something. The second clause is totally unrelated to the assertion of the first clause. Not only does it not share a common topic but also the relationship implied by the use of the word "nor" between the two clauses does not exist. This is not simply a humorous non sequitur, for it is not comprehensible enough for us to see a joke. It is, as Levin so aptly put it, "a wilful divagation from the expectations raised". In Finnegans Wake Joyce did not construct a personal language; he composed an anti-language. He composed the literary work that is the logical product of a conception of literature as language. Finnegans Wake is constructed absolutely and systematically on the principle of deviation of poetic language from ordinary language. Not only does it use words that never occur in ordinary language; it goes much farther. It goes so far as to counter the entire structure of ordinary language - the structure by which language makes assertions and joins them into extended statements. It little matters here what one may think of such an effort. The cardinal point is that a definition of literature cannot be constructed that can include Finnegans Wake and exclude anything else. However it may be that this work is supposed to "tell a story" - and this scarcely seems possible - it does not meet the minimum requirement for consideration as a work of literature; it is not a statement. One pays his money and takes his choice. Joyce chose to compose and his readers choose to read an anti-statement. To compose (even to read) an anti-statement is one kind of achievement; literature is quite another. 2. Event Why must a work of literature be a statement? A work must be a statement because only if an instance of language is a statement can it present an event. Events can be presented other than in language, e.g. in cartoon sequences, pantomime, and silent film.

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But in language an event can be created only by means of a statement. Statements are commonly about something. Literature differs from other kinds of statements in that it creates an event. A literary work states something that has happened, is happening, or will happen. It presents what is reputed to occur in some place at some time. What happens may be something as simple as a person in the act of speaking. Or it may be as complex as the full life of the cursed wanderer Melmoth and the people that he encounters during the course of more than 200 years. The place may be delimited as vaguely as "in a corner". Or it may be specified like the 220 addresses in Dublin given by Joyce in the course of his Ulysses. The time may be rendered as vaguely as "tender is the night" or as specifically as Thursday, June 16, 1904, from 8:45 A.M. to 2:00 A.M. But a work of literature must be a statement, for only as a statement can it create an event in language. Each of the works of literature in our list presents an event. Each one either states or unequivocally implies the there and then, the here and now, or the where and when that constitute an occurrence in space and time. The degree of specificity being a matter of literary fashion or genre convention, it little matters that the Iliad, for example, does not specify what calendar year its event is supposed to have occurred in. All that is essential is sufficient indication of time and place for an event to be discernible. But the Iliad gives us much more. The event of the Iliad is the course of the Trojan War during seven weeks of its tenth year in and around the city of Troy, with focus on how it is affected by Achilles' withdrawal from combat. Although the Iliad is about an international conflict and Tom Jones is about only a country boy's early life, the event of Tom Jones covers much more time - the first twenty-one years of Tom's life - and more space - ranging from a Somerset estate to London. You Know Me Al ranges much farther. Since the event depicted in Jack Keefe's letters to his friend Al is his baseball career as he moves out of a bush league team in Terre Haute, Indiana, into the big leagues as a player for the Chicago White Sox, this is revealed as taking place all over America as Keefe travels back and forth across the country with his team. Other works may range beyond the bounds of this world entirely. Although

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"The Legend of Maui" in Polynesian Mythology starts out in this world, it eventually takes the hero up to the heavens to snare the sun and down into the underworld to try to conquer death. Yet "The Legend of Maui" in this version is only thirty pages long, as compared to the several hundred pages of the Iliad or Tom Jones. The extent of the work then and the extent of the event have no necessary correlation. A work of only thirty or forty pages, The Saga of Hrafnkel, covers nearly seven years, and about the same amount of time is occupied by the frame event of the Arabian Nights, a work of three or four thousand pages. This disproportion arises in part at least from the fact that, although the passage of a certain amount of time may be necessary to complete the event, not all of what happens during that time bears directly on it. Although Tom Jones does present the protagonist's life from infancy to adulthood, it focuses on the last two years of that period, beginning with Tom's estrangement from Squire Aliworthy and ending with his return to the Aliworthy fold, generally giving the incidents of this time more fully than those of most of the previous years. In The Saga of Hrafnkel the event begins when Einar's father talks to Einar in the spring about getting work. It is his getting work from Hrafnkel that eventually leads to Einar's death at the hands of Hrafnkel in midsummer. The time between Einar's death and the court session (Tiling) of the following spring is passed over quickly, for it is at the Thing that the vengeance for his death will be set afoot. This is accomplished directly after the Thing with the punishment of Hrafnkel, but the ensuing six years are passed off in a sentence, and detailed treatment only resumes with Hrafnkel's slaying of Eyvind in long-delayed retaliation. Similarly, in the Arabian Nights the incidents leading to King Shahryar's misogyny occupy comparatively little time but take up the bulk of the first dozen pages, while the three years in which he practices his daily marriages and executions are passed through in a sentence. On the other hand, the next three years, those one thousand and one nights that he spends with Shahrazad, constitute the bulk of the work. Nevertheless, the entire extent of the event from beginning to end is six years, not just a thousand and one nights.

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In a drama, which makes no use of summary and very little of narrative, the total time of the event may be somewhat difficult to discern since what is acted out continually occupies the foreground. In Othello Act I covers one evening; Act II and Act III, scenes i through iii, progress continuously through one afternoon, night, and following day; and Acts IV and V cover one continuous day and night. Yet the event of Othello lasts more than four days, though how much more cannot be stated exactly. Total lapsed time depends in part on how long it took the principals to sail in rough weather from the Venice of the first act to the Cyprus of the second act. One other lapse of time occurs between Act III, scene iii and scene iv. When Bianca says that it has been a week since she saw Cassio, and Cassio replies that this was because "I have this while with leaden thoughts been pressed", we can assume that Cassio's neglect of Bianca followed his drunken fiasco and thus that about a week has passed between this and the previous scene. (Indeed, one wonders why this scene does not open Act IV instead of concluding Act III.) And this week must be added to the total time required for the event of Othello to take place. There is a class of literary works, however, in which the work is coextensive with the event. Such is the pure unnarrated, uninterrupted dialog, of which our humble nursery rhyme, "Pussy cat, pussy cat", is an example. Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been? I've been to London to look at the queen. Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there ? I frightened a little mouse under her chair. Somewhere in England during the reign of a queen the owner of a cat is interrogating it about its absence. This is the event, but we are not told it; rather we infer it from what is presented - the words of two speakers as they are being spoken. The event begins with the first words of the interrogator and ends with Pussy's second reply and lasts only as long as it takes for these words to be uttered. Someone speaking is the simplest kind of space-time event that literature can depict. Less than this - someone thinking or dreaming - is not a perceptible space-time event, though what is

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thought or dreamed may be. But it is important to understand that the speech itself does not constitute the whole of the event. What makes an event is that from the speech as it is presented may be inferred that someone is in the act of speaking it. Our non-literary example of a nursery rhyme, Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear And twenty-nine in each leap year.20 could be a speech and is undoubtedly spoken on many an occasion when someone in the English-speaking world is trying to recall how many days there are in a month. The statement itself, however, offers no evidence of being presented as spoken. "Pussy cat, pussy cat", on the other hand, does. The mere fact of its being a dialog, a perceptible exchange of speeches, suffices to establish this as the event. And as usual more than the bare minimum is supplied: we are given the identity of one of the speakers and, from what is asked, can easily infer something of the identity of the other speaker, at least in relation to Pussy. "Thirty days hath September" gives no indication that it is being spoken: no one is addressed, no specific time or place is designated, no reference is made to a speaker. By virtue of its complete lack of narrative elements "Pussy cat, pussy cat", belongs to a distinct type of literature, which may be called unmediated. It differs from mediated literature, such as are most of the examples on our list, by consisting only of the words of a speaker or speakers. The event of an unmediated work reaches us through the words of the speakers only but consists of more than these; it consists of the words plus the specific situation that is inferable from them. The process of inference that is operative when we read an unmediated work is no different in kind from 20

The claim that this is literature is made, however, by the linguist Archibald A. Hill, who labels as literature every work that has proven to be "permanent". See "A Program for the Definition of Literature", University of Texas Studies in English XXXVII (1958): 52.

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that which is operative when we read mediated works. In the vast majority of mediated works there is a great deal of dialog, too, and from it must be inferred the parts of the event that are so presented. Usually, nevertheless, much is supplied in addition by means of narrative. What makes unmediated works a distinct class is that here this process of inference alone is operative and if it were not we could not perceive that the work presents an event. The close but distinct demarcation between the two kinds of works can be seen by means of a brief glance at a passage of dialog from a mediated work on our list, Othello. First, let us contemplate the passage from Othello without the aid of the narrative elements that mediate the dialog for as in the original and see how much it tells us without them: Here, stand behind this bulk; straight will he come. Wear thy good rapier bare, and put it home. Quick, quick! Fear nothing; I'll be at thy elbow. It makes us, or it mars us - think on that, And fix most firm thy resolution. Be near at hand. I may miscarry in't. Here, at thy hand. Be bold, and take thy stand. (V, i) Two men have come up to a building. The one advises the other to hide behind a projection from it to await another man expected at once and to have his rapier unsheathed and ready to thrust into the one awaited. The man so advised apparently hesitates, for the first speaker urges him again, assures him that he will not be deserted, and reminds him how important his action is for their mutual welfare. The second man is evidently nervous, fears that he will fail, and thus wishes the other to stay with him. The first replies by saying that he is still here. The implication of this remark is that they are waiting in the dark, for the second speaker seems unsure where the first one is standing. Very little of our understanding of the scene is enhanced by reading in the original the introductory narrative sentence, "Enter Iago and Roderigo"; the speaker tag, I ago, at the head of the first five lines and the seventh line; and the speaker tag Rod., for the sixth line. The play is somewhat easier reading so provided, but the event could certainly still be inferred without these aids. Yet

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this is information provided not by the speakers but by the narrative, so it cannot be said that for the reader, any more than for the playgoer, the words of the speakers are the only source of the work. The distinction is close here where we are trying to make clear the similarity between works of two basically different kinds. Later comparisons will show how important this difference can be. At present the point is that since many works are mediated so little, it should not surprise that many are not mediated at all. An event - unmediated to be sure - can even be constituted by only one person speaking, provided always that the circumstances of the speaking are clearly implied in the speech. To see how an event can be conveyed in a single speech (as opposed to narrative), let us again extract an example from Othello, this time as a monolog rather than a dialog, and strip it of all narrative tags. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul, Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, And smooth as monumental alabaster. Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men. Put out the light, and then put out the light. If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me; but once put out thy light, Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again; It needs must wither. I'll smell it on the tree. O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more! Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after. One more, and this the last! So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep, But they are cruel tears. This sorrow's heavenly, It strikes where it doth love. She wakes. (V, ii)

5

10

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However unrealistic may be the dramatic convention of having a character speak aloud when there is no one to hear him or to inanimate objects that could in no wise be expected to understand

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or reply, it is yet a common convention in literature the world over. And a very important convention it is, for its chief function is to create an event. During the course of this excerpted speech, the speaker addresses his soul, the stars, a candle, a sleeping woman, and her breath. In addition to giving utterance to the intentions of the speaker, these addresses give the listener or reader important information about what is happening. The addresses to the stars and the candle clearly reveal that the time is night and that the speaker carries a candle. The address to the woman's balmy breath indicates that the speaker kisses her on the lips between line 15 and line 16, and the exclamations of lines 16 and 18 make clear that he kisses her twice again. That he speaks to a woman, kisses her, and says aloud that he is going to kill her already indicate that she must be asleep, a point that is confirmed in line 22 with "She wakes". Other behavior of the speaker indicated in the monolog as it is in progress is his beginning to weep. And of course the conclusion to the event as here delimited is the stirring awake of the woman. These inferences are confirmed but not augmented by the narrative matter appended. Introductory to the speech are the sentences: "Desdemona in her bed. Enter Othello with a light." After line 15 is inserted the statement: "He kisses her." And the speech is of course preceded by a speaker tag: "Oth." This information is helpful in following the play as a whole, but it is not necessary for establishing the event of this passage in all its detail. Such a passage could stand alone as an independent work of literature, and many works are no more than such as this passage. The literary work in our sample list that creates an event through the words of a single speaker is Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale". All i he words of "Ode to a Nightingale" are the utterance of someone standing in a garden on a mid-May night near midnight addressing a nightingale that is singing in the forest just beyond and that flies to "the next valley-glades" as the speaker bids him adieu. Despite the fact that a nightingale cannot speak or understand, the poem is clearly being spoken to him as he sings. Says the speaker: "... thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, in some ... plot of beechen green ... singest. ... Away! away! for I will fly to thee ... on the

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viewless wings of poesy ... Already with thee! tender is the night. ... Now ... to cease upon the midnight with no pain while thou art pouring forth thy soul ahroad. ..." And finally he says, Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades. The location of the speaker as he speaks is also indicated in his utterance to the nightingale: "And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, ... but here there is no light save what from heaven is with the breezes blown through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet ... but ... guess each sweet ... The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose ... Thus Tom Jones, Othello, and "Ode to a Nightingale", though statements of very different sorts, are nevertheless all three literature by virtue of having in common the characteristic of presenting an event. On the other hand, "Thirty days hath September", usually classed together with "Pussy cat, pussy cat" as a nursery rhyme, differs essentially from it. Both works are certainly nursery rhymes, yet only "Pussy cat, pussy cat" is literature because only it creates an event. Therefore we have discerned one of the characteristics that literary works have in common and that some nonliterary works lack. For it is clear that other works in the non-literature list resemble "Thirty days hath September" in that, though they are obviously statements, they are not about an event. Take, for example, Lucretius' On Nature. R.S. Crane, it will be remembered, insisted that On Nature is a composite of literature and philosophy. And what gives it its literary character, he claims, is its use of verse and its intention to inculcate certain emotional states. Crane's own definition of literature, however, had nothing to do with either of these characteristics; rather it was expressed

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in terms of the presentation of the "moments of an imagined human activity". Certainly Lucretius' work would not be classifiable as literature according to the criterion of presenting an imagined human activity, nor would it in our terms of presenting a specific space-time event. On Nature is composed (like The Metamorphoses) in Latin dactylic hexameters, yet it does not purport to be literature and in fact does not present an event. Lucretius expressly states that he chose to compose his treatise on the doctrine of Epicurus in verse because ... our doctrine often seems unpalatable to those who have not sampled it, and the multitude shrink from it. That is why I have tried to administer it to you in the dulcet strains of poesy, ... My object has been to engage your mind with my verses while you gain insight into the nature of the universe and learn the value of my words. Lucretius assumes that there is something intrinsically attractive about verse, something that will draw people to read what they would not think of reading were it in prose. (If On Nature is a proper test, this assumption seems to be wrong, for the work survives from antiquity in only one, disfigured manuscript.) But whatever Lucretius thought verse had to contribute to the presentation of his Epicurean doctrine, he did not seem to think that it was the creation of an event or events. On Nature is divided into six books, for which R.E. Latham in his translation into English provides a conspectus of topics: 21 I treats matter and space; II, movements and shapes of atoms; III, life and mind; IV, sensation and sex; V, cosmology and sociology; and VI, meteorology and geology. Moreover, each book is further analyzable into such subtopics as, for example in Book VI: praise of Epicurus; the value of understanding natural phenomena; thunder; lightning; waterspouts; clouds; rain; earthquakes; why the sea is always the same size; volcanoes; etc. Even when the work does take up a specific space-time event such as the plague that broke out in Athens during the second year of the Peloponnesian War, it is not presented as such. Although Lucretius follows Thucydides' account closely in respect of symptoms and behavior, al

The Nature of the Universe (Baltimore, 1951), 21-26.

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he never specifies when the plague occurred (nor does he acknowledge his source), when it began, or how long it lasted; he is intent solely upon giving a graphic description of the physical and social consequences of such an epidemic. In Lucretius' account the plague is not an event but a phenomenon. Thus even in parts of the work Lucretius does not present an event or events. It must be noted, however, that there are a number of direct addresses in the work. The entire work is specifically addressed to Memmius, a contemporary Roman statesman, who is often exhorted by name and for whom the second-person grammatical forms are used throughout. But at the beginning of the poem there is also a lengthy invocation to Venus, and at the beginning of Book III Lucretius also addresses his mentor Epicurus. How do these multiple direct addresses differ from those in the speech of Othello quoted above ? Do these not suffice to constitute an event in On Nature as those did in Othello ? The answer is no, because direct address alone does not suffice to create an event. Direct address may provide one of the indications that an event is occurring, as Othello's apostrophe to the sleeping Desdemona's balmy breath indicates that he is kissing her. But it may not; otherwise, every letter, every prayer, every note left for the milkman, would be a work of literature. Something more is required. Yet that something more is not a matter of length. The medieval Mozarabic song: What shall I do, Mama? My lover is at the door!22 does in two brief lines what On Nature never does in 7500 lines. The girl and her mother are at home when the girl's lover arrives unexpectedly. She is either not in a position to receive him or does not know how to and, at a loss, turns to her mother for help. Lucretius' direct addresses are of quite a different order. To Venus he says: "... I am eager that you may be my ally in writing these verses." To Memmius he says such things as: "For what 22

The original Mozarabic, translations, and a discussion of this poetic tradition may be conveniently found in Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London, 1968), 86-90.

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is to follow, my Memmius, lay aside your cares and lend undistracted ears and an attentive mind to true reason." To Epicurus he says: "... you are my guide, oh glory of the Greek race. ... From your writings do I crop all your Golden Sayings. ..." Clearly Lucretius is writing a book. But writing a book is not a space-time event such as speaking at a particular moment in a particular context is. The movement of Lucretius' pen across the papyrus could be such a space-time event, or a moment-bymoment account of his behavior in the act of composing could be such an event. For example, Ovid, in The Metamorphoses, does give an account that constitutes an event of someone composing a letter: The words that she had thought up she proceeds with trembling hands to set down. Her right hand holds her pen; her left, a clean wax tablet. She starts, then hesitates, then stops; starts again but, hating what she has written, erases. Thus she alters, wipes out, writes again. She throws her tablets down and in turn picks them up again. She doubts everything and, at the moment of writing on, decides against it. Shame and determination alternate in her face. She began with "sister" but now decides to erase "sister" and writes instead on the cleared wax these words, "Your health, dear,..." (IX: 521-30)

Writing, in the sense of composition, is like thinking, an abstraction rather than an event, a generalization of what is done, not the act itself. Neither thinking nor the recorded thoughts - unless they depict an event that was thought up - make literature. This is an especially pertinent point when we turn to our next example in the non-literature category, Conrad to a Friend, with its informative subtitle, 150 Selected Letters from Joseph Conrad to Richard Curie (London, 1928). The collection opens with a letter addressed to "My Dear Mr. Curie", dated 6 November, 1912, from Capel House, and concludes with one addressed to "Dearest Curie", dated 22 July, 1924, from Oswalds. Thus times and places and persons are fully designated and the extent of the correspondence over a period of twelve years is fully perceptible. Yet neither the collection as a whole nor any of the individual letters constitutes a work of literature, despite the fact that the letter-writer, Joseph Conrad, did write many works of literature. As we shall see later

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on, an epistolary novel is not literature by virtue of its epistles but by virtue of the event narrated in them. Since Conrad's letters to Curie do not narrate an event either in the aggregate nor in any one letter, neither the work as a whole nor any of its parts is literature. The direct addresses of Conrad to his friend Curie are no more sufficient to make this collection a work of literature, to create an event, than were Lucretius' addresses to his friend Memmius. You Know Me Al is also a series of chronologically arranged letters extending over a period of years, with times, places, and persons fully designated. And it is a work of literature because it creates an event - Jack Keefe's adventures as he pursues his baseball career across the country - from start to finish of the correspondence. Indeed each letter contributes to the presentation of this event in all its detail just as if the work were narrated in the first person in other than an epistolary form. Genuine collections of letters, though written by an author of literature and even to a single recipient, do not come close to showing such unity of a sustained created event. The epistolary novel is indeed a fiction. According to the entry under "Frazer, Sir James George" in CasseWs Encyclopaedia of Literature,23 "The Golden Bough is an immensely valuable study of man's early beliefs, religion and social culture; and a work of literature in its own right." According to the criterion of presenting an event, however, Frazer's monumental study does not constitute a work of literature. Whatever the author of the encyclopaedia entry means, he cannot mean that The Golden Bough presents an event, nor is it, like Sir George Grey's Polynesian Mythology, a collection of literary works, each one of which presents an event. The Golden Bough does bring together an enormous amount of mythological material, but only in a few rare instances is this material presented in a literary way - as an account of an event. Yet The Golden Bough is the first non-literary work so far considered in which there is some literature. The work as a whole does not present an event, but a few citations of beliefs involve the recounting of events in which they are reflected. In a total of thirteen volumes there cannot be more than a dozen or so 23

Ed. S. H. Steinberg, 2 vols. (London, 1953).

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such instances. These instances, moreover, consist of quotations or paraphrases or a combination of the two directly from the primary sources, as a comparison of the appropriate part of "The Tale of Sayf al-Muluk" from the Arabian Nights with Frazer's version of it in Part VIII of The Golden Bough would reveal. Thus The Golden Bough as a whole is not literature, and what literature there is in it also exists as literature independently of The Golden Bough. Mandeville,s Travels has also had, like On Nature and The Golden Bough, its literary supporters. The most thoroughgoing of these is probably Josephine W. Bennett, who concludes her monograph, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, with the declaration: "It is to restore the Travels to its rightful place in English literature that this study has been dedicated." 24 Unfortunately, Mandeville's Travels is neither English nor literature. Though subsequently translated into English, as well as eight other languages, it was originally composed in French, probably in the mid-fourteenth century, by an author who has remained anonymous, despite efforts continuing since shortly after the appearance of the work until now to find out who he was. The title of Bennett's study is a trifle misleading since she concludes her investigations with the remark, "In the end we know no more about him than he tells us in his book" (p. 216). For not only is there no evidence other than in his book; for the existence of a Sir John Mandeville, but also what information about him is supplied by the author of the Travels who purports to be him is quite obviously made up from a variety of contemporary sources. Like The Golden Bough, the Travels is a compilation of material, much of it mythological, from other written sources. But unlike that in The Golden Bough, the material in the Travels is put forward in a fictional guise. The author claims that he is an Englishman bora and bred, who left England on Michaelmas Day, 1322, traveled all over the then known world, served the Sultan and the Great Khan, returned to England, and, having been stricken with arthritic gout, "And thus taking solace in my wretched rest recording the time passed, I have compiled these things and put them 24

New York, 1954, 260.

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written in this book, as it would come into my mind, the year of grace thirteen hundred and fifty-seven in the thirty-fourth year that I departed from our country." 25 None of these assertions is verifiable. Moreover, the date of departure, the service in the court of the Great Khan, as well as almost everything else in the work, has been lifted, often verbatim, from a contemporary series of French translations of genuine itineraries, from the encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais, or from some other classical or medieval writings. And while much of what is recorded in the Travels is either truth or what most people at the time thought to be the truth, neither Mandeville himself nor his assertions that he saw what he records is true. Nevertheless, despite the fictionality of the character of Mandeville, the Travels is not literature. "Fiction" and "literature" are not entirely synonymous. While there is most commonly a correlation, a statement may be a fiction and not be literature. It is only literature if it presents a fictional event, and this Mandeville's Travels does not do. For what is recorded there is what Mandeville purports to have seen, not what he did. It is not an account of any one doing any thing. Therefore it does not present an event. Josephine Bennett in her monograph compares it with Swift's Gulliver's Travels and asserts, "Swift and Mandeville show considerable similarity in narrative technique ..." (p. 255). The two works do resemble each other in that they are both presented as first-person accounts by fictional authors. Captain Lemuel Gulliver is no more real than Sir John Mandeville. But Gulliver's Travels is literature because Gulliver narrates an event. The difference is crucial; Gulliver's account is of Gulliver traveling. What he sees on his voyages is incorporated into his account of what he does. In addition to describing the character and customs of the Lilliputians, for example, Gulliver also tells us just how he happened to come to their country, what he did while he was there, and how he came to leave. A comparison of the synopses provided by each "author" at the heads of their chapters should suffice to show the difference. For instance, the first three chapters of Mandeville's Travels bear the following captions: 25

Adapted from the Cotton Version, an English translation made c. 1400.

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Chapter I. To teach you the way out of England to Constantinople Chapter II. Of the cross and crown of Our Lord Jesus Christ Chapter III. Of the city of Constantinople and of the faith of the Greeks

Mandeville says that he has often taken the route to the Holy Land "with good company of many lords, God be thanked", but he does not describe any of his journeys. He says that he himself has seen the crown of thorns preserved in Constantinople, but he does not describe himself seeing it. The first three chapters of Gulliver''s Travels, on the other hand, bear these captions: Chapter I. The author gives some account of himself and his family; his first inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life; gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput; is made prisoner, and carried up the country. Chapter II. The Emperor of Lilliput, attended by several of the nobility, comes to see the author in his confinement. The Emperor's person and habit described. Learned men appointed to teach the author their language. He gains favor by his mild disposition. His pockets are searched, and his sword and pistols taken from him. Chapter III. The author diverts the Emperor and his nobility of both sexes in a very uncommon manner. The diversions of the court of Lilliput described. The author hath his liberty granted him upon certain conditions.

It will be noted that even in synopsis it is clear that the description of the customs and country of the Lilliputians is interwoven with the adventures of the author as he lives amongst them. The account of these adventures is what makes Gulliver's Travels literature - not the descriptions of the countries and people he encounters, however imaginary, however fictional a creation they are. Mandeville does tell some anecdotes that constitute fictional events, but these are few, scattered, and brief, and, with two or three exceptions, do not concern Mandeville himself. One exception is a private interview with the Sultan, which is recounted, however, ten chapters after the Sultan has been introduced, the intervening matter having nothing at all to do with him. It is as if Gulliver were to tell us all about Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., and then to finish by telling us about a conversation he had had with the Emperor of Lilliput. As Mandeville

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himself says in his concluding remarks quoted above, he put these things written in this book as it would come into his mind, thus presumably not according to any chronological - or even logical sequence. So much for Mandeville's "skillful management of the narrative" that Bennett makes so much of (p. 10). In any case, the entire conversation occupies only forty-five lines of text, scarcely enough to turn a work of thirty-four chapters into a fictional event. Unlike Mandeville's Travels, MurasakVs Diary has a historically verifiable author, who, moreover, really is an eye-witness of what she narrates. Nevertheless, MurasakVs Diary, though it comes much closer than any of the other works so far discussed to stating an event, still fails to do so. For Murasaki's diary, like most real diaries - as opposed to novels in diary form - lacks coherence. It is a scrapbook, of incidents, of observations, of meditations, kept at random intervals from about 1007 to 1010 A.D. It begins for no particular reason and then just stops. A unifying event is never decided upon. Certainly the event is not Murasaki's life during this period, for the first forty out of seventy-six pages 26 are concerned rather with a great public event, the birth of the Crown Prince, with all the ceremonies attendant upon it, including that of the Fiftieth Day, and which is ended only with the Empress's return to the Imperial Palace from her father's home, where the birth took place. Murasaki is of course a member of the Empress's retinue and needs must participate in all of this, yet the event is not so rendered. Rather the account concentrates on the event itself and little is said about the precise part Murasaki took in it. Yet even to describe the topic of this part of the diary is to give it more unity than really obtains, because interspersed with this running account of public matters are accounts of personal matters, which, however, have nothing to do with the public ones. Only in the account of the Fiftieth Day celebrations do the two strands meet, to break apart again shortly thereafter when Murasaki is called home while the Empress returns to Court. 26 "The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, A.D. 1007-1010", in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, tr. Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, intro. Amy Lowell (Tokyo, 1935).

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The rest of the diary is much more of a mixed bag. The next two or three pages contain some miscellaneous unclassifiable incidents. Then there are seven or eight pages on the big Palace Festivals, and in between the remark that "Days passed without any interesting events." The New Year's festivities and a robbery at this time in the women's quarters take us up to the twothirds mark. And at this point all pretence to narration ceases, and ten pages of descriptions of the court ladies and the Empress are presented, then five pages of self-analysis, and an odd page that seems to be part of a letter to someone. Then we have a brief account of one incident, an official visit by the Empress to a temple. However, this return to temporal sequence is quickly dropped and we have two or three pages of reminiscences, which concern the Empress's father's attentions to Murasaki, a subject first treated in another brief anecdote at the very beginning of the diary. Finally, between these reminiscences and the next entry a year lapses; a second prince has evidently already been born to the Empress and his Fiftieth Day ceremonies celebrated when the entries of the last five pages are made. There is matter here for any number of events, each of which could be unified by the participation of the diarist and made into the unifying event of the diary, but this is never done. What Murasaki's diary lacks may perhaps best be seen by comparing it with the equally famous diary of her contemporary and namesake, Izumi Shikibu. Although Izumi's work is also called a diary (nikki), it is written in the third-person, contains only one instance of a personal name, and has only one dated entry. More important, the entire content of the diary treats the course of a love affair between the unnamed woman and a prince. The diary begins with the first contact she receives from him and ends with his wife's leaving him in anger because he has taken the woman into their household as a favored consort. Although other things undoubtedly happened to the protagonist during the year covered by this diary, none is mentioned and not even generalized musings are included unless they fit in with this particular event. Obviously, whatever scholars may call it and however much it may be based on actual experience, Izumi's work is not a real diary, for it has what a

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real diary is bound to lack - a unified coherent event. And to that extent at least it is a work of literature, while Murasaki's real diary is not because it does not narrate an event, a space-time occurrence that accounts for all that is included in the work. Like Mandeville, Murasaki just put these things written in this book as it would come into her mind. Her diary contains more incidents than Mandeville's Travels, yet no one of them is sufficiently portrayed to stand alone as the event of the work, while a multiplicity of incidents do not of themselves add up to one event. What a maker of literature makes up is an event. We have now discerned two important aspects of literature as a result of our analysis and comparison of the works on our list: (1) that not all fictions are literature, (2) that a work of literature must present an event. Unfortunately, the characteristic of presenting an event is not restricted to literature any more than being fictional is restricted to presenting an event. It appears obvious if we look at the eight remaining works on our non-literary side of the list that each one presents an event. In most of the cases, the titles clearly reveal this. Benjamin Franklin is an account of one man's life from beginning to end and thus presents at least as much of an event as The History of Tom Jones, The Saga of Hrafnkel, or You Know Me Al. Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year presents a year of plague in London, England, just as Camus' The Plague presents a year of the plague in Oran, Algiers. Tennessee vs. Scopes is precisely what its title indicates, the complete transcript of the eight-day trial as it took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in July, 1925. The Fall of Troy, which purports to be an eye-witness account of that event, actually covers more than the fall, taking us back as far as the initial hostilities that provoked the war. Still, it constitutes an event - the causes, course, and conclusion of the Trojan War with as much, or more, specificity of time and place as the Iliad. And like "Ode to a Nightingale", the Gettysburg Address is an utterance implying a specific time, place, and audience and therefore is as much of an event as the ode is. Moreover, when we look beyond mere titles, we see that the rest of the works also present events. The Red Notebook, like Tom Jones, is an account of the first twenty-one years of a man's

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life, in this case the author's, Benjamin Constant. The Oregon Trail, like Gulliver's Travels, is an account of travels that, because it presents the trip itself, constitutes just as much of an event as does the account of Lassiter's revenge in Riders of the Purple Sage. The work begins with the departure of Parkman and his cousin on 28 April, 1846, from St. Louis, Missouri, their journeying along the Oregon Trail and south of it, their return to St. Louis five months later, and their departure from there to the East. There is nothing fictional about the narrator Parkman, however, who is of course a well-known American historian. Obviously, the presentation of an event is not confined to literature. Titles can be misleading though. The title of The Tale of Genji probably fails to prepare the reader for the fact that Genji himself dies two-thirds of the way through the work. His descendants are left to carry on to the end of the sixth book (fifty-third chapter), which itself stops so abruptly that already readers of the generation immediately following Murasaki's were recording their opinion that the work was incomplete. It may well be that it was cut off by the author's death. The question remains open, yet it need not worry us here. An event presented in half a million words is complete enough for discerning whether or not it is literature. Our only question is whether a work in which the chief protagonist dies some time before it ends can be considered the statement of a single event. Is The Tale of Genji really two works, say, rather than one ? The answer has to be no. Although the life of one person serves as the unifying event of such amorphous works as Don Quixote and Melmoth the Wanderer, there is no reason why an event cannot be much less than this or much more. A work may expand its event in space to cover the fortunes of an entire group of people during a brief but critical period of time, as War and Peace does. Or a work may expand its event in time to trace the fate of a single person in his descendants even when his own life has ceased, as The Tale of Genji does. The continuity of generations may constitute an event just as well as the continuity of an individual life. The only literary requirement is that the continuity be shown. And The Tale of Genji is not at all deficient in this respect. There is in fact no way to break up the work into seif-contained events. As

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is natural, Genji's offspring, whose fortunes are traced in the last two books (fifteen chapters) of the work, have already entered into his life before the novel is very long under way. In the seventh chapter his first, illegitimate, son is born; in the ninth chapter his legitimate son is born; in the fourteenth chapter his eldest son is raised to the Heian throne, and his daughter is born. The lives of Genji's offspring are thus inextricably woven into his; it is just that their threads run on after his has broken off. The same kind of event, however, that unifies The Tale of Genji also unifies The Saga of Coe Ridge, which nonetheless appears on the non-literature side of our list. Like The Tale of Genji, it presents the continuity of generations, beginning with Zeke and Patsy Ann Coe when they settle Coe Ridge, Kentucky , in 1866 and following the fortunes of three more generations until Coe Ridge becomes deserted in the 1950's. Thus the saga of the Genji family and the saga of the Coe family are both comprehensibly unified events, though one work is classed as literature and the other is not. On the other hand, while it is now clear that each of the eight works remaining on our non-literary list presents a single unified event, it must be noted that two of the works on the literature list - Polynesian Mythology and The Metamorphoses - do not. Of course Polynesian Mythology does not purport to be a unified work; it is patently a collection of stories. Therefore the literary character of each story must be determined independently of the others in the collection. Not so obviously, this holds also for The Metamorphoses. It could just as well be subtitled, GrecoRoman Mythology and Ancient Traditional History as Told by Ovid, for such it is. To be sure, Ovid has not recorded these stories from the lips of Greek and Roman priests. He is telling them in his own words. Yet his work is as much a compilation as Grey's is because he does not present them in the form of a single unified event. The Metamorphoses is unified neither by time, nor place, nor persons. Some attempt is made at the beginning of the poem to arrange the stories in a chronological sequence, but this soon falls away. Had it been sustained, however, a chronological se-

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quence of incidents involving different people at different times and places would still not have provided a single event. Ovid also seems to have intended a thematic unity in which each story would contain a transformation. While this theme is not always adhered to - for example, none occurs in the Death of Achilles - even if it were, an idea is not sufficient to unify any number of events into one. What The Metamorphoses lacks should be obvious when compared with that other great repository of old stories, the Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights contains a large number of distinct events incidents concerning different persons at different times and places from one another-just as The Metamorphoses does. Many of these events are narrated by characters within other narrated events, a device on occasion also used by Ovid, as for example when Theseus visits Achelous in Books VIII and IX and they and other guests exchange stories while dining. The crucial difference in the Arabian Nights is that all these separate events with their individual narrations are brought together by the ingenious device of the frame event that allows Shahrazad to be the ultimate narrator of them all in her attempt to delay the hour of her death. The story about Shahrazad constitutes the event of the Arabian Nights. All the other events presented in the work are integrated into this one just how we shall see in a later chapter. It is precisely such a frame event that The Metamorphoses lacks. Ovid narrates the major share of the stories himself. Though some are put into the mouths of characters, no one such narrative situation is the ultimate source of all the stories. Ovid does attempt to link his stories to one another but only in the form of a chain. That is, a story is linked, though often quite remotely, with the one that precedes and the one that follows it, but only occasionally is a frame provided for more than one story, and it is never sustained for more than, at the most, three character-narrated stories in one frame. The transition in Book VI between the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela and that of Boreas and Orithyia is typical. Pandion, King of Athens and father of Procne and Philomela, dies of grief not long after his two daughters have been transformed into birds, and the rule of Athens passes on to Erechtheus, who has four daughters, one of whom is Orithyia, who is wooed by Boreas,

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who like Tereus is a Thracian and because of Tereus's crime is not welcomed by the Athenian king as a suitor. All this information is related in summary fashion as a transition. The story proper is simple enough: Boreas having been rejected as a suitor abducts Orithyia. Then comes the transition to the next story, that of Jason and Medea. It seems that Boreas and Orithyia had two sons, who when they grew up joined the Argonauts in the first ship that sought the Golden Fleece! After they have helped Ovid with this transition, they are heard of no more. There are connections here, to be sure, but no connecting event. Therefore, The Metamorphoses, though made up of works of literature, is not, properly speaking, itself such a work. The significance of this analysis of The Metamorphoses lies in our realizing that a work of literature is not just a statement of an event but a statement of an event. If more than one event is introduced, this must be done in a way that makes it integral and clearly subordinated narratively. In any given instance, such as The Metamorphoses, it may seem that we are arbitrarily cutting up what the author intended to be unified. Nevertheless, we want to avoid qualifying a string of incidents that do not share time, place, and person as an event because then our hard-won distinctions would at once go by the board. If we could not delimit an event, then we could not delimit a work of literature. Every conception, in order to be readily comprehensible, must have its limits, and setting limits is precisely what Ovid failed to do in The Metamorphoses. 3. Moment-by-Moment A work of literature is a statement of an event. Yet since there are other discourses that are also statements of an event but are not literature, there must be something more to literature than this, a further characteristic that it possesses and these other discourses do not. What this characteristic is should become apparent by comparison of passages treating the same episode, some taken from works that are literature and others from works that are not literature. The Fall of Troy, A History by Dares the Phrygian,

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though it traces the course of the war from the inception of hostilities with the theft of the Golden Fleece and thus covers a much more extensive event than the Iliad, does treat a number of the incidents presented in the epic. And yet it treats them very differently. The Fall of Troy belongs to that peculiar class of discourses that can only be called false history. A letter attached to it and addressed to Sallust claims that the letter-writer, Cornelius Nepos, discovered this eye-witness account of the Trojan War composed in Greek by Dares, a warrior on the Trojan side, and immediately translated it word-for-word into Latin: "Thus my readers can know exactly what happened according to this account and judge for themselves whether Dares the Phrygian or Homer wrote the more truthfully - Dares, who lived and fought at the time the Greeks stormed Troy, or Homer, who was born long after the War was over." 27 Those who have taken up Nepos' challenge have nevertheless had to conclude that Dares is in his own way just as much of a liar as Homer. For the whole thing is a hoax. Just when the hoax originated is impossible to say. References to Dares go back to the first century A.D. Nepos and Sallust actually lived in the late first century B.C. Certain written sources incorporated into the work set the date of the Latin version (whether or not there was a Greek one) in the early sixth century A.D. In any case, this eye-witness account of the Fall of Troy does not put in an appearance until at least a thousand years after the traditional date of the event. Dares' false history is usually considered together with another work of the same ilk, A Journal of the Trojan War by Dictys of Crete, supposedly a warrior on the Greek side. The journal, which also purports in an introductory letter to be a translation from the Greek, in fact is so. With this one exception, however, it is equally fallacious. The manuscript of Dictys' eye-witness account of the Trojan War is claimed to have been written in the Phoenician alphabet on linden tablets, which were discovered in Dictys' tomb at Cnossos when it collapsed in the time of Nero. The discovery is supposed to account for the fact that no one for a 27

The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, tr. R.M. Frazer, Jr. (Bloomington, Ind., 1965), 133. All subsequent quotations of The Fall of Troy and A Journal of the Trojan War are from this translation.

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thousand years after the Trojan War knew anything about Dictys' eye-witness account; during all that time it lay in his tomb. This striving for plausibility in contrast to Homer characterizes both works. But Dares' account makes the greatest effort after plausibility. While Dictys only reduces the gods' roles, allowing for some supernatural intervention, as in the story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at the end of Book I, Dares omits all mention of the gods, rationalizing every incident that Homer depicts as involving their interference. Also to increase plausibility Dares gives a firsthand description of each of the major figures involved in the conflict. This is just the sort of precise detail one would expect an eye-witness to be able to provide. Helen, he tells us, had a beauty-mark between her eyebrows, Hector spoke with a slight lisp, Nestor's nose was long and hooked. Dares, moreover, introduces some statistics into his account. In addition t o the catalog of ships, given also in Dictys and the Iliad, Dares gives the precise duration of the war, the precise numbers of Greeks and Trojans who fell in battle, and so on. These devices for rendering his account credible have been well noted by commentators. Yet the effort after credibility is really more basic than any of these devices. It affects the entire way that the event is recounted. As against the Iliad, both the History and the Journal share this characteristic kind of narration, but Dares is the most consistent in using it. A comparison should help us see precisely what this essential difference in narration is. One of the highlighted episodes of the Iliad is the fight between the wronged husband, Menelaus, and his wife's abductor, Alexander (Paris). Here is Dares' account: Menelaus began to pursue Alexander who, turning around, pierced him in the leg with an arrow. Nevertheless, though pained by his wound, Menelaus continued to pursue, and Locrian Ajax accompanied him. Hector saw what was happening, and immediately he and Aeneas came to the aid of their brother. While Aeneas, using his shield, provided protection, Hector led Alexander out of the fighting and into the city. Night brought an end to the battle, (p. 105) Dictys, like Homer, presents the conflict as a duel. First Alexander casts his spear and it is deflected by Menelaus' shield: Then Menelaus, throwing with all his might, met, alas, with the same

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result - his spear stuck in the earth; Alexander had been on his guard and dodged the blow. But soon they were armed with new spears, and the fight was on again. Finally, Alexander fell, wounded in the thigh; and Menelaus, hoping to take complete vengeance and win greatest glory, rushed forward to kill him. But Pandarus, committing an act of the blackest treachery by shooting his bow from a hidden spot, wounded Menelaus and caused him to halt. (p. 61) Since Dares' and Dictys' accounts were composed in prose, the version in the Iliad of the same episode is rendered here in prose: Then Menelaus son of Atreus raised his hand to throw his spear and prayed to Father Zeus: "King Zeus, grant me revenge on the man who first wronged me, outstanding Alexander, and by my hands bring him down, so that posterity may shudder at the thought of injuring a host who has welcomed them." So he said, and balanced his far-shadowing spear, and hurled it, and struck the round shield of Alexander son of Priam. The heavy spear pierced the glittering shield, pressed on through the inwrought breastplate, and thrust straight ahead and tore the tunic on his flank, but Alexander swerved aside and escaped dark death. Then Menelaus drew his silver-studded sword and raised his hands and struck the ridge of Alexander's helmet, but the sword shattered into three or four pieces and dropped from his hands. At this Menelaus lifted his eyes to the sky and groaned: "Father Zeus, surely there is no other god as cruel as you are. I thought I was going to be revenged on Alexander for his wickedness, but now my sword breaks in my hand, and my spear was thrown in vain, and I have not touched him." So he said and threw himself on Alexander. (Ill, 349-370) There are, of course, a number of differences among the three passages in the actual nature of the episode recounted. In both Dares' and Dictys' accounts Menelaus is wounded by an arrow, but in Dares it is Alexander who wounds him; in Dictys, Pandarus. In the passage quoted from the Iliad he is not wounded at all. On the other hand, both Dictys and Homer describe the fight as a duel, in which, Alexander having thrown first, Menelaus throws, misses, and then breaks his sword. Nevertheless the circumstances of the conflict and the two parties to it are the same in all three versions. In all three Menelaus is undeterred by his difficulties and pursues Alexander until stopped by outside intervention. At any rate, there is enough similarity in incident here for us to see the difference in the way the episode as a whole is presented.

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The first notable variation among the three accounts is in the length of the passage in relation to the length of the event depicted in it. The shortest passage, Dares', covers the most time, place, persons, and action. In these few lines Menelaus and Alexander fight, Menelaus is wounded and continues to pursue Alexander, Hector and Aeneas come to Alexander's rescue, Alexander manages to get back into the city, and the fighting is brought to a halt by the coming of night. Dictys' passage is only slightly longer than Dares', yet it covers much less. Menelaus and Alexander fight, Alexander is wounded, Menelaus rushes towards him and is shot by Pandarus. However, the passage from the Iliad is more than twice as long as either Dares' or Dictys' passage and does not even get to the end of the fight between Menelaus and Alexander. What is it that accounts for such a remarkable difference in proportion ? To be sure, Dares' and Dictys' accounts cover many more incidents in the episode of the conflict between Menelaus and Alexander. But the Iliad covers much more of the incident itself. The incident of the fight is given to us in great detail. Yet this detail is not description - of what Menelaus or Alexander looked like or what they were or what kind of character each had. Rather, it is a blow-by-blow presentation of what happened - what moves were made, what words were said - as the moves were made and as the words were said. The Iliad gives us not only what happens; Dares and Dictys do that. The Iliad presents what happens as it happened, in the way it happened. If one reads on in the Iliad, one finds that here too Alexander escapes from Menelaus, who pursues him, and gets back inside the city, that Menelaus is shot with an arrow by Pandarus, that night halts the fighting. Indeed, it is most probable that the Iliad is the source of these incidents as they are recorded in Dares and Dictys. The incidents themselves are not therefore what accounts for the difference between The Fall of Troy, A History and A Journal of the Trojan War, on the one hand, and the Iliad on the other. Rather, the difference stems from the presentation of the incidents in the Iliad in the way that they would have occurred - moment-by-moment. It is this moment-by-moment presentation that is responsible not only for the much greater length of the Iliad

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version of the incident but also for its being literature and the other two works not. The composer of the Iliad does not eschew summary. In fact most narration contains passages of summary, some of it as brief and general as Dares', some of it as full and particular as Dictys'. The Fall of Troy, however is all summary and A Journal of the Trojan War only a little less so, whereas the Iliad is a moment-bymoment presentation of the event - with occasional use of summary. For instance, in the lines just preceding those quoted above from the Iliad there occurs the passage: "First Alexander hurled his farshadowing spear and struck Menelaus' round shield, but the bronze did not break through, for its point was bent back by the sturdy shield" (11. 346-349). This is a summary account of Alexander's first spear throw. But Menelaus' first spear throw, the account of which is quoted above, is rendered as it happens moment-bymoment. Menelaus raises his hand, holds his spear on high, and prays aloud to Zeus, and the words of his prayer are given as he utters them. Then he ceases praying, balances his spear, and throws it. The spear strikes Alexander's shield, goes through it, enters the breastplate, goes through that, and tears into Alexander's tunic, as he swerves aside. This is a moment-by-moment account of Menelaus' first spear throw. Moreover, Menelaus' next act is presented in the same detail. He draws his sword, raises it in his hands, and strikes Alexander's helmet. The swordblade shatters and the hilt drops from Menelaus' hands. Then Menelaus looks up, groans, calls aloud again upon Zeus, and what he says to Zeus is again rendered in direct discourse as he says it. Then he ceases speaking and seizes Alexander. The event of The Fall of Troy actually begins with Jason's uncle, the ruler of the Peloponnese, urging Jason to obtain the Golden Fleece of Colchis and does not end until after the Trojan War, when Helenus, accompanied by his bereaved female relatives, leaves Troy to settle in the Chersonese. The Iliad, on the other hand, begins only during the tenth year of the war, with the priest Chryses' attempt to ransom his daughter from the Greeks, and ends less than two months later, with the burial of the bones of Hector. Yet The Fall of Troy numbers thirty-six pages in the most

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recent English translation, whereas the Iliad runs to 15,693 lines in the Greek, and in most English translations these amount to four or five hundred pages. The moment-by-moment presentation of the event in the Iliad is what makes the difference. If the Trojan War alone were presented in its entirety in the same way that the Wrath of Achilles is presented, it would constitute a work of enormous proportions. In consequence, we see that an event can be stated in two different ways. It can be presented moment-by-moment, with or without transitional summaries, and thus constitute a statement of an event. Or it can be narrated in summary, with little or no moment-by-moment presentation, and thus constitute a statement referring to an event. The first way is characteristic of literature. The second way is characteristic of history - as well as of works that purport to be history but may not be. Although it refers to an event, The Fall of Troy does not present the event moment-by-moment at all. Works of history that cover comparably large events are usually narrated in the same way as The Fall of Troy, that is, they state an event but do not present it moment-by-moment. For even if moment-by-moment data were available for some of the historical episodes treated, in order for an event of such scope to be comprehensive and comprehensible, it has to be narrated by means of summary, of generalizations about the moments rather than the moments themselves. An obvious example of this type of narration is Samuel Eliot Morison's The Oxford History of the American People (New York, 1965), which traces the course of the white man's settlement and development of North America from Columbus' first voyage in 1492 to President Kennedy's death in 1963. Covering as it does the deeds of thousands of people over a period of four hundred and seventy-one years, it scarcely could and does not present any of these momentby-moment. Even a contemporary genuine eye-witness account, such as Dares' purports to be, of an event no longer than the Trojan War is not likely to be rendered moment-by-moment. Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby's Thunder Out of China (New York, 1946) covers the Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937 and its Chinese civil war aftermath through 1946, a ten-year

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period comparable to the traditional duration of the Trojan War. Yet though both authors were eye-witnesses of much of what they write about and although White gives some first-person accounts of what he saw on three different journeys, there are no more than half a dozen very brief moment-by-moment accounts in the entire book of 336 pages. The incompatibility of narrative history with moment-bymoment presentation of the event can be illustrated by Thomas Babbington Macaulay's difficulties in composing his History of Englandfrom the Accession of James the Second avowedly in order to give "to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction". According to many of his admirers, Macaulay does indeed succeed in narrating history as vividly as a novel. In the standard survey and reference work, A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, Samuel C. Chew in his section on Macaulay declares that "In the narrative of Jeffreys' 'Bloody Assizes' and of the last interview of the condemned Monmouth with King James the novelists were challenged and beaten on their own ground." 2 8 Perhaps they were, but Macaulay paid a price for this success. The original intention of the work was to cover English history f r o m 1685 until the death of George III in 1820. After five volumes it had still reached only the death of William III in 1702 - thus covering only seventeen years altogether instead of the 135 originally planned. Whenever possible Macaulay takes authenticated dialog and other moment-by-moment accounts and integrates them into his own narrative. For example, in narrating the behavior of Judge Jeffreys when he presided over the trial of Alice Lisle, Macaulay writes: One witness named Dunne ... entirely lost his head, and at last stood silent. "Oh, how hard the truth is," said Jeffreys, "to come out of a lying Presbyterian knave." The witness, after a pause of some minutes, stammered a few unmeaning words. "Was there ever," exclaimed the judge, with an oath, "was there ever such a villain on the face of the earth? Dost thou believe there is a God ? Dost thou believe in hell fire ? Of all the witnesses I ever met with, I never saw thy fellow." Still the poor 28 N e w York, 1928, 1329.

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man, scared out of his senses, remained mute, and again Jeffreys burst forth: "I hope, gentlemen of the jury, that you take notice of the horrible carriage of this fellow. How can one help abhorring both these men and their religion ? A Turk is a saint to such a fellow as this. A pagan would be ashamed of such villainy. Oh, blessed Jesus! What a generation of vipers do we live among." "I cannot tell what to say, my lord," faltered Dunne. The judge again broke forth into a volley of oaths. "Was there ever," he cried, "such an impudent rascal ? Hold the candle to him, that we may see his brazen face. You gentlemen that are of counsel for the crown, see that an information for perjury be preferred against this fellow." (Chapter V)

Despite the "pause of some minutes", this is essentially a momentby-moment account of the interrogation. Moreover, Macaulay presents other of Jeffreys' interrogations during the course of the "Bloody Assizes" in similar detail, and this is just one episode so narrated in the course of the history. Moment-by-moment presentation is one of those very "attractions which have been usurped by fiction", indeed, more properly belongs to it, as we shall see. In the meantime it is enough to see that the method of narration is highly impracticable for large-scale histories, since if Macaulay had completed the narrative of 135 years that he had originally intended, it would have required an estimated fifty volumes. The very advantage of summary narration is that it enables an event of the largest possible scope to be treated within comprehensible limits, while the advantage of literature is that it permits the intensive, vivid presentation of an event that must of necessity be much smaller in scope. A work like Melmoth the Wanderer, the event of which extends over 200 years, is barely held together by the preternatural figure of Melmoth, and often the event as a whole is lost sight of. The limits of moment-by-moment presentation of an extended event are here very much pressed. In making this distinction between the characteristically literary narrative and the historical, we are not claiming that every instance of summary narration is either history or putative history. For example, a synopsis of a literary work is just as much an instance of summary narration as a history may be. But, it is important to note, the synopsis is not itself a literary work, for a literary work

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is a moment-by-moment statement of an event and a summary is not such a statement, regardless of what it may be summarizing. Nevertheless we can say that one of the principal uses of summary narration is in stating an event for the purposes of information, and that the author of The Fall of Troy in his effort after plausibility in recounting a pseudo-historical event was consistent with his purpose in eschewing all moment-by-moment narration. The author of A Journal of the Trojan War, on the other hand, was not so consistent in this regard and incorporates about seven pages' worth of speeches and dialog into his account, which as a whole runs to 108 pages in English translation. Such a small amount of moment-by-moment presentation makes it impossible, however, to say that the event as a whole is rendered moment-by-moment. Now this conclusion raises an important question: Is the literary characteristic of moment-by-moment statement of an event then just a question of proportion ? That is to say, is it just a matter of those works that present more moments being more literary than those that present fewer? For better or worse, the answer to this question must be two-faced. In some respects it is just a matter of proportion, and in others it is not. In the first place, the concept of moment-by-momentness in literature allows us to say precisely when the event of a literary work begins and when it ends. The event of a literary work begins with the first moment-by-moment account and ends with the last. Some of the matter in between may be presented in summary, but this is encompassed by the extent of the event that is presented moment-by-moment. Earlier we said that the event of Tom Jones is the life of Tom from the time of his birth until age twenty-one. How do we know this ? We know this because the first moment-bymoment account is of Squire Allworthy finding in his bed the newborn infant, and the last moment-by-moment account is of the night before Tom and Sophia's wedding. The work itself extends somewhat farther than this event by giving at the end a summary account of what subsequently happened to all the main characters of the story. There are, to be sure, stretches of time within these twenty-one years either passed over or given in sum, and indeed the bulk of the work (Books VII through XVIII) goes to the ac-

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count of six weeks in Tom's life at the age of twenty-one. Nevertheless, by presenting moment-by-moment incidents from Tom's birth on, however many gaps there may be, Fielding justifies his title of the history of Tom Jones and makes it clear what is intended to be the event as a whole. The event of The Tale of Genji does not begin with the birth of the chief character. Although the incident of his birth is summarized, the first moment-by-moment narration in the work does not occur until Genji's mother is on her deathbed when Genji is already three years old. At the end of Genji there is no concluding disposition of the main characters; the work simply stops with some summary narration of what one of the characters thought about the immediately preceding moment-by-moment narrated incident. This abrupt ending may give reason for thinking the work unfinished, but there is no question where the event begins and where it ends. It is often more difficult to determine the beginning or end of the event in a work that is narrated summarily because the background incidents leading up to the topic event are narrated in the same way as the topic event itself. Does the event of Morison's History of the American People begin with his initial account of American Indian culture before the coming of the white man, or is this merely background to his arrival ? Does it include the account of the Irish, Norse, Genoese, and Portuguese voyages, some going back to perhaps the year 1000 A.D., or is this merely background to Columbus' first voyage? Does the event of Thunder Out of China begin with the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War on July 7, 1937? This does not occur until page 47. Yet the book opens with an account of Chungking in the fall of 1938 and the spring of 1939 when it was being filled by war refugees and bombed by the Japanese. Chapter Three, moreover, traces the rise of the Kuomintang, thus taking the account as far back as 1923, though the work as a whole does concentrate on the pattern of incidents from 1937 to 1946. But whatever disagreement might reasonably exist about these different beginnings, no one would claim that the event begins with the first moment-by-moment account. The first moment-by-moment narration does not occur until page 170, where the famine described in Honan province brings us up to

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early 1943, almost six years anyway after the event begins. Certainly this is not the beginning of the event of the work. The same discrepancy between the beginning of the event and the first moment-by-moment presentation also occurs in such works on oar list as Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin. Not only does it have very few instances of moment-by-moment presentation, but also these do not occur until well after the work is underway and many incidents have taken place. The event here clearly begins with the birth of Franklin in 1706, cited on page 7, but the first moment-by-moment account, of an incident in 1766, does not occur until page 336, 330 pages and sixty years later. Therefore, though instances of moment-by-moment presentation of the event do occur in such a work, it can hardly be said to be constituted out of them. Not only is the moment-by-momentness a tiny proportion of the total account, but the event is not framed at beginning and end by moment-by-moment presentation. "Thirty days hath September", On Nature, Conrad to a Friend, and The Fall of Troy contain no moment-by-moment accounts. Therefore they cannot be literature in any case. MurasakVs Diary, The Golden Bough, and Mandeville's Travels do contain a few scattered incidents presented moment-by-moment. Nevertheless, as we have seen, none of these works states an event. Consequently, there is no event whose moment-by-moment presentation would constitute the work. Each one of the instances of moment-bymoment presentation that does occur may constitute a work of literature in itself, distinguished by its own event that is presented moment-by-moment and is not part of a larger event. Both Frazer and Mandeville, though for very different purposes, occasionally narrate tales. For example, Frazer in Part VIII of The Golden Bough retells a story from the Arabian Nights in order to illustrate a common folk-belief in the existence of external souls. Mandeville in Chapter IV of his Travels gives a moment-by-moment account of a version of the old Tale of the Loathly Lady, prefaced with an untypical disclaimer: "And some men say that in the isle of Lango is still the daughter of Hippocrates in the form and likeness of a great dragon, which is a hundred fathoms in length as men say, for I have not seen her." This ignorance, however, does not prevent

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him from giving a moment-by-moment account of what she said and did when discovered by a young squire. Such stories can stand on their own as works of literature but do not make the discourse they appear in a literary work because there is no single unified event to be so presented. Only, then, in the case of a discourse that presents an event does the proportion of moment-by-moment presentation constitute a factor in determining whether the work is literature or not. However, even in such cases proportion is still just a factor - one among several. Already we have seen that where the first and last moment-bymoment accounts occur in the presentation of the event is another factor. In the case of Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year there is yet a third factor - what the moment-by-moment accounts are of in relation to the event as a whole. It is clear that A Journal of the Plague Year is about a single event precisely delimited in time and space: the London Plague of 1665 from the signs of its commencement with the first deaths at the end of 1664 to its cessation by February, 1666. Less evident is the amount of moment-by-moment presentation of this event. Out of the total of 278 pages of a popular edition of the Journal only 53 pages are made up of moment-bymoment narration. Thus a little more than a fifth of the work is so narrated. In regard then to the sheer amount of moment-bymomentness A Journal of the Plague Year is rather marginal. Nevertheless, the decisive reason for putting this work on the non-literature list involves more than proportion. What else is involved may perhaps best be understood by considering on the one hand a work in which an event and the momentby-moment statement of it are coextensive with each other (that is, the beginning and end of the event and of the moment-bymoment account of it are the same) but occupy only a small part of a larger work. Jorge Manrique's "Stanzas on the Death of His Father" ("Coplas por la muerte de su padre") is much shorter than A Journal of the Plague Year, and yet the proportion of momentby-momentness in it is the same. The poem consists of forty-two twelve-line stanzas or coplas. The first twenty-six are made up of general contemplations on death such as the following, stanza 3, translated by Longfellow:

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Our lives are rivers gliding free To that unfathomed, boundless sea, The silent grave: Thither all earthly pomp and boast Roll to be swallowed up and lost. In one dark wave. Thither the mighty torrents stray, Thither the brook pursues its way, And tinkling rill. There all are equal. Side by side, The poor man and the son of pride Lie calm and still.

There is neither event nor moment-by-moment presentation here. The next eight stanzas contain a eulogy of Manrique's father, the dead Rodrigo Manrique, but his accomplishments are not narrated nor his qualities exemplified, because "His deeds are known ... and men can see why he is loved" (stanza 27). Finally, with stanza 35, Death appears in person, knocks at the door of the home of the elder Manrique, and calls out to summon him. The dying man replies aloud to Death and then gives up the ghost. The dialog between the father and Death is the only event in the poem. It is presented moment-by-moment but occupies only the last eight stanzas, or one-fifth of the work. What we have here is a discourse in three distinct parts: a meditation on death, an elegy on Rodrigo Manrique, and a fictional account of Manrique's death. It could be argued that as a discourse the work is unified by the topic of death. However, only the last eight stanzas are a moment-by-moment statement of an event; moreover, none of the rest of the discourse, the preceding thirty-four stanzas, bears directly upon this event. If the statement of the event were to be omitted from the discourse, there would be no noticing it because the event is not led up to by, not incorporated into, what comes before. It could be argued that the eight stanzas eulogizing the dead Manrique do lead up to the fictional portrayal of his death, but even if this is so, and it is arguable, twenty-six stanzas, or about three-fifths of the total discourse, are left unintegrated with the narration of the event. Thus Manrique's "Stanzas on the Death of His Father" is no more a work of literature as a whole than

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is a sermon with a parable in it or an essay containing an anecdote. On the other hand, in A Journal of the Plague Year the work as a whole and the event are coextensive (that is, the beginning and end of the work and of the event are the same). But there is hardly any moment-by-moment presentation of the event. Thus the work as it stands is no more a work of literature than is a history that cites a few stories current at the time of its event. If the Journal were full of moment-by-moment narration of how a wide variety of citizens of London struggled with the plague, it would be a work of literature. Or if it presented with a minimum of momentby-momentness, the struggling of one man, the narrator, with this particular event, it would probably be a work of literature. But as given it does neither. It presents a minimum of instances of moment-by-moment narration, and what instances there are, though they all occur in plague-ridden London, have nothing else in common. The work is supposed to be the memoirs of "a citizen who continued all the while in London", but this citizen tells us very little about his own activities and almost nothing of them moment-by-moment. The longest moment-by-moment account in the story is provided by an anonymous manuscript that he inserts of the adventures of three men who attempted to escape to the country for the duration of the plague. It has nothing to do with the narrator nor with any of the few other faceless people whose mishaps provide what few other moments of literary narration there are in the work. The greater part of the Journal is taken up with what might be found in any history of the London Plague of 1665: the weekly mortality bills and analyses of them, examples of advertisements by people who offered cures, eight pages quoting health orders published by the lord mayor and city aldermen, discussion of official policies such as the quarantine of stricken houses and of unofficial remedies such as the constant keeping of fires to purify the air. Moreover, although the narrator tells us that he was appointed a parish examiner, a post he held for three weeks, he does not give us one personally observed incident from this experience. About incidents he had heard of, which he narrates in

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summary, he says at one point, "I cannot undertake to give any other than a summary of such passages as these, because it was not possible to come at the particulars. ..." Thus once again we see that the effort after plausibility mitigates against literature - against the moment-by-moment statement of an event. In confirmation of the essentially historical nature, if not accuracy, of the Journal, despite its fictional narrator, is the fact that it was actually re-issued in 1754 with the title, The History of the Great Plague in London in 1665. Thus A Journal of the Plague Year could pass, with the few unconnected bits of literature in it, as history. Camus' The Plague also purports to give us an eye-witness account of a plague that raged for a year in a large seaport city, in this case Oran in 194-, In it too the narrator keeps himself in the background, partly by speaking of himself anonymously as narrator and in the third-person as participant, partly by citing accounts given him by others, and partly by portraying his own life in the same proportion as the lives of others who become involved with him as friends and associates during the plague. Here a principal difference between Defoe's work and Camus' emerges. The event of Camus' work is actually more specifically circumscribed. It is not just the plague in Oran in 194-; it is the effect of the plague on the lives of Dr. Rieux, the narrator, and several of his friends, associates, and patients as it runs its course. And while summary narration is regularly provided of how the citizens of Oran as a whole are faring, moment-by-moment presentation of the way in which these particular individuals respond to their changed circumstances provides the bulk of the work. Therefore Camus' The Plague is neither history true nor false but unequivocally literature. The attempts to convert fiction into history and history into fiction, which have been going on for millenia, have given rise to some rather odd discourses. A Journal of the Plague Year is a marginal example all round - with little moment-by-moment presentation and none of it unified around a person or group or even arranged in a sequence of episodes. Eirik the Red's Saga, on the other hand, has moment-by-moment narration aplenty, so it does not raise the question of proportion in the strictest sense. Yet even

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more obviously than A Journal of the Plague Year it raises the problem of what the moment-by-moment accounts are of in relation to the event as a whole. The instances of moment-by-moment narration seem to have little to do with each other. Moieover, those episodes that would seem chiefly constitutive of the event are skimpily narrated moment-by-moment, while those that seem quite secondary are presented in full detail. In the first place, Eirik the Red's Saga has little to do with Eirik the Red. The first two sections, which contain the most about him, are lifted verbatim from the Icelandic historical document, The Book of the Settlements (Landnámabók). The saga really begins with an account of Gudrid, who will much later become Eirik's daughter-in-law, and the first moment-by-moment narration in the work recounts the incident in Iceland of Gudrid's rejected suitor, an incident that has nothing further to do with Gudrid or the rest of the saga. The next section presents probably the most fully developed scene in the saga - the prophesying in Greenland of the Little Sybil - and features most particularly Gudrid's part in it and what was prophesied about her. Yet although Gudrid's role in the rest of the story seems merely to participate in the voyage to Vinland that lies at the center of the saga, the prophecy of her future says nothing about this. And so it goes. The next section tells how Leif, Eirik's son, discovered Vinland, but this is recounted in three or four sentences, whereas the prophecy took more than two pages to describe (in a work that runs to only thirty pages). Moreover, while Gudrid does presumably go to Vinland with her second husband, Karlsefni, nothing at all is said about her being there, though a son is born to Karlsefni there and is three years old when they leave. In the final analysis this inexplicable disparity in treatment makes it difficult to determine precisely what the event of the saga is. If it is supposed to be the stay in Vinland and what brings this about, the greater part of what is presented moment-by-moment in the saga and in the greatest detail has nothing to do with this. It looks as if two different events - one about Gudrid's suitors and the other about her second husband's voyage to Vinland - have been set together just because they involve the same people, without

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ever being made into one unified event. They could have been unified, but then this would probably have required altering the history or received tradition to which the composer wished to adhere. Thus Eirik the Red's Saga is suspect history because of its literary narration and garbled literature because of its fidelity to its sources. These oddities serve a function, however, in helping us to see precisely what the characteristics necessary to literature are. The existence of a work like Eirik the Red's Saga shows that although moment-by-momentness in literature is partly a matter of proportion, it is not just a matter of proportion. Moreover, all the examples that we chose to illustrate the problem, with the exception of The Plague, were of course problem examples. In most cases the discourse is obviously either a moment-by-moment statement of an event or something so different as not to be confused with such a statement. Moment-by-moment presentation of an event, then, is the characteristic without which there is no literature. What, it might be wondered consequently, is the distinctive sign of the presence of moment-by-momentness. How do we know it when we see it ? Do we have to count the moments in each instance, or is there something conspicuous, even self-evident, about it? Unfortunately, there is no infallible sign of moment-by-moment presentation. Yet there is one feature that comes rather close to being such a sign. The absence of it is no sure indication that the discourse is not moment-by-moment, but the presence of it is almost a sure sign that it is. This feature is speech, and, more particularly, dialog. To be sure, works do exist that contain no dialog or speech of any kind and yet are clearly literature. Emily Dickinson's "A bird came down the walk"; Thomas Hardy's "At Tea" and "Snow in the Suburbs"; the anonymous "When in my pilgrimage I reach" are short poems that contain no speech but do narrate moment-by-moment. "Snow in the Suburbs", for example, sets the scene with a tree weighed down by heavy snowfall, upon which a sparrow suddenly alights. Whereon immediately A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

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Descends on him and showers his head and eyes, And overturns him ... And lights on a nether twig, when its brush Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush. Then a cat creeps up with his eye on the discomfited sparrow. But this cat belongs to the narrator, who now takes him in. There is not much story here, yet unquestionably there is a sequence of moments: a bird lights on a snow-covered tree, thereby starting a small avalanche, which then falls on him, overturns him, and then falls on the branch below, starting another small avalanche, and a cat at this moment appears. In a short poem, where the narrative can be of the simplest sort of incident, the absence of speech is not rare. In literary works of any length, on the other hand, it is unusual to find one that has no speech whatsoever. A few short stories have only a single utterance, such as Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Willa Cather's "Paul's Case", Sherwood Anderson's "Death in the Woods", Heinrich von Kleist's "The Beggarwoman of Locarno". Even fewer, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield", Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "The Tale of the 672nd Night", or Eudora Welty's "A Memory", have none at all. Perhaps there is a novel-length work or even short novel that has none. Certainly it would be a tour de force - or perhaps more likely, a very marginal work of literature. For there is no question that the vast majority of literary works contain speech and usually a great deal of it. Not only do most plays consist almost entirely of speech, but also works considered to be of quite another sort, epics, are made up in large measure of speech and dialog. It has often been pointed out that nearly one-half of the Iliad is given over to speeches and dialog, and more than two-thirds of the Odyssey. In the brief passage of the Iliad quoted above there are two speeches, occupying more than a third of the extract, and this in the midst of a duel! In the Odyssey, of course, all of Odysseus' adventures from the time he leaves Troy until his arrival at the palace of King Alcinous are recounted by him in speech. The different kind of speech preponderant in each epic underscores the two possible functions of utterance in a literary work. Utterance can be used as it is predominantly in the

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Iliad - with its numerous quarrels, debates, embassies, and challenges - to constitute the moments of which the work is made. Or utterance can be used, as it is predominantly in the Odyssey with its wandering and articulate hero - to narrate many of the moments of which the work is made. The importance of utterance in literature can thus hardly be over-estimated. A work like the Arabian Nights may be said to be made up almost entirely of speech because it is made up almost entirely of story-telling sessions. All the internal stories except the first one, which is told by Shahrazad's father, are told by her, while characters in the stories that she tells are commonly portrayed telling stories of their own. Furthermore, in some narrated literary works the only momentby-moment presentation is speech. This is very typical, for example, of the entire genre of Aesop's fables. Often the fable will set up the event in a sentence or so of summary narrative, and then one of the characters involved will speak the sentence that supplies the point of the story as well as all the moment-by-momentness of it. Fable after fable is constructed just like that of the wolf and the kid, though it is one of the briefest. "A kid who stood on a housetop was making nasty remarks to a wolf who was passing by, so the wolf said to him, 'It's not you making those nasty remarks - it's your position.' " Short and simple as these fables are, however, they are no different in kind from a work of three or four hundred pages such as Baldesar Castiglione's The Courtier, all the momentby-moment presentation of which consists of persons speaking. While a few incidents other than persons speaking do occur in The Courtier, these are narrated in sum and occupy very little space. The great bulk of the work renders what was said as it was said, and the summary narrative goes to the linking of these speeches together in their specific context. With a work like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion there is practically no narration at all beyond "said Demea", "replied Philo", "continued Demea", and so forth, and thus we are here getting very close to pure dialog. And it is the existence of pure dialogs and monologs that shows what an important part speech plays in establishing the moment-by-momentness and thus the literary nature of so many works.

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For if the occurrence of dialog is sufficient in itself to make a work literature, then there is no question that a work consisting of nothing but dialog is literature. We have already seen this in the case of the nursery rhyme "Pussy cat, pussy cat". The event there is the conversation between Puss and its owner, and this event is rendered by giving the conversation itself, the words uttered as if they are being uttered. Instead of rendering this event, as the nursery rhyme does, as if it were happening, if we simply stated what did happen, we would get something like this: Pussy cat's owner wants to know where Pussy cat has been, so Pussy cat explains that it has been to London to visit the queen; the owner is prompted therefore to ask what Pussy cat did there, and Puss boasts that it frightened a little mouse under the queen's chair. The content of the conversation has been stated and the event summarized, but the moment-by-momentness that constitutes the conversation has not. The paraphrase states a fictional event, yet since it does not create or recreate it, since it does not render or present it, the paraphrase is not literature, whereas the nursery rhyme is. Any dialog presented as a dialog is a work of literature simply because it is a dialog. A dialog is a space-time event in and of itself. The exchange of speech, indicating as it does the presence of the speakers together at one time and place, suffices for a context, and the speeches themselves provide the moment-by-momentness, the temporal sequence of words occurring one after another as they are uttered. In this sense then it can be said that speech is the very essence of literature. Dialog by itself suffices to create literature and suffices in a work otherwise summarily narrated to make it literature. When there is speech, however, but no dialog, no exchange of speeches, the literary character is not so self-evidently established. In the discussion of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" it was pointed out that speech by a single speaker can constitute a work of literature, provided only that the event of which the speech is a part is clearly indicated in it. That is, the work clearly has to be a speech, not just some thoughts nor even someone's thoughts. Otherwise, it could not be said to be an event, whereas an exchange of speeches is obviously something happening. If the event of which the speech

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is a part is clearly indicated in it, then the speaking itself rendered as uttered provides the xnoment-by-momentness. Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" by clearly implying the context of utterance - the May midnight hour in the garden - and supplying the utterance its e l f - the address to the nightingale - constitutes an event rendered moment-by-moment and thus a work of literature. "Ode to a Nightingale" resembles Aesop's fable of the wolf and the kid quoted above in that the moment-by-momentness of both is provided by a single speech. The difference is that the ode makes the context of the speech implicit; the fable makes it explicit. The importance of speech - or more precisely, utterance - in constituting works of literature can not be gainsaid. But if in moment-by-moment presentation, particularly of utterance, we have discovered the sine qua non of literature, we have not yet arrived at a definition, at a characteristic or complex of characteristics that occurs in literature and literature alone. To be sure, The Saga of Coe Ridge has even fewer moment-by-moment accounts than A Journal of the Plague Year, and some of these have even less direct bearing on the history of the Coe Ridge settlement than the Journal's did on the plague. The absence of moment-by-moment presentation in Benjamin Franklin has already been discussed. Constant's autobiographical sketch of his first twenty years, The Red Notebook, has even less moment-by-moment presentation, containing as it does one brief anecdote in Part 1 and another in Part II. Such is not the case, however, with that other autobiographical work on our non-literature list, Parkman's The Oregon Trail. Not only, as we have already seen, does this work present a single unified event, but also the bulk of this event is presented moment-by-moment. Dialog abounds, of which the following is a sample: "Hallo!" cried Henry, looking up from his inspection of the snakeholes, "here comes the old captain." The captain approached, and stood for a moment contemplating us in silence. "I say, Parkman," he began, "look at Shaw there, asleep under the cart, with the tar dripping off the hub of the wheel on his shoulder." At this Shaw got up, with his eyes half opened, and feeling the part indicated, found his hand glued fast to his redflannelshirt.

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"He'll look well, when he gets among the squaws, won't he?" observed the captain with a grin. (Chapter 5)

While moment-by-momentness independent of conversation is not so common, here is a typical example: As we were passing the foot of a hill, I saw Raymond, who was some rods in advance, suddenly jerk the reins of his mule, slide from his seat, and run in a crouching posture up a hollow; then in an instant I heard the sharp crack of his rifle. A wounded antelope came running on three legs over the hill. I lashed [my mare] and made after him. (Chapter 13)

Historian though Parkman may be, in this first book of his, about his own personal experience, his narration is indistinguishable from that of any novelist. Is it then literature ? As for Tennessee vs. Scopes, we pointed out when we introduced it as the very first of our instances of non-literature, in contrast to Othello, that no one has yet been known to claim that the transcript or minutes of a trial or hearing is literature. And we also pointed out in what way this transcript of a trial formally resembles the script of a play. Both are made up chiefly of dialog, with speaker tags, and a modicum of "stage directions", or narrative tags. Yet it is precisely this characteristic of dialog that we have just now been pointing to as a sure sign of moment-by-momentness and therefore presumably of literature. This paradoxical conclusion applies similarly to our choice of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as an example of a work that formally resembles Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" but is not literature. For the point of resemblance between the two works is precisely that they are both utterances. It is clear, moreover, that Lincoln's speech indicates as well as Keats' ode does the event of which its utterance is a part. Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation. ... Now we are engaged in a great civil war. ... We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives ... we can not dedicate ... this ground. ... The world will little note ... what we say here. ... It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here....

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Time, place, and occasion of utterance are all lucidly revealed in these remarks. If Keats' ode is literature, is not Lincoln's address literature too? 4. Unverifiability Three works appear in our non-literature list that cannot be excluded from the ranks of literature solely according to the definition of it developed so far. The Oregon Trail, Tennessee VJ. Scopes, and the Gettysburg Address are each a moment-by-moment statement of an event. So far as this criterion takes us, Parkman's autobiographical narrative is indistinguishable from a novel like Tom Jones', the transcript of the Scopes trial is indistinguishable from a play like Othello; and Lincoln's public oration is indistinguishable from a lyric poem like "Ode to a Nightingale". At the beginning of our attempt to define literature we declared that once we have determined what it is that fiction - or poetry - makes up, we shall have determined what literature is. And we have determined that what a work of literature makes up is a moment-by-moment statement of an event. But what has been left out of our definition so far is the specification that this moment-by-moment statement of an event is made up, is indeed a fiction. The event of The Oregon Trail, of Tennessee vs. Scopes, and of the Gettysburg Address is not made up; it is a fact. The event of Tom Jones, of Othello, and of "Ode to a Nightingale" is made up; it is a fiction. This is to state the essential difference between the three works that are literature and the three that are not positively. A fiction is a statement that refers to a made-up event, an event that has been invented or feigned rather than having actually taken place. This is to express the concept of fiction positively, in terms of what has been created, rather than in terms of what is missing from fiction. In expressing the idea of fiction negatively, as is most often the way it is expressed, we would say that a fictional statement is untrue, false. Such a concept of fiction hardly deserves the priority it has received, however, because the attempt to explain literature only in regard to its negative character, its untruthfulness, has by its very nature been destined to fail. So characterized, literature

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has remained indistinguishable from lies or errors and therefore subject to attack for the pointlessness or mischief of its falsehood. But more important, simply on logical grounds, because it is a negative definition, it is not really a definition at all. That something is not true is important, but what it is that is not true is even more important. To say that fiction is not true is not to say what fiction is and therefore not to define it. By starting our definition from the positive pole, from the point of what is created - a moment-by-moment statement of an event - we have been able according to this criterion to eliminate all but three of the fourteen works on our non-literature list, works chosen indeed for their very similarities to literature. And it is no exaggeration to assert that the vast majority of works that bear superficial similarities of one kind or another to literature can easily be distinguished on the basis of the definition so far worked out. Yet the positive pole in the concept of literature can take us only this far. It cannot take us all the way, because the concept is made up of the negative pole as well and will not work without it. Nevertheless, it must be admitted at the start that this negative characteristic - fictionality, in the sense of untruthfulness - can seem rather equivocal. For the problem is: Is fictionality a characteristic of the literary work itself or can it be discerned only by knowledge acquired outside the work ? Can we tell simply by reading or hearing a moment-by-moment statement of an event whether it is fictional or not? Certainly for some works it is obvious that one can say that they could not possibly be true, though, to be sure, from the point of view of common-sense realism. From such a viewpoint Ovid's Metamorphoses is a string of impossibilities. Not only are the gods and goddesses, nymphs and demigods, with all their supernatural appurtenances suspect to our sense of reality, but also each story is predicated on a miracle - a miraculous transformation of a demigod or a human being into an animal or vegetable life: Daphne into the laurel, Actaeon into a stag, Arachne into the spider, Baucis and Philemon into trees. Polynesian Mythology is equally full of such impossibilities, no story in the whole collection being without them, and they include - as well

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as miraculous transformations such as the runaway women turned into trees - Maui snaring the sun, birds reconstructing a felled tree, a wooden head uttering terrible cries, and supernaturally endowed protagonists of all kinds. And of course the Iliad contains its fair share of supernatural beings and incidents, although admirers of "heroic poetry" wish this were not so and try to explain it away as much as possible. Supernatural elements of one kind or another are the common coin of literature the world over. The degree to which supernaturalism has been excluded from Western prose literature of the past two centuries is unique and not likely to be maintained for long. Nevertheless, the existence of such realistic or naturalistic literature is sufficient to show that it is not fantasy - impossibilities - alone that makes for fiction. Indeed, literary fictions can remain well within the bounds of the possible and yet be highly implausible. Critics and readers who reject folktales and myths because of their manifest impossibilities will accept the wildest improbabilities as long as a realistic or naturalistic decorum is maintained. And authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Fielding, Zane Grey, and Lady Murasaki are not averse to pressing highly improbable coincidences into service on more than one occasion. After all, it is possible for coincidences to occur in real life; sometimes they do occur. Yet the same may be asserted of supernatural personages and events, at least insofar as people's beliefs are concerned. For throughout the ages there have existed in mankind deep-seated convictions of the reality of at least some supernatural creatures and occasions. People whose behavior is very realistic may still reserve judgment on evidence of things unseen. Is the fictionality of a literary work merely then a matter of personal belief? If this were so, it would hardly be possible to establish a definition of literature as fiction, because the criterion would continually shift according to the beliefs of the particular definer. Neither implausibility nor impossibility are sufficient to account for the "untrueness" of all literature. This does not prevent a distinguished literary scholar from making the statement, however, that "Other things being equal it is more pleasurable to read a story we believe to be true than a

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fictitious one." 29 This statement hardly reflects a universal consensus of literary taste, yet it does reflect a contemporary preference for "what we believe to be true". The catch lies in the qualification "other things being equal". What are these other things and is there not some incompatibility between the existence of them in a literary work and its truthfulness ? Otherwise, why would there be fiction at all? Sigurd Nordal, the scholar who expresses this preference for stories that are true, sets out, however, in his study, Hrafnkels Saga Freygotha, to demonstrate that his favorite saga, loved from boyhood on and believed by him as well as most other scholars of the Icelandic saga to be essentially true, is in fact false. "Until the present time", he asserts, HrafnkeVs Saga "has been considered to be among the most reliable of sagas, and in some matters its evidence has been preferred even to that of Landnama", which is for the most part an unadorned listing of the Icelandic settlers and their settlements. Furthermore, Nordal points out, "A general belief exists that it is easy to distinguish between the true Family Sagas ... and the frankly fictitious sagas" (p. 62). The sagas that had been made up out of whole cloth would, it is thought, surely give themselves away by being derivative, stereotyped, and implausible or even impossible. The Family Sagas, on the other hand, would contain nothing that was not believed to be true and therefore would be plausible, individual, and original. The criterion for determining historicity would thus be clear enough: Finnur Jonsson has argued for the truthfulness of Gunnlaugs saga in a very simple way; 'There are no grounds for not believing that the incidents here related are true in all essentials; they are not inherently incredible.'' (p. 62)

But if this criterion were decisive for the truth of a statement, then there would be no reason for our not believing all such works as Adolphe, Riders of the Purple Sage, You Know Me Al, The 29

Sigurthur Nordal, Hrafnkels Saga Freygotha, tr. R. George Thomas (Cardiff, Wales, 1958), 63. Cf. Knut Liestol's remark, "... of two equally good stories the one which can claim to be historical will always be the more interesting" (The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas, tr. A.G. Jayne [Oslo, 1930], 182).

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Plague, The Tale of Genji, and HrafnkeVs Saga itself to be true. With great skill Nordal demonstrates nevertheless that HrafnkeVs Saga for one could not possibly be true: Hrafnkel's expulsion from Adalbol, his second rise to power at Hrafnkelsstadir, his subsequent resumption of his previous authority, in fact all the principal events in the saga never took place. Two of the chief actors, the sons of Thjostarr, never existed. Many other details of some importance, Hrafnkel's descent, his rise to authority and the name of his farm, the lawsuit against Einar being taken direct to the Althing et al., are shown (after comparison with more trustworthy sources) to be inaccurate as they are presented in the saga. (p. 56) It follows from Nordal's disproving of these elements in the saga, moreover, that all the other incidents and all the dialog depending on these fictitious elements cannot be true either. Although Hrafnkel himself has been shown to be an historical figure, the deeds attributed to him in HrafnkeVs Saga have not only not been shown to be historical, they have been shown to be false. The way in which Nordal has gone about disproving HrafnkeVs Saga is not, however, accessible to the reader or listener. On the contrary, his results stem from the most knowledgeable and ingenious methods of historical research. There are no confirmed reliable historical sources to which HrafnkeVs Saga can be directly compared. Nordal had to discern precisely where confirming or disfirming evidence might be found. Until he could discern where proof might lie - what point in the saga could be subjected to corroboration, given the evidence available about Icelandic history in the tenth century - he could not even begin to say whether HrafnkeVs Saga was true or not according to the criterion of historical verification. What made Nordal suspect that the veracity of HrafnkeVs Saga needed to be tested, however, is precisely what does or should make any reader or listener suspicious of the historical veracity of such a statement as this saga is. What made Nordal suspect the veracity of this saga is the abundance of dialog it contains. Nordal's estimate of the amount of dialog in this saga puts it at a little less than half, while Knut Liestol's puts it at a little more thau

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half.30 But among those sagas so analyzed, only one, Bandamanna Saga, runs to more. The incident that marks the turning point in HrafnkeVs Saga - Sam and Einar's father's encounter with the sons of Thjostar, whose support will enable Sam to win the lawsuit against Hrafnkel - consists of nearly 130 lines of dialog in a text that runs to a total of only 950 lines in the standard edition. This dialog even contains an instance of narration, when Thorkel gives a moment-by-moment account of how Einar's father should go about introducing himself to Thorgeir. Obviously we are not dealing here with a few pithy remarks that might have been remembered and later recorded by witnesses of the encounter. Liestol, a saga scholar of the generation prior to Nordal's, held an only slightly more sophisticated conviction about the historicity of the sagas than the one quoted from Finnur Jonsson. He was firmly convinced that although in their extant form the sagas contain much that is unhistorical, they have an historical foundation, were dealt with from the beginning as history, and preserved accordingly. And he concludes from this conviction that, while it is often difficult to draw the line between what is and is not historical, "The proper criterion would seem to be that if there are no grounds for holding that a thing is unhistorical there are grounds for holding that it is historical" (p. 247, italics added). Liestol spends the last three chapters of The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas attempting to establish this doubtful hypothesis. But in doing so he provides against it compelling evidence for thinking the sagas essentially unhistorical. In the words of still another saga scholar, "As is well known, dialogue plays an extraordinarily large role in the Sagas of Icelanders, so large that the story for long stretches can take on a purely dramatic character." 31 HrafnkeVs Saga is thus by no means unique among sagas but, rather, typical. If dialog plays such a large part in the sagas, then it is impossible to see how the event of any saga - as rendered - could possibly be historical. On this question we can use Liestol against himself: 30 81

58.

Nordal, 74; Liestol, 89. Peter Hallberg, The Icelandic Saga, tr. Paul Schach (Lincoln, Nebr., 1962),

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Now conversations are particularly difficult to remember correctly and repeat with accuracy. They are only too easily distorted and forgotten. Naturally many insignificant and pointless sayings included in contemporary tradition would soon drop out. One might infer, therefore, that dialogue would become scantier with the advancing age of the tradition. And this, no doubt, would happen if tradition were capable of remaining historical; for no new dialogue could then be composed in place of what had dropped out. The contrary, however, is the case. We have seen, in comparing parallel passages of the Islendinga Saga and Arons Saga, that the latter, though further away from the events related, had more dialogue. And this is the usual state of affairs, (pp. 88-89, italics added) The conclusion is patent. Since the Sagas of the Icelanders consist so largely of dialog and since the more dialog a saga contains the less likely it is to be close to the historical event that may have provided its starting point, the Sagas of the Icelanders are not historical. The event of a work may have an historical foundation, but as soon as it is depicted moment-by-moment, as soon as speech and conversation are used to present it, then does it cease to be historical. Liestol goes so far as to admit that several of the conversations in the sagas are "unquestionably inventions". Then he continues with the observation, "Consider how much space is devoted to dialogue, and how greatly the dialogue helps us to understand persons and events in the family sagas." And finally he asks, "What remains of Ofeig the Crafty apart from what he said ? Or Hallgerd in Njala?" (p. 243). Here Liestol is well on the way to seeing that even persons whose real life existence can be confirmed are no more than namesakes of the corresponding characters in a work of literature. For the particular behavior attributed to Ofeig in Bandamanna Saga or Hallgerd in NjaVs Saga is simply not susceptible to confirmation even though the existence of two such persons could be confirmed. The reason is that a moment-by-moment statement of an event remains - with few exceptions - quite outside the realm of history and historical verification, no matter what historically verifiable deeds and personages it may so depict moment-by-moment. Absence of moment-by-momentness from a narrative is no proof that the statement is true. Dares the Phrygian's The Fall of

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Troy, A History contains no moment-by-momentness whatsoever and is false nevertheless, false in content and false as a purported document. The presence, however, of moment-by-momentness makes the statement open to the suspicion that it is false. The obverse of Liestol's "proper criterion" is what is really applicable here: if there are no grounds for holding that a moment-bymoment statement of an event is historical, there are grounds for holding that it is unhistorical. In every instance of the moment-bymoment statement of an event the burden of proof of its veracity is upon the statement. If means for verification are not supplied, then there is every reason to believe that they cannot be supplied. The principal reason for this is that providing proof for momentby-moment statements of an event is indeed a burden. In most cases it is much easier to make up a moment-by-moment statement of an event than to remember what in fact did occur moment-by-moment. This difficulty is already fully acknowledged by one of the world's earliest historians, Thucydides. In the very first chapter of his account of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides admits that neither he nor his informants were able to remember the precise words of the speeches that they heard. Therefore on the basis of both the generally remembered content of the speeches that were actually delivered and ol the speeches that he would have delivered had he been in those circumstances, Thucydides makes up the precise words of all the speeches, and there are a number of them, in his narrative. That a moment-by-moment statement of an event rarely lends itself to verification, even when the presentation is absolutely realistic, when the event is solidly based on history, and when the narrative sequence closely follows verifiable documents, is shown by Irving Stone's The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud. The fact that this as well as Stone's other "biographical novels" have consistently been best-sellers indicates that a large body of contemporary readers shares Nordal's sentiment that "Other things being equal it is more pleasurable to read a story we believe to be true than a fictitious one." At least one of the other things that must be equal, we now see, is that the story be presented moment-by-moment. Unfortunately, momentby-moment presentation and truth are in the vast majority of

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cases incompatibles. For the most part, to present a story momentby-moment is to create or recreate because, on the one hand, as Thucydides found, after the event even the witnesses are unable to remember the moments as such, though remembering well enough what happened in general, and because, on the other hand, real events can rarely ever be recorded moment-by-moment when they happen. When an event occurs, there is hardly either reason or opportunity for recording the moments of it. Either no one recognizes at the time it is happening that the event warrants detailed recording or they are too busy participating in it to stop and keep track. Stone's novel narrates the life of Sigmund Freud from one Saturday afternoon in June of his twenty-sixth year to his arrival in Dover on June 6, 1938. Although not much is known about Freud's day-to-day life before the time the novel opens, the fifty-six years following are doubtless among the most welldocumented of any biographical subject's. Freud became engaged not long after that Saturday afternoon in June, and he and his fiancée not only kept a diary of their courtship, but then during their engagement, which lasted four years, wrote long letters to each other daily. The correspondence contains a great deal more than "sweet nothings", being the principal record of Freud's activities and ideas during that period. After marriage Freud maintained a voluminous correspondence with others, as well as eventually publishing his ideas and detailed accounts of his psychoanalytic cases. Eventually he even composed a brief autobiography. Then there is the introspective, self-revealing nature of psychoanalysis, in which examples from personal experience are frequently cited. Stone includes in his novel, verbatim from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's moment-by-moment narration of one of his dreams. Finally, this vast body of data on one man's life has already been organized and elucidated by Freud's close associate, Ernest Jones, in a monumental, three-volume biography.32 Indeed, in view of Jones' biography, a "biographical novel" would seem super32

The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: Vol. I, The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900; Vol. II, Years of Maturity, 1901-1919; Vol. Ill, The Last Phase, 1919-1939 (New York, 1953; 1955; 1957).

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fluous. The biography is detailed, patterned, accurate, and readable. What on earth does a "biographical novel" have to contribute? This question is the more pertinent in that the novel comes equipped with a number of documentary biographical appurtenances. The text is preceded by a page of acknowledgments for permission to include excerpts from copyrighted works, although there are no such documented citations in the body of the text. Andthe text is succeeded in smaller print bythree pages of acknowledgments for assistance, an eight-page glossary of psychoanalytic terms, a three-page essay on Viennese social life and the German words used in it, and a sixteen-page bibliography. These appurtenances doubtless have the function of implying the fidelity of the novel to the life. This issue of fidelity is never asserted, however, anywhere in the novel. And indeed how could it be ? For when all is said and done, although a great deal of the novel is true to the life, it is after all a novel, a moment-by-moment statement of an event, and though the event may on the whole be verifiable, this moment-by-moment statement of it is not. It is rather a recreation of what could have happened moment-by-moment in Freud's life, given the information available about what did happen on the whole historically. That the novel is a novel is evident from the first pages. Here we are introduced into the midst of a conversation between Freud and Martha Bernays, the young woman he is courting, as they are taking a walk. And the moment-by-moment presentation is by no means confined to dialog. When the couple are seated for a few minutes in the cafe, "He stretched out an arm, put his hand palm up on the center of the table. She laid her hand in his, lightly." Perhaps that is the way it happened. But this scene is not presented as an hypothesis; it is presented as the scenes of all works of literature are: as a precise, detailed account of the way something did happen. And of that, Stone, for all his six years of research, is in no better position to say for certain than we are. There is one documented instance of handholding between the couple, but unfortunately the documents disagree. According to a recollection of Freud's many years later, Miss Bernays squeezed

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his hand in return for the first love-letter he sent her. However, a diary written the week after the incidents of the courtship states that she squeezed his hand under the table at a family luncheon after he took her place-card as a keepsake. When Stone treats the incident, he has Miss Bernays take Freud's hand first and then has him reach for the place-card. Such are the trivial details that one gets bogged down in when setting out to verify the moment-by-moment. And in most cases these trivial details are precisely what cannot after all be verified. Notice that the verification of an historical event constantly encounters the problem of the existence of different versions of what happened. This problem may occur on such a trivial level as hand squeezes or it may extend to the crucial level of whether something did in fact happen at all. As a biographer, Jones, in presenting Freud's courtship, gives both versions and then his opinion as to which is the most trustworthy. The novelist, because he is presenting an account of something that supposedly happened as if it were happening - moment-by-moment - simply cannot present alternative versions. The presentation of alternative versions is incompatible with presenting an event as if it were happening. To do so would be to undercut the essential nature of a literary work - the stating of a single unified event. Two or more characters in a literary work may disagree about what happened in the course of the event of the work, but then their disagreement constitutes a part of the event as a whole. Yet if the work itself presents mutually exclusive alternatives of the event of the work, then it ceases to be the statement of an event. In such an instance one could not say what the event is, and thus it would fail to be a work of literature.33 Verification of the moment-by-moment presentation of the event in The Passions of the Mind is impossible even when Stone puts into Freud's mouth the very words Freud is known to have stated. For example, Freud is described as attending a performance of Sarah Bernhardt's in Sardou's Theodora at the Porte St. Martin 33

Analysis of a recent attempt to present mutually exclusive alternatives of the event of a literary work may be found under "Consistency of Event" in Chapter VIII below.

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Theater in Paris. During intermission he is depicted as saying to his companion, Klikowicz, while they are standing in the street eating oranges, "How this Sarah can act! After the first words uttered in that ultimate, endearing voice, I felt I had known her all my life. I've never seen a funnier figure than hers, but every inch is alive and bewitching. As for her caressing and pleading and embracing, the way she wraps herself around a man, the way she acts with every limb and every joint, it's incredible. ..." (Book Four, 4)

An almost identical passage appears in Jones. Freud has attended the same production, but with Darkschewitsch rather than Klikowicz, and of it he is quoted as declaring that he cannot say anything good. "But how that Sarah plays! After the first words of her vibrant lovely voice I felt I had known her for years.... I have never seen a more comical figure ... and yet ... every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. Then her flattering and imploring and embracing: it is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and every joint acts with her." (I, 177-78)

There are some slight verbal differences that may be attributable to different translations from the original German. But a more significant verbal difference is that much more occurs in the passage cited from Jones, as our ellipses indicate. For example, between "I have never seen a more comical figure" and "and yet" in the original occurs a dozen words, and after "and yet" half a dozen more. What Stone depicts Freud saying is not after all precisely what he did say. The most significant difference, however, is that in Stone these words are uttered in a conversation, while in Jones they are quoted from a letter. What Freud said is verifiable all right; he did make these remarks about Sarah Bernhardt. But he made them in a letter. What he may have said about Sarah to Klikowicz while the two of them were standing in the street eating oranges at intermission is not accessible to anyone and therefore not verifiable. This practice of constructing conversations for Freud out of the actual words of his writings is quite common in Stone's novel. It fails, nevertheless, to make the conversations themselves ver-

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ifiable. And indeed this particular conversation is suspect on more than one count. The other participant in it, Klikowicz, is a truly superfluous man. He has no other role in the novel than to attend this particular performance with Freud and to reply to the prefabricated conversational utterance just quoted, and he does not appear at all in Jones' biography, where Freud's attendance at the performance is cited with a different Russian as his theater companion. If Klikowicz is a fictitious character, then this conversation must be fictitious too; just as with Hrafnkel's Saga, Nordal's demonstration that the sons of Thjostar are fictitious proves with the same stroke the fictitiousness of all the conversations in which they participate in the saga. Yet even if we should be able with a little research to actually disprove some of the moment-by-momentness of the novel, as well as the saga, this should not mislead us into thinking that such a procedure is necessarily preliminary to our recognizing it as a work of fiction. It is a fiction, not solely because we can show it in part to be fictitious or otherwise. Stone's moment-by-moment accounts of Freud washing up, getting dressed, examining himself in the mirror, are not inherently incredible, but they are inherently unverifiable. The likelihood of such moment-by-momentness ever having been observed and recorded is nil. In order for a moment-by-moment presentation of an event to be recorded in words, it has to be considered of some importance. And therefore its recording usually has to be prepared for in advance of the event. That is why the burden of proof for the truth of a moment-by-moment statement of an event is a burden. Take for example a transcript such as that of the Scopes trial. It will be recalled that this transcript satisfies our definition of literature so far worked out; it is the moment-by-moment statement of an event. Wherein then does it differ from its counterpart on the literature list, Othello, or even from The Passions of the Mind! The answer is that Tennessee VJ. Scopes is a verifiable moment-bymoment statement of an event. It is not just that the event of the Scopes trial, like that of The Passions of the Mind, is verifiable. In addition, the moment-by-moment statement of the event is

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verifiable. And this - the verifiability of its moment-by-momentness - is the single factor that differentiates it from a work of literature. We began this discussion of fictionality by asking if it is possible to tell simply by reading or hearing a moment-by-moment statement of an event whether it is fictional or not. Our subsequent investigation seems to have led to the conclusion that it is possible. In such cases as HrafnkeVs Saga and The Passions of the Mind the presentation of the event moment-by-moment rendered the event as presented beyond the reach of verification. For most events corroboration of their occurrence as they occurred moment-bymoment is in the nature of things simply not obtainable. Yet the example before us, the published transcript of the Scopes trial, is obviously moment-by-moment and beyond a doubt verifiable in even its moment-by-momentness. Therefore one must conclude that (1) in certain instances moment-by-momentness does not preclude verifiability and that (2) in certain instances, consequently, it is not possible just by hearing or reading a moment-by-moment statement of an event to determine whether or not it is verifiable. When confronted with what purports to be the transcript of a trial, one must resort to knowledge outside of the statement in order to confirm its truth. The verification that is necessary for the moment-by-momentness of such statements is unlikely, however, to exist for very many statements. The published transcript of Tennessee vs. Scopes is an unabridged version of the trial based on stenographic records compiled by newspapers. What verifies it, what corroborates it absolutely, is the existence of an official, though unpublished, transcript in the Tennessee State Library, which is almost identical with the published version that provides our example. There are of course numerous other, partial, verifications, as there would be for a trial that was nationally broadcast on the radio, that was attended by more than a hundred press correspondents, and about which an estimated million words were written during its eight-day course. Yet verification of the moment-bymoment statement of the event as such is dependent upon the official transcript. Official transcripts, however, represent a great deal of investment in time and money. They are dependent in

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turn upon trained stenographers experienced in court reporting. After being transcribed, the text has then to be transliterated, edited, and bound. The transcript of the Scopes trial runs to more than 800 pages, more than a hundred pages a day. Only the singular importance of the event justifies these efforts to record and preserve its every moment. As events, trials have this importance and are expected to have it. That is why provisions are made in advance for recording them. Few other kinds of events, however important they may turn out to have been, can be anticipated to be so. Moreoever, the practice of transcribing trials in full is of relatively recent provenance, so that even for such important events as a trial can be expected to be, opportunities for recording it have not always occurred. The record of the trial of Alice Lisle in 1685, from which Macaulay quotes in the excerpt given above from his History of England, although just as moment-by-moment as that of the Scopes trial, is not in fact an official transcript, and indeed nothing is known of its origins. No report contemporaneous with the trial was published, but not long afterwards a number of accounts printed surreptitiously began to appear. The recorder of the full, transcript-like document, incorporated into the Collection of State Trials and considered by historians to be the most accurate, is completely unknown. There are good reasons for accepting this anonymous transcription as a reliable historical document, and the anonymity of its source can be explained by the political situation at the time. The use that Macaulay makes of it, however, in the excerpt given above furnishes an object-lesson in how difficult it is to keep moment-by-moment presentation within the limits of verifiability. For though there are exceptions such as we have just been discussing, the two characteristics tend always to conflict and always in some degree to remain mutually incompatible. The reason for this incompatibility is, as has been indicated before, that moment-by-momentness is too detailed and expansive to be of much use in historical narrative, where great chunks of experience must be digested and comprehended in generalizations. Macaulay had a conception of historical truth that ran counter to some extent to this invaluable comprehensive and generalizing

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function of historical narrative. In his well-known Essay History, he writes,

on

History cannot be perfectly and absolutely true ... for to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to lecord all the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions - all the things done, and all the words uttered, during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignificant, would be a defect. ... No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best stories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. This sort of naive empiricism amounts to denying that generalizations can be true. And this mistrust of generalization leads Macaulay to think that literature is truer than historical narrative, for historical novels go much farther towards presenting the fullness of a given incident or event than a historical narrative can. Sir Walter Scott ... has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them, in a manner that may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs. But a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated. Just how the historian is going to beat the novelist at his own game is explained by Macaulay and may be taken as the manifesto of his own method in his History of England: The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. But by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. ... If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the histoiy of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. As Macaulay says, so he does. His History of England does not omit "the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes", and with these he intersperses the details - particularly speeches and even private conversations - that

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are "the charm of historical romances". At the same time, these speeches and conversations are always provided with footnotes that give the sources, and thus they are presumably authenticated by sufficient testimony. The record of the Trial of Alice Lisle included in State Trials is cited by Macaulay as sufficient testimony of what

Judge Jeffreys and the witness Dunne said on the occasion. Macaulay, however, does not allow this sufficient testimony to speak for itself. By his "judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement" he does give to his extract from it those attractions possessed by fiction but at the expense of that accuracy demanded of history. To begin with, like Stone, he omits. The first sentence that Macaulay quotes of Jeffreys' is, "Oh, how hard the truth is to come out of a lying Presbyterian knave." So far, so good. But then Macaulay goes on to say that after this utterance of Jeffreys' the witness is silent and then stammers a few words. The truth of the matter is, however, that silence does not come so soon. These fourteen words of Jeffreys' are only fourteen of some 150 that Jeffreys goes on to hurl at Dunne in this particular utterance. Where further on Macaulay depicts Jeffreys as saying: "I hope, gentlemen of the jury, that you take notice of the horrible carriage of this fellow. How can one help abhorring both these men and their religion? A Turk is a saint to such a fellow as this. A pagan would be ashamed of such villainy. Oh, blessed Jesus! What a generation of vipers do we live among."

the record reads: "/ hope, gentlemen of the jury, you take notice of the strange and horrible carriage of this fellow, and withal, you cannot but observe the spirit of that sort of people, what a villainous and devilish one it is. Good God! That ever the thing called religion (a word that people have so much abused) should ever wind up persons to such a height of impiety, that it should make them lose the belief that there is a God of truth in Heaven, that sees and knows, observes and registers, and will punish and take vengeance of falsehood and perjury. It may well make the rest of mankind, that have any sort of faith in a Deity and a future life, to abhor and detest both the men and their religion, if such abominable principles may be called so. A Turk is a saint to such a fellow as this, nay a Pagan would be ashamed to be thought to have no more truth

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in him. O blessed Jesusl what an age do we live in, and what a generation of vipers do we live among V Note that, as our italics show, what Macaulay does quote, he quotes very inexactly. Furthermore, not only does he omit a great deal between the parts he quotes, but also he neglects to indicate in any way his omissions. Finally, we have given just the part of Jeffreys' harangue from which Macaulay extrapolated. There is much more to it. Y e t this does not keep Macaulay from following up Jeffreys' exclamation about a generation of vipers with Dunne's "reply", "I cannot tell what to say, my lord." According to the record, however, Dunne could not and did not reply to Jeffreys until Jeffreys not only had finished his harangue to the gentlemen of the jury but also had once again addressed Dunne. In sum, Macaulay has created - out of historical sources, to be sure - what is nevertheless a fictional dialog. The scene that he presents did not occur. Moment-by-moment it does not match the record. Consequently, it is unverifiable in the sense that it can not be proven true, for when collated with the record, it is shown to be false. Like HrafnkeVs Saga, it is unverifiable because disprovable. But also like HrafnkeVs Saga, its veracity is already suspect because it is moment-by-moment. How odd that Macaulay should insist history cannot be "perfectly and absolutely true" because it can never "record all the particulars of the slightest transactions" and then slip into falsehood by virtue of his failure to record those very particulars he had been vouchsafed by the transcript of the trial! He would have remained closer to the truth had he drawn on the basis of the particulars a few generalizations about Jeffreys' conduct of the trial. Had Macaulay said that Jeffreys intimidated the Presbyterian witnesses by impugning their faith, this generalization would have been verifiable by reference to the particulars of the trial. But in choosing to construct a scene, which it was of course necessary to keep short because of the scope of his history, Macaulay laid his narrative open to unverifiableness - to falseness - by reference to these very particulars. The goals of history and fiction are diametrically opposite. It is not surprising, therefore, that their methods of presentation are too. The term "unverifiable" is an awkward one. It means "incapable

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of being proven true". And this may be taken in the sense of either "demonstrably false" or "undemonstrably true or false". Since works of literature can in rare instances be demonstrated to be false but in most instances are not demonstrably either true or false, the two possible construings of "unverifiable" are equally applicable to literature. The essence of literature is its fictionality. When makers of literature attempt to be historically referential to some degree, as the maker of Hrafnkel's Saga or The Passions of the Mind did, they run the risk of being caught out so that their works can in part be shown to be false. But for the most part there is simply no way of putting a literary work to the test of verification. And this may be the case even when seemingly considerable effort has gone to make the moment-by-moment statement of the event verifiable. The classic examples of works that seem to offer themselves for verification come from personal history or autobiography. The first-person narrative in such cases always purports to be that of an eye-witness or participant. And he or stie must be the eye-witness of, participant in, a private rather than a public event. Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan purport to have been participants in what they narrate, but the Trojan War is a public event. The raising of troops, the launching of ships, the battles, if known about at all, must be known about by a great many people. If the event of The Fall of Troy or A Journal of the Trojan War had actually occurred, then corroboration would theoretically be available from a great number of sources. In the case of autobiographies or personal histories, however, the narrator is the chief and sometimes the only theoretically possible corroboration for what he claims to have happened. When a person claims to have said and done quite plausible things moment-by-moment, sometimes alone, sometimes in the presence of others with whom it is not possible to check, then verifiability becomes a problem. Only the narrator is in a position to authenticate what he narrates. He claims that what he narrates is true, but the reader or listener is not even theoretically in a position to verify his claim. Are all such accounts then to be taken as fiction? The answer must in principle be no. But they are the next best thing to it. For personal

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history is where the borderline between literature and non-literature is the most difficult to establish. The Oregon Trail provides the problem example on our nonliterature list. Although Parkman subsequently made his name as an historian of American settlement, in this his first work he is simply a memoir-writer narrating a personal adventure. He does not much take up the historical import of the scenes that he witnesses and the real historical persons whom he encounters. What he does do is give a moment-by-moment account of his journey, replete with conversations among his companions and his move-by-move behavior in the course of the many buffalo hunts. The event itself is verifiable and the participants in it. The work was written not long after the event occurred, and its composition was based upon the day-by-day diary that Parkman kept of the journey. Moreover, when he came to put it in final form, because of his impaired sight he dictated his composition to his cousin and companion on the journey, Quincy Adams Shaw. Thus the recollections of the two participants could have been correlated at the time of composition. The question is, How can the moment-by-momentness of such an account be verified? The Oregon Trail certainly cannot be verified in the way that Tennessee vs. Scopes can, by an official transcript, recorded by an eye-witness and confirmed by the participants. Nor is it verifiable in the way that the Gettysburg Address is. The Gettysburg Address is verified by the drafts of it that were made before it was delivered, by copies made afterwards incorporating the changes that occurred in delivery, and by the consensus of the fifteen thousand people who heard it - many of whom also read it later. The Gettysburg Address was a public event, whose importance warranted the composition of the address beforehand and its publication afterwards. A private speech, however, is a private event, and though it too may be recorded, before, during, or after, the likelihood of its being verifiable is not very great. Like Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale", Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" purports to be the speech of a particular person at a particular time and place speaking to another particular individual. Wordsworth's poem, however, is also historically very particular,

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as its full title reveals: "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798". The poem itself purports to be an utterance being made by the speaker as "I again repose/ Here, under this dark sycamore" to his "dear, dear Sister!" We know that Wordsworth and his sister did in fact visit this spot at this time, and no doubt he did take the opportunity to lounge again under the sycamore tree with her, but what we do not and cannot know is that at that moment he uttered to her the exact lines subsequently published as the poem "Tintern Abbey". Dorothy Wordsworth does not attest to this particular utterance, and no one else could. Therefore, unlike the Gettysburg Address, the Tintern Abbey Addiess is literature because it is an unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. Tennessee vs. Scopes and the Gettysburg Address were public events whose moment-by-momentness was at the time thought sufficiently important to be preserved. But what Parkman and Shaw and their companions said to one another on their journey out west would have been considered significant only by some of those who participated in the event, and of these only one, Parkman saw fit to record it. Is one man's word reliable in this case ? Or to put the matter in the terms that we have been using, is one man sufficient verification for the moment-by-moment statement of an event that he witnessed or participated in ? Here we are right on the borderline between literature and history. One does not often come across instances where the decision has to be based upon such a small difference. And as far as the particular work under discussion is concerned, the decision as to whether it is literature or history is not very important. The Oregon Trail is these days more often read for its "story" than cited for its "history". Yet the principle upon which the decision must be based is important, because in other instances the difference can be so. On the literary side of the scale there is Parkman's moment-bymoment narration of incidents to which he was not a witness, such as the account in Chapter Six of a lone Indian warrior's night raid on an Indian village the year before, or the account in Chapter Ten of a battle between the Crows and Blackfeet six years before.

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Moreover, though most of the conversation Parkman records is as short and simple as that quoted above, he does on one occasion render moment-by-moment the fairly long harangue of an old Indian woman to her dog, a harangue that must have been uttered in the woman's native tongue and which thus would have been in a language Parkman was not overly familiar with since he required an interpreter for most of his dealings with the Indians. Such deviations from authoritativeness undermine confidence in the author's reliability as verifier of his own experiences that he recounts. However, these lapses from authenticity are few and far between. Ultimately, the features on the historical-verifiable side of the scale seem to outweigh them. In the first place, Parkman is a historian and his journey had, as he tells the reader, a scientific purpose. Although the first part of his account is leisurely enough, he announces at the beginning of Chapter Ten that, I had come into the country chiefly with a view of observing the Indian character. To accomplish my purpose it was necessary to live in the midst of them, and become, as it were, one of them. I proposed to join a village, and make myself an intimate of one of their lodges; and henceforward this narrative, so far as I am concerned, will be chiefly a record of the progress of this design, and the unexpected impediments that opposed it.

The central portion of the narrative is just this. Then the final chapters treat the return journey. Here was the purpose of the journey as a whole, and it fits into the larger purpose of Parkman's intention to be a historian. In his preface to the fourth edition of The Oregon Trail he makes this quite explicit: I went in great measure as a student, to prepare for a literary undertaking of which the plan was already formed, but which, from the force of inexorable circumstances, is still but half accomplished. It was this that prompted some proceedings on my part, which, without a fixed purpose in view, might be charged with youthful rashness. My business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it.

Of course the term "literary" here is rather misleading since what it refers to is not a series of Leather-stocking novels in the manner

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of Cooper but Parkman's series of historical works on the conflict between England and France for the control of the North American continent, a conflict that involved the Indians to no small degree. By a literary undertaking Parkman simply means an undertaking to write up what by study and observation he learned about this conflict and the parties to it. In the second but decisive place, Parkman uses real names. Taken in conjunction with the other features of veracity it tips the scale. The conversation from The Oregon Trail quoted above uses the real names of Parkman and of his associates - his cousin Shaw, his guide Henry Chatillon - and this is typical of the work as a whole. Not only is the work by Parkman and dedicated to Shaw, but also the preface to the fourth edition contains followup information on Chatillon, as well as on the muleteer Deslauriers, the hunter Raymond, and the Indians of the band with which Parkman lived, thus further attesting to the real lives of the characters in his narrative. The only person who is not identified by name in the conversation quoted is the captain, and Parkman never gives his full name nor that of the two men with him. He is identified only as Captain C - of the British Army, who with his brother Jack C - and an English gentlemen, Mr. R - , join Parkman and Shaw for part of the journey but then fall out with them. The refusal to cite names in this instance is explicable by the harsh words that Parkman has for his British companions. Unlike Parkman, the first-person narrator of Moll Flanders makes clear that she is not using her real name, nor does she use anybody else's. She gives no means whatsoever by which the persons of her narrative could be identified if they were real persons. In this way she has put her moment-by-moment account of her life beyond the reach of verification. Whether there was a real person behind the story of the pseudonymous Moll Flanders, as Defoe claimed in his editorial preface, or not, Moll Flanders is by virtue of this unverifiability, coupled with moment-by-momentness, well over the borderline on the side of literature. Like Defoe, anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his editorial introduction to Pedro Martinez purports to be presenting the narrations of real people. Yet at the same time he also admits that the names

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of all three narrators and of all the people they mention, with the exception of a few historical figures marginal to the narrative, are fictitious. In both Moll Flanders and Pedro Martinez this concealment of supposedly real identities is alleged to be necessary for protection of the narrators. In neither work is it possible for the reader, however, to discern whether the narrators are real people or not. And since their identities are unverifiable, while their narratives constitute the moment-by-moment statement of an event, both Pedro Martinez and Moll Flanders are works of fiction. Readers of Pedro Martinez are advised by Lewis of the existence of his field notes and tape-recorded interviews with the pseudonymous Martinez, his wife, and their eldest son but are not given examples of or access to this material. Lewis has deleted from the narrations all references to himself as interviewer and all the questions that he undoubtedly asked in order to elicit these narrations. Moreover, the smoothness and coherence of the narrations suggest an even greater degree of editing than these deletions. Finally, Lewis provides no direct commentary at all on the truth of his narrators' assertions nor the accuracy of their memory. Thus even if readers did have access to the notes and interviews, they would still be unable to verify the moment-by-moment statement of an event that is constituted by these narrations. All they would learn is whether the narrative Pedro Martinez is in fact what the real family going under that name did narrate to Lewis. Apparently the purpose of Lewis' presentation is to render what the Martinez family thought and felt about their life, not necessarily what really happened in it. One has only to compare Pedro Martinez with a work like The Saga of Coe Ridge in order to see that, whatever else Pedro Martinez may be, it is not history. The Saga of Coe Ridge is a model of how personal history ought to be presented so that its verifiability is obvious and does not come into question. All the chief informants and the chief characters of the event are verifiably named. Only rarely is information cited from an unnamed informant and only in regard to one particular cluster of incidents have the characters been kept, for reasons of privacy, pseudonymous. But this occasional necessity for shielding persons is offset by the fullness of documentation in all

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other regards. The source or sources of every item is given immediately beside that item. The time, place, and nature of the interviews with informants is carefully specified. Differing accounts are checked out against each other and their collation when it occurs made clear. The taped interviews are liberally quoted from as interviews, and within them different informants who participated in the same incident offer corroboration of what others have narrated, often moment-by-moment, in the same interview. Discrepancies and gaps in information are not glossed over but pointed out, and a concluding analysis of the historicity of the saga as a whole that emerges from these collected accounts fulfills one of the main purposes of the work. The important difference between The Saga of Coe Ridge and works like Moll Flanders and Pedro Martinez is that the problem of verification is dealt with as part of the work itself. When one reads or hears a moment-by-moment statement in which this problem is either completely ignored or only superficially met, then one can be almost certain the statement is literature. Indeed, the absence from The Oregon Trail of any outright acknowledgment of the problem of verifying the narrative is one of the factors that goes to make it such a borderline work. Parkman's equivocation with regard to the names of his British companions merely serves to emphasize this borderline character. There is not a work we have yet considered that is so equivocal as to its historical or literary status. Perhaps this is to be expected from a historian who refers to his greatest historical undertaking as a "literary" one. Parkman never seems to have quite decided with The Oregon Trail whether he was writing a travel adventure story for the entertainment of his readers or an eye-witness account of Indian life on the prairie for their edification. Both intentions seem to be at work and frequently cross each other. The issue is undeniably a close one. It is doubtful that we shall find any that is closer. First-person participant narratives are a problem for both the historian and the literary scholar because they are primary forms of both history and fiction. By defining literature as the unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event we have already begun to elucidate the nature not only of literature but of history too.

Ill THE LITERARY WORK

With the addition of unverifiability to the criteria by which literature is recognized, the definition of literature as fiction is complete. A work of literature is the imverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. Literature comprises the whole body of such statements. This definition avoids paradox and metaphor and yet includes in its compass the great bulk of what has been and is called literature, as well as much that has heretofore gone unrecognized as such. Undeniably this definition does exclude some of what has been and is called literature. An effort was made in the working out of the definition to show precisely why the works excluded from it are so. Many of those excluded share with literature one or more of the criteria of the definition but also lack one or more criteria. The diagram "Literature and Its Kin" illustrates the particular criterion whose lack excludes the work from the definition. A two-dimensional diagram, however, cannot always reflect the correlated way in which the characteristics occur or fail to occur in a single work. For example, from the very start "Kubla Khan" is excluded because it is not a statement. Yet neither is it of an event nor moment-by-moment. Indeed, a case could be made for asserting that it is not unverifiable, since Coleridge claimed in his introductory note merely to have transcribed as soon as he awoke what he dreamed on a particular occasion and the work has no other use than to present his transcription of what he dreamed. Whether the verifiability of "Kubla Khan" can be pressed or not, the point is that the characteristics of literature tend either to appear all together or to be absent all together. "Thirty days hath September", though a statement, is excluded from literature

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LITERATURE AND ITS KIN not a statement not oi an event

Tha. Waste Land. FiHnegans Woke "kubla khan *

"Thirtydays hath Sept.* Manciev'iUe's Travels Murasakt's Diary the.,

un verifiable moment -bymoment Statement of en event

The Red Notebook The. Fall of Troy benjamin franklin

not moment-by-moment

The Oregon Tbettf _ Tennessee v.s Scopes J "The Gettysburg Address"*

not unverifiable

by the definition because it is not of an event. Yet neither is it moment-by-moment, and certainly it is verifiable. Such is the negative way in which the characteristics are correlated. On the positive side, a work like Mandeville's Travels is excluded because it is not of an event. Yet it is not hard to see why it should have been thought to be literature, because it is a statement and it is unverifiable. That is, it has two obvious characteristics in common with literature. A work like Dares' The Fall of Troy shares three different characteristics with literature - statementness, e ventness, and unverifiability - but lacks moment-by-momentness. And a work like the Gettysburg Address also shares three characteristics,

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though different ones. It has moment-by-momentness, as well as being a statement of an event, and lacks only unverifiability. In the framework of this definition, therefore, it is less surprising that the Gettysburg Address should be considered literature than that "Kubla Khan" should; The Red Notebook than Finnegans Wake; The Oregon Trail than The Waste Land. Such a disparity in expectations points up the incompatibility between the fictional conception of literature and a linguistic one. Only in regard to the initial criterion - that a work of literature be a statement - have the works excluded failed to share any of the defining criteria of literature as fiction. Yet it must be admitted that many of the works excluded here by virtue of failing to be a statement are the very ones that the competing conception of literature as language would include, while The Fall of Troy or Tennessee vs. Scopes would not even be in the running. The I Ching maintains its position in histories of Chinese literature because of the antiquity and mystification of its language. Much the same must be said of the Tao Te Ching. But perhaps Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is thought of as literature simply because it was composed by someone who did also compose works of literature. Either of Blake's two poems called "The Chimney Sweeper" undoubtedly qualifies as literature according to a fictional definition. So does Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yet few would argue that Blake's letters, Eliot's essays, Coleridge's political tracts, or Joyce's book reviews are literature because composed by literary men. A line must be discernible somewhere between all the utterances of a man who composes literature and the literature that he composes. Nevertheless it would be naive to claim that The Waste Land, "Kubla Khan", and Finnegans Wake are considered to be literature merely because they were composed by literary persons. The truth of the matter is that these works were intended to be literature and have simply failed to be so by the criteria of the definition of literature as fiction established here. Yet these works would doubtless meet the criteria established by a conception of literature as language. As indicated in Chapter II, such a conception invariably

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involves the notion of linguistic deviation, whether into incoherence, vagueness, or counterstatement, and each of these three works exhibits one or more such characteristics of linguistic deviation. Here it is claimed that literature cannot be defined so as to include these works. If these works are to be covered by a definition of literature, then literature cannot be defined. The definition offered above has been achieved only by excluding such works. The challenge squarely presents itself. Since a definition of literature has been achieved on a fictional basis and since it includes more works usually called literature than it excludes, those who still prefer a conception of literature as language are challenged to go and do likewise. But to meet this challenge it is not sufficient merely to include those works that have been excluded by the fictional definition presented here. A definition - if it is to be a definition indeed - must provide principles of exclusion as well as inclusion. Such a definition cannot include everything or it ceases to be a definition and is of no use for systematic study. In defining literature there has thus been some loss. But there has also been much gain. Many works not traditionally thought of as literature have shown themselves to have more in common with it than some works traditionally designated as such. A large part of the gain has been those works cut off by the various evaluative conceptions of literature that have reigned in literary study since its inception. Songs and tales of primitive peoples, "pulp" fiction, jestbooks, broadside ballads, bawdy anecdotes, Aesop's fables, Chinese storytellers' promptbooks, saints' lives, ghost stories, dime novels, yarns, nursery rhymes, tall tales, "Westerns", detective stories (both oiiental and western), mummers' plays, parables - all are classifiable, or potentially so, as literature according to its definition as the unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. In a given instance a nursery rhyme may not present an event or a promptbook or jestbook may contain only the summary of an event, but every category possesses numerous instances that clearly qualify as literature according to this definition and regardless of the low esteem in which the category is held. The second way in which the definition has expanded the area of literature is in pointing out the literary nature of many works

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that are put forward as history, journalism, anthropology, sociology, autobiography, biography, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychical research. Many moment-by-moment statements of an event put forward as true lack, for various reasons, the characteristic of verifiability that such statements must possess in order to be accepted for what they purport to be. Histories such as Herodotus', chronicles such as Jean Froissart's, and biographies such as Ssu-ma Chi'en's, in which events long past, never recorded, and not attended by the narrators are depicted moment-by-moment, take their places alongside the historical novels being written now. Although they may be an incidental source of facts to historians, although their general propositions may be supported by archaeological excavations or less literary and more verifiable contemporary accounts, they cannot be, taken as a whole, histories because the bulk of what they narrate is unverifiable. A first-person, participant, account of a haunting from the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research or a newspaper report such as that of the death of Jesse James published in the St. Joseph, Missouri, Evening News on April 3, 1882, the day after it happened, are less elaborate examples of the kinds of fictions regularly offered as fact. The narrative of the haunting presents an event that could not have occurred as rendered because it defies the laws of space and time, the nature of verifiable reality as we know it. The newspaper report, correct as far as Jesse James' being shot to death is concerned, gives a moment-by-moment account of the killing - at which only the two brothers accused of it and the man now dead were present without citing any source for this inside information. Often such statements are rendered unverifiable by the various devices used to protect privacy - changed names, unspecified places, approximate dates. Yet these are the devices of fiction. Thus privacy is preserved at the cost of truth because verifiability has been sacrificed to these devices. The way in which Pedro Martinez, put forward as anthropological data, is rendered unverifiable by pseudonymity has already been pointed out in Chapter II. Psychological case histories are almost invariably rendered unverifiable by the necessity for protecting the privacy of the patient by changing or omitting names and altering identifying details.

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Psychiatrist Robert Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour bears the subtitle A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales and is purportedly based upon cases from his own experience. Nevertheless he rarely gives his protagonists full names, specifies the geographical location of the event, or cites any calendar dates. And after the opening words "On a certain day in a certain city" he recounts moment-by-moment, complete with dialog, an episode that he did not witness. Though put forward in the framework of science - as data - works like these had best possess a justification other than scientific because they are not science, that is, not knowledge. Truth requires sacrifices of privacy. Fiction does not. That indeed is one of its great virtues. Science's loss is literature's gain. Still, although to achieve a definition is in itself no mean feat, it must nevertheless be asked whether the one here achieved satisfies basic requirements of a definition of literature. Despite the fact that Pollock failed lamentably to achieve a satisfactory definition himself, he did discern the indisputable requirements of one. There are, he says, three basic requirements of a satisfactory analytical definition of literature, in the restricted sense. Such a definition must, whatever else it does, (1) include prose as well as verse, (2) avoid the pitfalls of the valuedefinition, and (3) distinguish the essential characteristics of literature from those of science.1 And such a statement provides a useful check list against which to match our new-made definition. Does it do these three things, and if so, how? Certainly the definition of literature as an unverifiable momentby-moment statement of an event includes prose as well as verse. A fictional definition is independent of the linguistic characteristics of a work. There is prose that is included and prose that is excluded; there is verse that is included and verse that is excluded. All that is required by way of language with a fictional definition is that the work be a statement - that it be in language and language alone and that this linguistic presentation be coherent. Thus in this restricted 1

The Nature of Literature, 9.

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sense literature is linguistic, but this is only the beginning of its definition, not the end. A distinct advantage of this relative linguistic independence is that it bypasses the problem of the lyric. Lyric poetry does not have to be accepted as a whole because of its verse character. Rather, with the concepts of "mediated" and "unmediated", it is possible to identify the essential literary features of much lyric poetry without recourse to its verseness. A lyric poem may be a narrative and thus mediated, like the vast majority of prose works of literature. More often it is unmediated, as are some prose works. Yet the direct discourse that makes for unmediatedness is characteristic of all literature. Therefore, although lyric poetry still cannot be defined, lyrics can be identified as literary works and the bulk of them included in a definition of literature. Perhaps the second of Pollock's requirements for a satisfactory definition ought to be expressed as "avoid the pitfall that is the value-definition". We cannot find out what a thing is good for until we find out what it is, and if we think we can, we shall, nevertheless find only what we think it should be. Has this pitfall been avoided? Does our definition include the good as well as the bad, regardless of what particular value good and bad may represent in a given case? Whether we think The Tale of Genji a rambling pornographic romance of tenth-century Japan or the world's first and one of its finest psychological novels, The Tale of Genji is still in either case a work of literature according to the definition. We may think that its sentimentality and verbosity render Riders of the Purple Sage a work far inferior to HrafnkeVs Saga, but both remain for all that literature according to the definition. We may have the highest opinion of the prosodic skill manifested in "Ode to a Nightingale", yet it is literature to no greater a degree for this accomplishment than "Pussy cat, pussy cat". The Metamorphoses may be a work of great importance for and influence upon Western civilization, yet it is not more literary for this cultural significance than are the old tales of the Maori collected in Polynesian Mythology, which few students of Western civilization have ever read. The Arabian Nights is scorned by Arabic scholars and literati because of its colloquial language

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and frivolous subjects. Nevertheless The Arabian Nights is unequivocally literature according to the definition. The phenomenon of literature embraces the letters of a semiliterate baseball player and a physician's appalling narrative of an epidemic of the bubonic plague, even though one has the high seriousness that the other lacks. The Gettysburg Address undoubtedly is more moving and significant than "Pussy cat, pussy cat". And because it is verifiable, "Thirty days hath September" undoubtedly is more useful than "Pussy cat, pussy cat". Nevertheless, usefulness and emotional power are criteria of value, not literary criteria. Despite its lack of pathos or usefulness, "Pussy cat, pussy cat" is literature and the Gettysburg Address and "Thirty days hath September" are not. Quality, historical importance, linguistic skill, seriousness of purpose, usefulness, emotional power, seriousness of subject, linguistic propriety - all or any of these may be crucial factors in our evaluation of a literary work, but they do not affect our classification of it as literature, as the unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. When Pollock states as the third requirement of a satisfactory analytic definition of literature that it distinguish the essential characteristics of literature from those of science, he presumably means to distinguish literary statements from scientific statements. And this the definition here established has already gone a long way toward doing simply in the process of its establishment. Beyond being statements, the vast majority of scientific statements have nothing in common with literature at all, for they are rarely the statement of an event, much less moment-by-moment. Only history bears sufficient resemblance to literature to warrant the necessity of distinguishing between them. A narrative history or a memoir or a transcript can be, like literature, the statement of an event; upon occasion it can even be moment-by-moment. The important difference is that history is knowledge and therefore a historical statement must be verifiable. Otherwise it is not, in the strict sense, history. Whether history is really a science or not is a theoretical question not to be engaged here. Science in the strict sense and history do share the characteristic of verifiability. A scientific proposition is a

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proposition that can be verified by reference to something in the real world - a duplicable experiment or mathematical procedure or the tangible record of the past or present existence of something. History may be more circumscribed in its possibilities of verification but verification is still a central feature of history just as it is of science. History has reference to the real world, to real events of the past and real records of them in the present. Therefore both science in general and history in particular are readily distinguished from literature on the basis of this adherence to reality. The conception of reality may change from time to time, but the means by which it is determined at any given time is verification - recourse to what exists and what has existed. A literary work, on the other hand, creates an event that has no existence outside itself and therefore is by nature unverifiable. Science in the widest sense and literature are thus not just distinguishable but, rather, mutually exclusive.

A. THE MODE OF EXISTENCE OF THE WORK

Having defined literature we have, at least in some sense, 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?" 2 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. Not only does Theory of Literature attempt to define literature (ending up, however, with two incompatible definitions), but also Wellek attempts 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. 142). This is not an uncommon question in specula2

Theory of Literature, 142.

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tions about art and aesthetics. And the traditional answers to it are those countered by Wellek - that the work 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 experience 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 (physical, like a statue) nor mental (psychological, 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 collective ideology, changing with it, accessible only through individual mental experiences, based on the sound-structure ot its sentences, (p. 156) 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 tnat elementary rule of classification that requires that one define positively rather than make up a category simply by exclusion. Yet there is something to every paradox. It embodies truisms that we all recognize but cannot reconcile. And these self-contradictory axioms derive, predictably enough, from selfcontradictory sources. The question that gives rise to Wellek's answer is itself a splice made from two incompatible ideas. He 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 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, secondly, 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 artT 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

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known? Then the question would seem to want 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 that 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 alternatives. Neither works of art nor literary works heretofore have been satisfactorily identified and defined by any one. Indeed, considerations regarding mode of existence seem to be designed primarily to get around the more fundamental problem and necessity of definition. This is readily apparent in what Wellek omits to consider under mode of existence. Thete is no attempt to establish any contingency between the mode of existence of literary works (Chapter 12) and their nature (Chapter 2). Chapter 2, as was pointed out above, asserts that "Language is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paints of pictures, or sounds of music" (p. 22), but then 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 ...". The important point here is that Wellek admits to language being the medium of literature 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 language is a necessary preliminary step vo 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 of language?" The literary work of ait 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, something that, for want of a better term, may be called mental.

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Then, most important of all, if Wellek had actually posed the question that he has had to try to answer in this roundabout way, he would have seen at once that it was unanswerable. 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 that is the topic of the previous chapter 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 statements 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. While we cannot fathom the ultimate nature of language and/or meaning, we can, on the other hand, identify and analyze the various conventions of language and ascertain which ones are relevant to interpreting specific statements. The purpose of this study is to identify the conventions that 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 philosophical, 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 as rendered 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

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statement that are attributes of the work and those that are attributes of its oral or written presentation. There are many features commonly associated with literary works, such as titles, illustrations, prefaces, typography, that are not by 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 without 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.

B. THE MODE OF EXISTENCE OF THE EVENT

Every literary work has to do with an event. It may refer to the event directly, as in a mediated work, or indirectly, as in an unmediated work. In either case the event referred to is the essence of the work. Without the moment-by-moment statement of an event there is no literary work. Yet this event that is the essence of the work has never in reality taken place. The event as stated has been made up; it is a fiction. Although purportedly of space and time, it in fact has never occupied space and time. Where then is the event and what kind of thing is it? Or, to put the matter in Wellek's terms, what is the mode of existence of a fictional event ? An assertion about a real event has a space-time referent. The assertion that "The author of Paradise Lost lived in the seventeenth century" is true. The meaning therefore of this assertion about John Milton derives from its reference to an actual spacetime event. The assertion that "The author of Return to Paradise lived in the seventeenth century" is false. The meaning therefore of this assertion about James Michener cannot derive from a space-time referent because it does not have one. James Michener's existence in the seventeenth century is an existence that occurs only in the minds of the persons who hear or read the assertion. One can understand well enough what the assertion is asserting, but its meaning has no existence except in our understanding. An event called to mind by a statement but having no verifiable space-

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time existence independent of 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 aspect of statements but part of the mental or semantic aspect. The event of a literary work, like the event of the false assertion about the author of Return to Paradise, never occurred in the world and thus has no space-time referent; it is an imaginary construct in the mind of the reader or hearer of the work. The meaning of a verifiable assertion of an event is coextensive with its space-time referent: to know the reality of the event is to know the meaning of the statement. But with literature the meaning is the referent: to envision the event is to know the meaning of the statement. In this sense all literature is imagistic. Or, to put it another way, whether or not a literary work is imaginative in the laudatory sense of the term, it is as literature always imaginary. "Imaginary" means "existing only in the imagination", and this is precisely where the event of a literary work does exist and nowhere else. Consequently, while the statement of an unverifiable event can be exactly determined and characterized, the event that it states cannot always be. When an event is unverifiable and exists only in the minds of the readers or hearers, 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 demonstrably inadequate, but some seem neither sufficiently supported or denied, and therefore a reader or hearer who accepts such an inference will conceive of an event slightly different from that conceived by the reader or hearer who rejects or never thinks of the alternate possibility. This is not to maintain that the literary work is open to any and every interpretation and that its complete meaning lies inaccessibly in the mind of the reader or hearer. Quite the contrary, the purpose here must be to delimit the area of individual discrepancy in the conception of the event and to show in what instances it is relevant or not to interpreting the meaning of the work. For, though we be at variance with the tendencies of modern

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literary criticism, we must insist that each work does have a meaning and one only. There is not a variety of acceptable interpretations nor even different levels of meanings for a single work. If literary works are meaningful, and our definition of literature is based on the recognition that they are, then each work is subject to one - and just one - most adequate interpretation. The establishment of such an interpretation makes its intellectual demands, however, and has its core of commonality that shades off into individual irrelevant differences. The event of a literary work is not discerned only from the alleged facts that are stated as part of the statement. Since the event is the construct that each reader or hearer imagines for himself if he understands or is able to interpret the statement, the event includes not only the details given in the statement but also the inferences that are necessary if the meaning is to be a single, though unverifiable, space-time event. No work can give all the information that is relevant to envisioning the event, no matter how circumscribed the event nor detailed the statement. There is no statement of an event that could not be fuller than it is. Consequently, even the most rigorous and conservative interpretation of a literary work includes inferences - details of the event that are not explicitly stated in the work. The role of inference in discerning the event of unmediated works is especially obvious. If the work is an individual utterance, we have to infer the entire event of which it is a part, often including speaker and spoken to, in order to discern that the statement is a literary work. But while these inferences are certainly warranted by the nature of the statement, they are rarely stated outright. We are not told that the speaker in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Felix Randal" is a priest nor that he is speaking to a messenger. But if we do not infer this, the work will not be comprehensible to us. Inferences are perhaps less obviously necessary to our tinderstanding of mediated works. Nevertheless here too they play an indispensable role in our perception of the event. In Katherine Anne Porter's "Old Mortality" we must infer that the protagonist Miranda was enrolled in the convent school where we find her "immured" halfway through the story, even though there has been no account of this enrollment, which must have taken place after

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the event began. 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 Grandmother's farm and when Part II begins she is in a New Orleans convent school. Since these are not 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 the boarding school. This fact is not stated in the work, but any interpretation of the event that denies this inference can be demonstrated to be inadequate. And an interpretation that does include it can be justified by obvious and compelling reasons. The event of every literary work thus includes not only the details given in the statement of it but also all the details that must of necessity have existed or occurred within the limits of the event. Since the protagonists of Jane Austen and Henry James are represented as human beings, the inference is justifiable that they are as compelled to defecate as are the protagonists of Rabelais, Swift, or Joyce. It is impossible to conceive of a human being existing for several months without doing more physiologically than drinking tea. Insofar as a work is a statement of a single unified event we are aware of many activities that must occur within its limits without their being stated. This awareness does not, however, permit speculation about Hamlet at Wittenberg or the girlhood 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 Hamlet meets the ghost and the time he meets his death he eats and sleeps. The inference derives from our recognition that Hamlet is depicted as a human being. (Since the ghost of Hamlet's father, however, is a real ghost, whether sent by Heaven or Hell, inferences about his alimentary functions are not necessary to the perception of the event.) To see a work as a single unified event is to see it as a continuous segment of space and time rather than as a series of discrete episodes and intermittent existences. The event in Hamlet involves everything that happens,

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whether stated or implied, from the time the ghost appears to the carrying of the corpses from the scene - from the first moment-bymoment account to the last. These sorts of inferences are necessary to our imagination of the event but not, however, it is important to emphasize, to our interpretation of the statement. The difference between what is required for conceiving the event and what is required for interpreting the work may be clearly illustrated by "Ode to a Nightingale". Because this literary work is an utterance, we must infer a speaker in the event of which the utterance is a part. And we also infer, unless otherwise indicated, that because someone speaks this someone is human. And because we infer that the speaker is human, we make, even without thinking about it, the undeniable inference that the speaker is a member of one of the two sexes. There are just two alternatives. Yet there is no way of deciding upon one. But in conceiving of the event we conceive of one and cannot conceive of both at the same time. Recognizing that a statement creates an event by providing 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 needed but uninferable 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 eaily summer rather than a late summer night, but we are neither obliged 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. Indeed, a necessary inference may take us even beyond the conclusion of the statement. Compare, for example, the conclusion of Herman Melville's Moby Dick with that of B. Traven's The Death Ship. Both works are narrated by first-person participants

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in the event. Yet at the end of the final chapter of Moby Dick, as far as the reader can tell, the ship Pequod, all its whaleboats, and all its crew have sunk to the bottom of the sea. If it were not for the brief epilog that the narrator Ishmael adds, explaining how he was thrown free of the sinking ship and its vortex and managed to grasp hold of a sealed coffin, which buoyed him up for a day and night amidst the shark-infested waters, until he was rescued by another ship, the reader would be left to wonder how Ishmael survived to write his account. Nonetheless we would have to infer that he did survive, though we were not informed how, because his first-person, participant, narration is told in the past-tense and yet is carried up to the very end of the event. In The Death Ship the survival of the narrator is precisely what we must infer. For in its last chapter the narrator describes how he and his companion, shipwrecked far out to sea amidst waves fifty feet high, have tied each other to a floating wooden bulkhead and are going crazy with thirst. The narrator's companion in his crazed state manages to undo his ropes and plunge to his death in the water. That is the last thing we are told. There is no epilog to explain how the narrator was rescued from his seemingly hopeless circumstances. But rescued we must infer he was since he narrates the event in the past-tense and thus after its occurrence. A created or fictional event yields as rigorous a set of logical implications as a real one. The event may be quite fantastical or supernatural; the statement of it is still literature so long as the creator enables the reader or listener to imagine or envision the event. Imaginativeness or vividness in the usual sense is not involved. The task is merely that of being unambiguous in presenting what is alleged to happen. Edith Wharton makes it clear at the beginning of her ghost story, "Afterward", that ghosts do come with the old house the Boynes wish to rent at Lyng but that one never realizes he has seen a ghost there until long after he has seen it. This is the postulate of the story. One does not have to believe in the existence of ghosts in order to imagine the event of the story. All the creator has to do is to show the way in which - given this postulate about an event - such an event could be conceived to occur. And this Edith Wharton does. The Boynes do see a ghost and do not realize

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it until long afterward and the way in which they are presented as doing so enables the reader to see the ghost too. Strangely enough, however, Edith Wharton's contemporary, Henry James, failed in his much-discussed short novel The Turn of the Screw to accomplish this elementary task of the creator of literature. Indeed this failure is the principal reason for the novel's being so much discussed and its meaning so frequently debated. James did succeed in the most basic task, that of creating an event. Yet a basic part of the event - of what happens - is impossible to discern. Enough of the event has been worked out to constitute a work of literature but not enough to make it entirely conceivable and thus interpretable. The question that James raises in The Turn of the Screw is whether or not the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel do exist and do appear. James insists in his preface to it that the ghosts are real ghosts. Yet the author's assertion is neither here nor there. The problem is whether it is possible to discern the reality of the ghosts in the work. And the conclusion must be that it is not possible. At tne same time neither is it possible on the basis of the event as stated in the work to deny the reality of the ghosts. None of the other characters in the story ever admits to seeing the two ghosts that the governess, who is the sole source of the account, insists she sees. Thus, on the one hand, we have only the governess's word for the ghosts' appearance. And when in the presence of the housekeeper she sees the ghost of Miss Jessel and points it out, the housekeeper says that she herself can see no ghost. The little girl, present at the same scene, also denies the appearance of the ghost. On the other hand, incidents occur that seem to be accountable for only by the existence of the ghosts, such as the little girl's managing to row a boat with man-sized oars across the lake or the boy's being dismissed from school without reason. The result is a draw. One knows that the ghost in Hamlet is real because four different persons see it, and on different occasions as well. If James wanted his readers, as he said he did, to conceive of his ghosts as real ghosts, why did he not give conviction to the governess's account by providing confirming witnesses? This would be particularly

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necessary if you were going to put the governess's word to the test as James does when he has the governess see the ghost in the presence of the little girl and the housekeeper. Defenders of James' presentation of the event here claim that the reason the housekeeper cannot see the ghost is that she is too gross (Her name is Mrs. Grose). She is alleged to be a good woman but simply lacking in the imagination that the governess and the children possess. Nevertheless she is depicted as accepting the reality of the ghosts on the governess's word alone, even when her own eyesight explicitly refutes it. In this trustfulness she seems rather to exhibit an extraordinary imagination and sympathy, for things unseen are harder to believe in than things seen. It would be difficult for the reader to imagine anyone in real life capable of it. Moreover, the reader knows something Mrs. Grose does not know that raises doubts about the governess's reliability. The governess decides, after a tug of wills with the little boy outside the church, not to attend service. Instead she returns to the house intending to pack up and leave, goes to the schoolroom for her things, and there - according to the account she gives the reader in her manuscript written long after the event - is surprised by the ghost of Miss Jessel and addresses it with the sole words "You terrible, miserable woman!" to which it gives no reply but silently disappears. However, in the same account, when the governess tells her confidante, the housekeeper, about this encounter, she says, first, that she returned to the house intentionally to have a talk with Miss Jessel and, second, that Miss Jessel said that she suffers the torments of the damned and wants to get hold of the little girl to share them with her. Again, James' defenders may claim that the governess has to make explicit to the limited imagination of Mrs. Grose what she with her superior sensibility has discerned without the aid of words. But it is not at all perceptible to the reader, made party to the encounter, how the governess could have gotten this information out of the mute ghost. When Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and none of his companions do, the reality of the ghost nevertheless does not come into question. This is the apparition of a murdered man arising to haunt his murderer and so cause him to betray his crime to his

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companions. Whether we conceive of the ghost as a projection of Macbeth's imagination or as a "real ghost", its function is the same and perfectly clear. But the reader cannot assume that James is relying on some traditional conception of relationships between supernatural and human beings because insofar as he seems to depict the governess as trustworthy he runs counter to such traditional conceptions. James does make it plain that the ghosts are evil. And in traditional theology and folk belief a woman who has concourse with evil spirits is a witch. Why would a young welleducated parson's daughter be able to see and obtain a silent understanding with evil spirits that are invisible to an elderly illiterate housekeeper? Traditional beliefs would provide us only with assumptions against the governess. Most of those interpreters of The Turn of the Screw who put their trust, like Mrs. Grose, in the governess insist that the event is not ultimately ambiguous, that, although the question could go either way until the final scene, this scene decides for the reality of the ghosts. Nevertheless these interpreters must be reminded that no one but the governess, even in this final scene, is shown seeing the ghost. The little boy sesms to betray a knowledge of them, but when one appears at the window, he does not see it, although the governess does. Once again, the scene is pretty much of a draw. If The Turn of the Screw were a film, the director would have to decide whether or not to show the apparitions, especially when other characters accompany the governess. And if he showed them, he would create one kind of event, and if he decided not to, he would create another kind of event. James, however, by putting his statement of the event into a first-person, participant, narrative and refraining from allowing other characters to corroborate the narrator, has been able to avoid deciding upon the reality of the apparitions in this event and to prevent a decision, as far as his statement of the event goes, from ever being achieved on it. Perhaps the most puzzling feature of the whole problem regarding the event of The Turn of the Screw is that James wrote another story just like it. "The Way It Came" is also a ghost story and a first-person, participant, narration. And it also creates an insoluble ambiguity in a crucial part of the event because it fails to provide

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corroboration for the narrator's interpretation of the event. The narrator and her fiancé disagree as to whether the woman who visited him was a ghost or the real woman. The fiancé has had a prior supernatural experience but denies that this was one; the narrator insists upon the supernaturalness of her fiancé's experience but was not herself present when it occurred. The narrator is convinced, moreover, ihat the ghost is continuing to appear to her fiancé and breaks the engagement because of it, but he denies this also. "Evidence" is provided for what the narrator claims (but then it is provided by her) and for what the fiancé claims, and there is no way of deciding between them and therefore no way of deciding upon the meaning of the work. Did James forget that the events he presents are events of his own creation - fictional events ? It is incumbent upon the creator of an imaginary event to make clear what is to be imagined. Otherwise, why bother with an imaginary event at all? Ambiguity of this sort does not even exist in real life. In real life we would know that there cannot be attractive female ghosts that visit their lovers every night, and thus that the narrator is crazy or lying. But even if such ambiguity did exist in real life, at least it would then have the virtue of being the truth insofar as the truth was knowable. A fictional event is not contemplated for its reality, no matter how realistically it may be presented. Matters of "evidence" cannot be pressed very hard in a fictional statement of an event. Tùe creator has to apprise the reader or listener of the postulates that are to be taken as "facts" for the purpose of creating the event because the reader or listener has otherwise no access to them. These are precisely what the creator creates, and we willingly go along with them for the satisfactions that a fictional - as opposed to a real event provides. James' intentional mystifications of the basic literary experience betray a naivety about the nature of a fictional event that can be matched only by those creators of literature who insist upon the evidential character of the events they themselves have created. Of course there is a great deal of protestation in literature about the truth of the fictional events stated that does not signify much. It is part of the game to protest the truth of what is so

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obviously not true. Nevertheless there are instances in the realm of literature of works that are put forward as evidence and quite straightforwardly so, it would seem, because they appear to possess no other point or aim than that of being true. At the end of his short story "The Draftee" ("Le Requisitionnaire"), Balzac adds an oddly superfluous paragraph. The heroine has just died and her personal maid attributes her death to the shock of both disappointment and trespass that she has just suffered. The reader would agree; all of the event points this way. Yet the author goes on to comment gratuitously that the Countess's death was undoubtedly owing to some awful vision because at the very moment she died in one place her only son was shot to death in another. Therefore, he says, We can add this tragic event to all those cases that have been recorded of sympathies that defy the laws of space, to the documents a few men alone in the wilderness are collecting with scientific interest, and from which there may some day be extracted the first principles of a new science that today still awaits a man of genius. This is absurd. Since the Countess never in fact lived, her equally fictional death is of no scientific value whatsoever, even if there were such a science. Because Balzac's comment is little more than a postscript to his fully realized and thematically lucid literary work, it can be ignored when the meaning of the work is interpreted. But just what is to be made of Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705"? The very first sentence asserts, "This relation is matter of fact, and attended with such circumstances as may induce any reasonable man to believe it." And the last sentences read: "And why we should dispute matter of fact because we cannot solve things of which we have no certain or demonstrative notions, seems strange to me. Mrs. Bargrave's authority and sincerity alone would have been undoubted in any other case." The good reputation of Mrs. Bargrave and the circumstantiality of her account are supposed to suffice to convince us of the truth of an event that is completely inexplicable, for which we have only one person's word, and which is narrated

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to us moment-by-moment. From this unverifiable moment-bymoment statement of an event we are to conclude that "there is a life to come after this" and that we should prepare oui souls for it. "A True Relation" has no ostensible purpose other than to persuade the reader of life after death as demonstrated by Mrs. Veal's apparition to Mrs. Bargrave. And evidently it has succeeded in convincing many a reader. In a discussion of it Edward Wagenknecht declares: "Though long regarded as fiction, we now know that it was a masterly piece of reporting of an incident well known in Kent, the kind of thing that might appear today in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research."3 The Proceedings have already been cited above as a likely source of modern fiction. And if "A True Relation" is "a masterly piece of reporting", so is the newspaper story of the death of Jesse James, also cited above. Bonamy Dobree as well seems to consider "A True Relation" true but that its truth makes no difference. Whether, as now, we recognize the little work as a piece of accurate and inspired journalism, or regard it as once was done as a piece of equally inspired invention - with Defoe it is always impossible to disentangle fact from fiction - the result is an indubitable gem. From the very beginning the verisimility he thrusts upon us compels us to accept it all as a 'true relation'. To give us confidence, he tells us at the outset that Mrs. Bargrave is his intimate friend; he can 'avouch for her reputation for the last fifteen or sixteen years' - the very vagueness of the date is reassuring.4

It is difficult to see how the fact that such a story was current at the time is sufficient to make Defoe's account of it a fact. Nor does it inspire us with confidence to be told that Defoe claims Mrs. Bargrave as his intimate friend. Defoe does nothing of the kind. The author of the preface to "A True Relation", who is presumably Defoe, states unequivocally that the author of the relation is a woman who lives in Canterbury "within a few doors of the house" of Mrs. Bargrave. The author of the preface does not even claim acquaintance with the author of the relation. Indeed the relation is said to have passed through at least five people before 3 4

Cavalcade of the English Novel ( N e w York, 1943; rev. ed. 1954), 31. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740, The Oxford

History of English Literature (New York and London, 1959), 52.

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reaching the printed page. Mrs. Bargrave told it to her neighbor, who sent it to her kinsman ("a very sober and understanding gentleman"), who evidently passed it on to a justice of the peace at Maidstone, who sent it "to his friend in London, as it is here worded". And we are not told whether the friend in London is the same person as the author of the preface. The whole purport of "A True Relation" is that it is true. So it does make a difference whether it really is true. Yet it is obviously fiction. A fiction whose sole purport is that it be fact is something of a failure - as literature. "A True Relation" has not failed to be literature, for it is indisputably the unverifiable momentby-moment statement of an event. Nor, even though it is a ghost story, is any part of its event ambiguous as in The Turn of the Screw. It has a kind of flaw we have not met before. Though like The Turn of the Screw, "A True Relation" is ultimately uninterpretable, this is not because of ambiguity but because it lacks a theme. Since it is not true, it cannot be meaningful referentially. And since its only purport is to be true, it cannot be meaningful analogously, or thematically. Analogous meaning or theme is the kind of meaning that literature, which is not referential, possesses. Its nature is taken up in Chapter VII below. For the moment suffice it to say that "A True Relation" has failed to be meaningful in the characteristic way that literature is meaningful. But then perhaps Defoe was not trying to write literature. "A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal" was originally published in 1706 as an appendix to a book on death by Drelincourt. And this same book on death by Drelincourt is much mentioned in "A True Relation". The apparition of Mrs. Veal "reminded Mrs. Bargrave of ... much of the conversation they had with each other ... what books they read, and what comfort in particular they received from Drelincourt's book of death, which was the best, she said, on the subject ever written". She also mentioned some other books, "but Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest notions of death and of the future state of any who had handled that subject". Then she asked Mrs. Bargrave whether she had Drelincourt. She said, "Yes." Says Mrs. Veal, "Fetch it." And so Mrs. Bargrave goes upstairs

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and brings it down. Says Mrs. Veal, "Dear Mrs. Bargrave,... the notions we have of heaven now are nothing like to what it is, as Drelincourt says." We would not be far from right to think that what "A True Relation" is really is an advertisement for Drelincourt's book on death. In order to sell this book on death, Defoe brought in Mrs. Veal, who had purportedly "been there", to provide a testimonial. Because a literary event exists only in the imagination, however, it cannot be a source of testimonials and facts. Yet it is not only literary men writing "true relations" who misunderstand this aspect of literature, but also scientists writing literature. And, if a scientist does not understand the nature of fiction, he at least ought to be able to recognize what could or could not be a fact. B.F. Skinner, professor of psychology and author of technical treatises on the science of human behavior, actually managed to produce a work of literature with Walden Two. It is an unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. Yet Skinner seems to have forgotten that the Utopian community he describes is a product of his own imagination, because he depicts the characters in this literary work as continually referring to Walden Two as an accomplished fact. Whenever the straw man skeptic, philosophy professor Augustine Castle, asks, "Where's your proof?" the originator of Walden Two, T.E. Frazier, replies, "The proof of an accomplished fact? Don't be absurd!" (Chapter 8). More than a dozen times throughout the work, Walden Two is designated thus - as an "accomplished fact". All the questions the skeptic raises, and would pursue if he were not the author's creation, are shunted aside by this appeal to the fact of Walden Two. No conception is ever furnished of the economics of founding this community that has only a thousand members but as much or more machine technology to take care of them as any real community a hundred times the size. The problem of "foreign exchange" is mentioned only once, with the cryptic comment that the community has not yet made a satisfactory adjustment but is paying its way (Chapter 10). Besides, a moment later, with "a gesture of impatience", Frazier exclaims,

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"But this is idiotic! There's no problem here at all! No one can seriously doubt that a well-managed community will get along successfully as an economic unit. A child could prove it. The real problems are psychological. I really shouldn't talk about these details at all. They'll mislead you." But details are just what a literary work, with its imaginary event, requires. What is "idiotic" is to be told no one can doubt that a community's economic success is a consequence of its psychological well-being instead of its relations with the world outside, not to mention the earth inside. Nevertheless, whether "a child could prove it" or not, proof is not what a literary work has to offer. What it can do is show the way in which such a community could be conceived of as paying its own way. Skinner has failed not just to demonstrate the economic success of the community but even to imagine it. Let us grant, however, his hypothesis that the economics of a Utopia are subordinate to the psychology of it. Since this is a literary work and not a scientific treatise, the reader can entertain such a narrow hypothesis, providing only that it be rendered as an event. What is rendered as an event in Walden Two, however, are discussions about whether or not to accept the accomplished fact as a good thing. Some principles of behavioral psychology are talked about, such as positive reinforcement and controlled exposure to frustration. But none of these is exemplified in an event or part of the event rendered moment-by-moment. We are not even shown how those people who were brought up by such methods successfully managed to avoid the psychological problems besetting those not so brought up, and so be able to conceive of the advantage of such principles, if not their implementation. Since it is the discussion about Walden Two that is rendered moment-by-moment, evidently Skinner's aim is not to show his readers how a U t o p i a can be imagined but rather how arguing about one can be imagined. And after all there are a number of literary works that do little more than present people arguing or debating, such as Plato's Republic, Castiglione's The Courtier, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Dialog, as we saw in Chapter 11, lies at the heait of literature, and the representation of

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debate, as well as indisputably being literature, often contains - because it is conflict - opportunities for vivid drama. As far as literature is concerned, all that is required is that the way in which the Good Life, for example, can be debated be shown. But Walden Two does not do even this. Chapter 20 is ostensibly devoted to a debate between Castle and Frazier as to what is the Good Life, but actually the debate never gets going, because Frazier is presented as denying that there is anything to debate: "... The philosopher in search of a rational basis for deciding what is good has always reminded me of the centipede trying to decide how to walk. Simply go ahead and walk! We all know what's good, until we stop to think about it." And to prove that we all know what is good, Frazier asks if there is any doubt that health is better than sickness. Castle answers that sickness, even death, might at some times be chosen over health. But the point seems ridiculous to Frazier: "Other things being equal, we choose health. ... The technical problem is simple enough. Perhaps we can find time tomorrow to visit our medical building." In other words, there is nothing to argue about; the premises of the Good Life upon which Walden Two was founded are self-evident, and its successful foundation is an accomplished fact. Castle has nothing to reply to such remarks, so Frazier continues what is now a peroration rather than a debate and concludes: "And that's all, Mr. Castle - absolutely all. I can't give you a rational justification for any of it. I can't reduce it to any principle of 'the greatest good'. This is the Good Life. We know it. It's a fact, not a theory." Skinner seems to think that because he has created Walden Two he has created Walden Two. A scientist of all people ought to be able to recognize the dilference between a fictional event and an accomplished fact. Not that it is unreasonable for a scientist to use literature to work out a formulation - quite the contrary; William Blake's dictum, "What is now proved was once only imagined", provides the rationale. Literature is the place to work out the conceivable, the imaginable. Not everything that can be imagined can be consciously established, but everything that has been consciously established has had first

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to be imagined. Yet just as there are principles of scientific investigation, so there are principles of literary formulation, requirements for the construction of fictional events rendered moment-bymoment. An event whose mode of existence is imaginary carries weight just to the extent that it is rendered consistently specific, because it can only show how something could conceivably be, never that it is. Skinner's failure to implement this principle of literary formulation and his recurrent appeal instead to the fact of his fiction have added Walden Two to that small group of literary works for which it seems impossible to work out the theme or meaning. In this case science's loss has not been literature's gain.

C. THE LIMITS OF THE STATEMENT

Having delineated the range and usefulness of the concept of the mode of existence of a literary event, we may now relate it to the problem of establishing the limits of the statement that, 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 answer 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 versions" 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 activities. 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 criteria 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 "variant 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 will then be extremely rare in

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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 considerable 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 in the same language other than those produced by typographical errors. Even an author's revisions frequently embody material changes, that is, changes in the information necessary to create 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 edition. Fredson Bowers notes anxiously, for example, that the sixth and most frequently reprinted edition of The Scarlet Letter contains 62 variant words.5 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. Such wholesale alteration of the statement without any concomitant change in the event probably never occurs, however, except when one writer undertakes to revise his own or someone else's work. Thus Mark Twain's "emendation" of a passage from Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans purports to say in 215 words 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 offered. 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 5

"Textual Criticism", in James Thorpe, ed., The Aims and Methods of

Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York, 1963), 23.

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was their wish first to break down his resolution, and to reduce him to the level of a complaining 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 intolerable, though it might not be immediately dangerous. As often happened, however, on these occasions, this distance 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 instant had not Hetty rushed through the crowd, armed with a stick, and scattered the blazing pile in a dozen directions. More than one hand was raised to strike the presumptuous 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: In a minute he was once more fastened to the tree. The fire was immediately lighted. It was not the intention of the Hurons to destroy Deerslayer'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 reminding 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, dear!" cried Judith, "for that brave and ready act. Heaven itself has sent you on its holy errand. ..." 6 Nothing occurs in Cooper's account that does not also occur in Twain's. Twain eliminates n o detail of the event that either 6

"Cooper's Prose Style", in Bernard DeVoto, ed., Letters From Earth (New York, 1964), 122-24. Twain does add six words at the end, which, though amusing, are neither to Cooper's point nor to ours.

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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 inferable 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 preference. 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 variatior, not with any means of choosing one version over another. While the elimination of 150 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 Keats' "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, that could be resolved 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 two lines; if that were all that were involved, an understanding of the sentiments expressed in the lines would be the only concern. But the problem goes deeper. The sentiments can not be clear because it is not clear whose sentiments 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 is 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 " M y 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 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

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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 addressed 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 "Pussy cat, pussy cat" in presenting the unmediated words of two speakers, but there is a question as to whether the event is like that of "Ode to a Nightingale" in having only one speaker (the Nightingale never replies) or like "My Last Duchess" in including two. 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 quotation. 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

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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 "historian, who canst thus express a ... tale" and as "a friend to man, to whom thou say'st". But contrary to this, the urn also is addressed as the "bride of quietness", "the foster-child of silence", "silent form". And thecontradictoriness of these two alternatives is reenforced by the oxymorons in the imagery of flowery tales, leaf-fringed legends, unheard melodies, ditties of no tone, ditties piped not to the sensual ear but to the spirit.7 Thus, unless the textual critic can establish textually that Keats intended punctuation marks around these two lines, he cannot solve this crucial ambiguity, for although a solution would be provided by discovering 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 ambiguity 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 shortcomings, the value of textual criticism is clearly overemphasized. What the author has not done the critic, textual or otherwise, cannot do for him. Doubtless there are occasions when actual incomprehensibility is eliminated by recourse to variant editions or to original manuscripts. But the desire to recover and preserve the purity of the author's "intended" version, which 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 intention regarding these kinds of variations; and (2) that any unauthorized change in the text is a "corruption" and therefore must make a significant difference. When the textual critic has to acknowledge, as Bowers does, that we cannot in many 7 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 envision 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.

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instances find a single intention, even if there may have been one, that authors often seem not to have remembered what it was, if they had one, that some authors do not notice or seem to care about alterations that do occur, that alterations in the course of transmission are inevitable, then any support for the first assumption entirely disappears. 8 To these admissions has been added the point that the textual critic is frequently presented with conflicting 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 instead of one. This conception of variant versions following from the definition of literature presented here is not mere quibbling. 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 imaginative skill not on the meaning or achievement of the author at all but on what turns out to be a typographical discrepancy. Bowers cites the instance in which F. O. Matthiessen identified "Soiled fish of the sea" as a Melvillian discordia concors that "could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors ... of the immaterial 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'." 9 The incident does not therefore demonstrate the need for accurate texts, however. Whether the fish are soiled or coiled makes absolutely no difference in the meaning of the novel in which the 8

Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1959), 1-34. Note especially the anecdote concerning Eliot's failure to remember his own revisions, pp. 3233. But Bowers does not draw the obvious conclusion. 9 "Textual Criticism", 23.

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phrase appears since it is merely a general comment about deep sea fish and not about particular fish that participate in the 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, consequently, is the essential subjectivity and scholarly worthlessness of such generalizations as Matthiessen's. Generalizations 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 use the far-fetched interpretations of New Critics like William Empson, who bases the whole point of an Eliot poem on a printer's discrepancy in the last three lines, as their rationale for insisting upon the recovery of the initial purity of an author's text because "an author's punctuation and capitalization (and possibly his spelling and word-division) are literary instruments" (p. 24). But if they are not instruments for determining 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 that 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 that the work

creates. This must be the scholar's basic principle of analysis. Some creators give more, some less, assistance in the interpretation of the event by means of the comment upon it and the disposition 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 incidental features of the written or printed text, whether type faces, line arrangements, colors, illustrations, or illuminations. 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

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literal narrative lines or the blank page were omitted from Tristram Shandy, 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 obscurities 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 original, for it affects neither the statement nor the event and therefore is just like the Treasure Island map. No reference 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 described as "broken altar" in the opening lines. Any of these features may or may not be part of the statement, depending on whether or not they are referred to by the statement 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 typographical styling were probably as great as his contributions 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 features 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 that seem 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 that provides information of the fictional event qua fictional 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

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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 detachable elements are not the eighteen Chapter Ones of the eighteen books that 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 details of the event can be untangled from commentary. As far, at least, as this study is concerned, the notion of titles is like that of plays, lyrics, novels, 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 shortened form of it. The titles of some works have been lost and new labels have been supplied for convenience. And, indeed, the policy that works but not titles can be copyrighted 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 regarded as such; not all titles are included within our conception of literature. For example, no work that is an utterance can have a title that 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 fictional event. In the case of "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 Albert Camus' unmediated short novel The Fall. There is no conventional labeling of this utterance; instead there was a deliberate choice that seems to be a commentary on the theme of the work. However, if we allow this title to be part of the statement of event, then we can no longer interpret the event as unmediated and would be forced to read it as a third-person account. Not only does this alternative seem an inadequate interpretation of the work, it also fails to take into account the several reasons for viewing detachable elements as in fact detached - detached at least insofar as the event and the statement that creates it are

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concerned. When a work is a third-person account, then the question of titles does not really arise since a title is itself a similarly undifferentiated "statement." The title (as well as the epigraph it comes from) of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls 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 puiported author, Mr. Shandy, with the title. The title, therefore, is part of the work because it is part of the narrating of the event. Coleridge's poem "Dejection: An Ode" is the utterance 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 words of ttie man begin there is in italics a four-line stanza from the ballad "Six Patrick Spence" that 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" that prefaces the first stanza) only to provide a thematic introduction and to insure that the important reference will not be lost. The event of the poem is not a man composing an ode; it is a man talking. Ttie only way in which the lines from the ballad could be made part of this statement is for the speaker to speak them. 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 summaries to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") and not part of the statement of the event.

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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 prefaces of Conrad and James fall into this category. So does Tennessee Williams' "Production Notes" appended to the conclusion of The Glass Menagerie. The texts of contemporary plays are sometimes prefaced with information on the initial production; this is not part of the statement of the 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 and the ballad, 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 inability to get the same song or story twice from an informant. 10 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 identical 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. Yet the production of oral literature consists in memorizing, not statements or even events, but a kind of skeleton of the event or a series of incidents that may be varied, elaborated, or combined 10

Cf. C.M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952), esp. 216-21; Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (New York, 1932), 163-88; and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), esp. 26-29.

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according to the demands or impulses of the moment of presentation. Here then is variety in God's plenty. In the study of oral literature, therefore, variation has been ignored as much as possible in the attempt rather to establish the similarity of works that are obviously different. The question that preoccupies the student of oral literature is not whether "variant versions" are different works but whether they are the same work. Yet in terms of our definition, since any change in the event creates a different work of literature, almost all instances of oral literature must by virtue of their mode of composition constitute distinct - not variant - works. No amount of resemblance or even kinship of origin suffices. Either the event is the same or it is not, and the difference of event is always crucial. Take for example two ballads grouped together in Francis James Child's collection as number 210, A and C. First reading shows obvious similarities between the two literary works. Should one attempt to determine tne meaning of each work, however, 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 sadle, But neer hame cam he.

He saddled, he bridled, And gallant rode he, And hame cam his guid horse, But never cam he.

And doun cam his sweet sisters, Greeting sae sair, And down cam his bonie wife, Tearing her hair.

Out cam his mother dear, Greeting fu sair, And out cam his bonnie 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."

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Saddled and bridled And booted rode he, A plum 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 came he! One ballad editor refers to A as an "incomplete" version "perhaps improved" upon in C, 11 and as long as we continue 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 witn 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.12 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 protagonists' horses return, James' 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 11 Bartlett Jere Whiting, Traditional British Ballads (New York, 1955), 59. In order to see that A is not an "incomplete" version it is necessary only to compare it with Child 210 B and D, which are incomplete. Each consists of only two distinct stanzas that neither present a moment-by-moment event in themselves nor go together to constitute one. 12 Appropos of the two different Campbells is Child's comment in the headnote to 210 about attempts to identify a particular Campbell to whom the ballad can be taken to refer: "But Campbells enow were killed, in battle or feud, before and after 1590, to forbid a guess as to an individual..." (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. [New York, 1882-1898], IV, 142).

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to die, we are never told. 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 nonexistent house and barn ("unbigged" and "unbeen"). In C the saddle returns "all bloody to see" and thus is a vivid reminder to the bride and mother of the violence and horror of the human conflict that 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 ceasingto-be; C is analogous to the way in which human conflict destroys human hope and fulfillment. Any one of the differences noted would have been sufficient 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 immaterial 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 reconstruction of some supposed archetypal event gross similarities 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 manuscript and print. Therefore they can be studied as literature, and when they are studied as literature, then their uniqueness as created events rather than their similarity in

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incident and phrase to other works of literature is the important 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 historical incidents and verbal formulas has obscured for the literate collector the fact that almost every folktale, myth, and ballad on record is a unique work of literature, whatever it may have in common with others of its kind. Therefore these unique works cannot be omitted from any literary taxonomy or history without consequent distortion. In short, what is implicit in the definition and classification of literature presented in this study 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 events, and different themes, and different characters 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 13 has been prompted by evaluative, psychoanalytic, or anthropological motives, the literary character of the phenomena has been obscured, and such study runs the risk of building its house upon the sand - of having, 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 translated from one language into another is the event. Translation 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 non-semantic features of the 13

Cf. Wolfgang von Einsiedel, "Myth never had a particular 'literary' form; thus it could hardly have been a literary genre. The word 'myth' simply meant 'narrative' " {Die Literaturen der Welt in ihrer mündlichen und schriftlichen Überlieferung [Zürich, 1964], xiv).

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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 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 happening in the work. Robert Fitzgerald's postscript to his translation discusses some instances of this problem in the Odyssey.1* 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 in translation have resulted from mistaking what is literally happening in a scene. This kind of difficulty helps to explain the recurring insistence that lyric poetry is impossible to translate. As we have pointed out, most of what is called lyric poetry consists of the kind of event that is an utterance. Inferring 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, questions. 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 that is brief to begin with. Any misunderstanding then is likely to be major. Finally, there is the significant factor of convention in lyric poetry. The event in a lyric may derive almost entirely from what is taken for granted in the culture of its origin but is far from 14

New York, 1961, 465-83.

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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 situation 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 other way inaccessible t o 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 inferable dramatic context and therefore less dependent on these conventions of the time and place of its origin that so often govern such inferences. Frederick R. Burton's account of his efforts to understand the songs of the Ojibways contains a compelling example of this dependence of the event of lyric poetry u p o n cultural convention and the impossibility of capturing it in a literal translation. Burton gives the original Ojibway and a literal translation of the song that first awakened his interest in Ojibway 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 I knew not one Ojibway word. The intelligent Indian whom I asked for a translation slowly dictated the following, "I am out all night on the river seeking for my sweetheart." This impressed me as poetic in feeling, but I wished to get closer to the words themselves which I had carefully spelled from dictation and written as above, leaving spaces beneath for the English equivalents. I could see that there were only four words. By dint of patient, detailed questioning I arrived approximately at the English equivalents above given. Then I was puzzled and disturbed.

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"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 reason. 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 together some rhymed lines that would fit the tune, and let it go at that, as the easiest way out of the difficulty, 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 at 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 Ojibway were on the river he would necessarily be in his canoe. Here was promise of singable results and of the verbal repetition 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," 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

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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 you. 15

Whatever we may think of Burton's final version, his literal translation hardly constituted an event at all because he was unable to make the inferences that a knowledge of Ojibway culture made natural to the Indian. And primarily what Burton did in his final "translation" was to make these conventional inferences an actual part of the statement. Almost every translator must do this to a greater or lesser degree. That is why more is required in translation than just a knowledge of the language. This problem of interpretation is not limited, however, to the activity of translating. Take a poem from English literature that presents no apparent linguistic difficulties, "Western Wind": Western wind, when will thou blow, The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

The song obviously implies a direct relationship between the rain brought by the western wind and the return of the lover. A reasonable hypothesis is that the absent lover is a deep sea fisherman out on a voyage that 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. Nevertheless, no matter how ingenious, this is only 15

American Primitive Music with Especial Attention to Songs of the Ojibways

(New York, 1909), 149-53.

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an hypothesis. What the connection between the wind and the return may actually have been for tne original singers is completely lost; therefore, the poem is that much less clear to us. Modern attempts to account for this connection without considering the event have been hopelessly abstract, anachronistic, and unconvincing.16 We have lost the Ojibway's 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 interpretation of literature. Understanding the words is only a step towards understanding the work.

16

Cf. Robert Penn Warren's analysis in his essay "Pure and Impure Poetry", The Kenyon Review V (Spring, 1943): "The lover, grieving for the absent beloved, cries out for relief. Several kinds of relief are involved in the appeal 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 pertubations 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 expressed, then the violence allayed in the peace of tears. Third, there is the relief that would be had in the excitement and fulfillment of love itself. There seems to be a contrast between the first two types of relief and the third type: speaking loosely, we may say that the first two types are romantic and general, the third type realistic and specific" (in Ray B. West, Jr., ed., Essays in Modern Literary Criticism [New York, 1952], 251).

IV THE FORMS OF LITERATURE

Taxonomy is the endeavor that treats of the principles involved in classifying phenomena. Sometimes the term refers to such endeavor taken collectively, but usually it refers to 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 distinction 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 distinguishable 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 matter in the abstract. They are not the study of certain kinds of things but of the constituent elements of all things. We can say that scientists in these fields are concerned more with breaking down the things they find in nature than in grouping such things into larger and larger categories, that is, than in classifying and in constructing taxonomic systems. There is no science that does not analyze for constituent 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 the system of classification that will most adequately reflect the similarities in a multitude of different individuals. In sciences that 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

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to chemistry and physics, they study things qua natural phenomena, and as such they have special subdivisions devoted to classifying. Obviously there are many differences between identifying and classifying living organisms and identifying and classifying manmade products. These differences will be pointed up as we develop our literary taxonomy. More important than the differences, however, are the similarities. Biological taxonomy made possible the discovery of evolution, and evolution in turn made possible an increasingly 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 persistent 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 applicable 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 biological taxonomy is that phenomena cannot be studied, qua phenomena at least, without criteria for identifying individuals 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 biological, it would seem to follow that any history of literature that is based upon a system of taxonomy will of necessity alter to some extent that system of taxonomy. Biology has long since discarded the notion of an a priori system, a notion that troubled even Linnaeus and that was corrected with a strong dose of Darwinian historical data. A successful taxonomy does not have classes without members or individuals without classes. But before such a history is written, and as a prerequisite to it, we must, as Linnaeus did, begin somewhere, and that somewhere is with a consistently

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applied descriptive analysis of individual works, irrespective of chronology. History, be it political, literary, or biological, is at bottom not an account of taxonomic systems; rather, it is an account of what things did exist, when they existed, and how individual existing things were similar to each other and how different. It presupposes, in short, the ability to compare and contrast, in specific detail, those things that are the subject of the history. A taxonomy that makes it possible to write a history is one that provides us with a system for analyzing, not only groups of related phenomena, but, equally important, the specific characteristics of individual phenomena. Biological taxonomy (that is, knowledge of groups or species) has developed in direct proportion to our knowledge of how to analyze systematically the characteristics of the individuals that are to constitute these various species. And it is therefore justifiable to say that, while the goal of taxonomy is to determine how groups relate to each other, 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 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 that they use for their own work. There needs, in short, to be a systematic and agreed upon way of increasing 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 that function as criteria in a literary taxonomy. Ataxonomy of literature, if it is successful, will be the framework within which all literary scholarship will be conducted because it will provide the consistent terminology that is essential for coordinating the work of diverse

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scholars and their often widely divergent projects. Such at least is the ideal, an ideal that has long since been recognized in science, even though not always achieved. A. THE PROBLEM OF TAXONOMY

The problem of definition is to meet the challenge presented by those, like Wittgenstein, who contend that looking at the world in either/or terms falsifies reality. The answer to the challenge, admittedly not always completely convincing, is that only insofar as we are able to impose some sort of order on the diversity of experience is knowledge possible. But what it is that makes some artificial systems of order more in accord with reality and others less in accord is part of the never completely understood mystery of human knowledge. And just as definition and taxonomy are two sides of the same coin, so are the problem of definition and the problem of taxonomy. The purpose of this chapter is to show both sides of the coin and to demonstrate the possibility, at least, of their identity - to derive from the definition of literature already worked out a consistent and exhaustive literary taxonomy. With these established, it will then be possible to test both the scope and limitations of this fictional conception of literature by using the definition as the means for including data and by using the taxonomy as the means of locating eveiy individual instance in one and only one niche. If Moby Dick as an individual whale and whales as a species could be both mammal and fish, this would constitute a serious limitation to animal taxonomy. When Philaster can be cross-classified as a "tragi-comedy," and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" cannot be classified as either drama, or epic, or lyric, and Truman Capote can write a "non-fiction novel", and Charles Baudelaire can write "prose-poems" - then these reflect serious limitations to traditional taxonomy. The purpose of a definition is to maximize the precision with which individual instances are included within homogeneous classes. The purpose of a taxonomy is to minimize the possibility of cross-classifying within the defined class - to place individual instances either in one place or another.

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The alternative to eitherI or conceptions is more-or-less conceptions. When things differ, are we to understand this as essentially a matter of degree or of kind? (The question is itself unable to escape the same either/or dilemma.) Or are we to conclude that differences of kind are merely extreme differences of degree? Are woody plants either trees or shrubs, or are they more or less tree-like and more or less shrub-like? Is the defendant in a court case either innocent or guilty, or is he just more one than the other? Are human beings either male or female, or are these simply the poles of a continuum on which everyone is located depending on the proportion of male and female characteristics ? Is a nation either at peace or at war, or should we say that such distinctions are relative, with all-out peace and all-out war impossible to achieve? Is the moon either a planet or a satellite, or does it possess attributes more or less of both? These are the sorts of questions at the heart of every pursuit of systematic knowledge. Whether or not we also treat the problem of taxonomy as a philosophical dilemma, we are still obliged to take a position within individual fields of study. Before taking a position within literary study, let us examine two different manifestations of the problem in other fields. Zoological taxonomy is a successful and seemingly unequivocal example of either/or thinking. Every individual animal is a member of one and only one species, the species of his parent or parents. On the other hand, the classification of colors is a successful and seemingly unequivocal example of more-or-less thinking. As revealed by a spectrum, light manifests itself in an unbroken continuum of color from ultraviolet to infrared, correlating with increasingly longer wave lengths. Since the publication of the tenth and definitive edition of Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1758) the classification of animal species has undergone continual refining and expanding.1 Seven levels of classification and species numbered in the thousands have grown to as many as thirty-four levels and species numbered 1

George Gaylord Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy (New York, 1961), is the standard work in the field and the only full-scale analysis in English of the principles of animal taxonomy. It is the source for most of the points made in this section on the nature of zoological classification.

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in the millions. But the system remains essentially the same, and with each passing century becomes more firmly established as the most accurate knowledge of animal relationships available to man, always subject to revision as new data becomes available but never in need of radical reconstruction. Animals predictably embody all the primary anatomical and physical features of their parents. This is the species, guaranteed by the process of reproduction. Beyond the level of the species the anatomical and physiological similarities allow for the grouping together of related species into larger and larger classes (whether seven or thirty-four classes varies according to the purposes of the classification). Disputes, of course, arise even among the most knowledgeable workers in the field, and a few never are satisfactorily resolved so as to become established zoological fact. But for the great majority of animals the great majority of workers in the field agree on the composition of the species, genus, order, family, class, phylum, and kingdom. Where taxonomic disagreement does occur, it is over such questions as whether or not bisons constitute a separate genus within the cattle family, whether the two orders of odd- and even-toed hoofed mammals comprise a super-order, a cohort, or an infraclass. In his "Polemical Introduction" Frye compares contemporary literary study with pre-evolutionary biology,2 preoccupied with categorizing but having no precise principles and thus forced to work intuitively. The predictable result is that not only do scholars differ significantly among themselves3 but individual scholars differ from one part of their work to another. 4 Frye sees that 2

Anatomy of Criticism, 15-16. As, for example, do Wellek and Frye: "... the myth critic like Northrop Frye ... spins his fancies in total disregard of the text and even builds fictional universes which he calls, oddly enough, Anatomy of Criticism. Frye wants his system to 'reforge the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept'; but actually his criticism is an elaborate fiction which loses all relation to knowledge, science, and concept" (Discriminations, 3

257). 4

As, for example, do the four essays in Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: "As I have to have some word, I shall make an arbitrary choice of 'fiction' to describe the genre of the printed page. I know that I used this word in the first essay in a different context, but it seems better to compromise with the present confused

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Darwin's theory of evolution was the means by which biology came of age as a discipline, but he is not clear as to the reason for it. This reason had nothing per se to do with "conceptions of protoplasm and the cell", but rather with providing a principle of classification that imposed upon previous groupings by family resemblance a means of determining commonality even when superficial resemblance was lacking. Though Darwin found that, for example, there are crustaceans at opposite ends of the series that have hardly a character in common, yet he recognized them as forming a single group by virtue of the principle of evolution, of propinquity of descent, of common ancestry. The common feature of all biological classes is not necessarily one particular anatomical or physiological feature but common ancestry - not all Camivora are carnivorous, and not all carnivorous mammals are Carnivora, but all Carnivora have a closer common ancestor than do all mammals. Resemblance among members of a population is evidence for determining common ancestry; common ancestry is not the means of determining resemblance. Classes are established according to the principle of distance removed from common ancestry. Members of the species are closest to common parentage; members of the phylum are furthest removed. Our first lesson to be gained from zoological taxonomy is that the intuitive approach to classification cannot advance beyond the imprecision of family resemblances. Family resemblances are valuable as evidence but are unsatisfactory as the taxonomy itself because they provide no principles for making decisions in the face of alternative possibilities. The second lesson to be gained is that our most unequivocal example of either/or classification has come to have in its most advanced state an important admixture of the more-or-less. The Great Chain of Being version of animal hierarchy had, in its strictest sense, no place for discrete species at all; there were only more or less developed individuals stretching in a continuum from the most plant-like creature to the most terminology than to increase the difficulties of this book by introducing too many new terms" (p. 248).

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saint-like man. And even as late as 1745, the French zoologist Bonnet thought of animal taxonomy as essentially arbitrary divisions in the uniform scala naturae. This, however, has no place in modern zoology, but what there is a place for (thanks to Darwin) is the recognition that all individuals have in common, either near or far, the same parentage. At any given point in time every individual is a member of a particular species, genus, family, order, class, phylum; but looked at historically, no species, genus, family, order, class, phylum is immutable. All groups are undergoing change, and new groups are always being formed out of modifications in old groups. In the last analysis, however, animal classification is essentially a taxonomy rather than a continuum because individual animals can breed with their own kind and with none other - thus the species. Borderline cases are always conspicuous, for example, the sterile mule produced by the breeding of horse and ass. But borderline cases are the exception rather than the rule: egg-laying mammals constitute a very small percentage of the mammal class; lung-fish constitute a very small percentage of the fish class. And these forms are not freaks; they are clearly explicable as being transitional forms possessing definite characteristics of two adjoining groups. Biological groups are no less classes for being evolutionary. To what extent the classes beyond the species level can properly be termed "natural" is still much debated; what cannot be disputed, however, is that they are classes. The question of natural classes 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 has the physiological and anatomical capacity to produce 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

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taxonomic 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 criterion. Common ancestry and proximity of descent beyond the species level is not determined by studying creatures who can and do breed or who have a high degree of physical similarity and environmental 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 reality is being reflected by postulating a specific pair of common ancestors 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 zoological 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 that are said to compose it, the more hypothetical it is and the more it reflects the study of nature rather than nature itself. Simpson makes the very important point that the taxonomic goal is not so much to discover real, naturally delimited classes as to avoid arbitrary classes, and that even so, it is a goal that is very difficult to attain in the art of classification. If the goal is also completeness without overlap, we are usually obliged to tolerate an arbitrary element in our system. There is nothing wrong with being arbitrary in the practice of an art, including the art of classification. An arbitrary element is indeed absolutely necessary, and groups arbitrarily delimited are no less "real" on that account. It is the division lines between them and not the groups themselves that are nonobjective. 5 5

Principles of Animal Taxonomy, 119. For the purpose of introducing a literary taxonomy, our critique of animal taxonomy is adequate; but for any other purpose it is, of course, grossly over-simplified. The reader is referred again to Simpson's excellent work, which is 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.

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We have been forced, it seems, to do some rather obvious hedging with our "unequivocal" example of either/or classifying. The animal kingdom is still, however, a conspicuously different order of things from the color spectrum. The classification of colors has, since Newton and his prism, been a prime example of ordering in terms of more or less.6 And as soon as we order in terms of more or less, we make possible the use of precise mathematical quantification. The man in the street may be content with, say, "bluish-green", but the scientist will refer to "light at a wave length of 485 namometers". The human eye can perceive light at wave lengths of 380 to 760 namometers; the wave-length of red light is about ten thousandths of a centimeter, that of the short waves at the other (violet) end of the spectrum is about half as much. All visible wave lengths (i.e. colors) fall in between these two extremes. It is sometimes said (following Newton) that there are seven "primary" or "elementary" colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). Sometimes it is said (following Maxwell and von Helmholtz) that there are only three (orange-red, yellowish-green, and violet-blue). But whatever is taken as primary, everyone acknowledges that there is an infinite number of colors because there is an infinite number of divisions that can be made between 3800A and 7600A on that continuum that we call the spectrum. For example, Ostwald's famous color circle (which assumes four primary colors) is divided into twenty-four different sections. But like the mariner's compass, with its four cardinal points, the color wheel has no limits. Between north and east is north-east; between north and north-east is north-north-east; between north and north-north-east is north-by-east; between north and north-by-east is a range of eleven and one quarter degrees, 6

For an interesting introduction that emphasizes the diversity of theories about color, yet is elementary enough for the layman, see Kai von Fieandt, The World of Perception (Homewood, 111., 1966), 76-111. Von Fieandt is especially relevant to the present work because he comes from a background in European phenomenological thinking, which emphasizes not so much how things ontologically really are but how things epistemologically are perceived - i.e. are known.

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with each degree further divisible into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds. There can be no denying that the spectrum is a continuum, but it may still be objected that the spectrum is really just a system of measurement rather than a system of ordering or classifying. A thermostat measures heat; it does not classify it. A speedometer measures speed; it does not classify it. A scale measures weight; it does not classify it. Isn't there an important difference between measuring an aspect of some thing and classifying the thing itself? A man who weighed 154 pounds before dinner and 156 pounds after dinner does not thereby become a different kind of person by virtue of moving from a 154-pound class to a 156-pound class. To use the spectrum as an example of a classification system requires that it be shown to reflect more than mathematical measurement. Ordinarily the above example of a man eating his way from 154 to 156 pounds would be merely an example of measurement. But if the man in question happened to be an amateur wrestler competing in the 155-pound class, his meal would necessitate the reclassifying of him in the next highest (i.e. the 165-pound) class. Boxing and wrestling classes are examples of continuum classifying, not simply because they reflect matters of degree but also because these matters of degree are the basis for ordering individual things in significantly different classes. Similarly with age - we measure a person's age in years; this is measuring merely an aspect of him. But when we say that he is a minor before he reaches twenty-one and an adult after he reaches twenty-one, then the measurement becomes the basis of classification. Twenty-one is quite an arbitrary division; it might just as well be eighteen or fourteen. What matters is that there is a division. Yet at the extremes, there are no divisions, only approximations in an infinite regress. However small a lightweight may be, we can find or imagine a lighter individual. However heavy a heavyweight may be, no limit has been reached. Similarly, one is never too young to be a juvenile nor too old to be an adult. As with Zeno's paradox of Achilles' race with the tortoise, we can with a continuum go on splitting the difference indefinitely. That is what is meant by a continuum: an infinite regress that by

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its very nature can never reach a terminus. But not everything is properly thought of as a continuum - e.g. a race. When the tortoise is given a head start, then Achilles can never overtake him if Achilles must first reach his opponent's earlier position. No matter how fast Achilles is and how slow the tortoise, the tortoise will be establishing a new goal of both time and space for Achilles each time the previous goal is being reached. This kind of relationship is not, however, a race. A race is not a race unless there is a precise, preestablished terminus and no limit on the time allotted to reach it. You either win a race or you don't. It is a logical contradiction or a category mistake to conceive of a race that is measured in terms of more-or-less because there is no finite terminus in a continuum. The measurement of light waves is in itself just a matter of degree and not of classification. But what we perceive is not different lengths of light waves but different kinds of color. Thus what makes this measurement also a matter of classification is that different degrees of wave length correlate with the world of color differences, differences that we perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be of kind as well as degree. The sky is blue; the leaf is green; the flower is red. There is, of course, always the fundamental problem of intermediate cases: when the sea, for example, is greenish-blue. But it makes sense to talk about greenish-blue only because we have a notion of green and a notion of blue. It has proven impossible to talk about color qua color without referring to the different kinds that we perceive as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, etc. We can perceive a speed of forty-miles-per-hour as being twice as fast as a speed of twenty miles-per-hour, but we cannot perceive of red as being twice as colorful as violet - though its wave lengths are twice as long. Our "unequivocal" example of continuum classification thus turns out to be as dependent on elements of taxonomy as our "unequivocal" example of taxonomic classification turned out to be dependent on elements of a continuum. The color spectrum is a system of classification because the units of measure correlate with discernible differences of kind; the color spectrum is a continuum because these differences are infinite and their demarcation completely arbitrary. The spectrum is

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obviously variegated, with each segment that we choose to isolate differing from every other segment, but how we choose to isolate these segments has proven to be a matter of culture rather than physics. Some cultures make many distinctions within one segment of the spectrum; other cultures make no distinctions within that segment but many distinctions within other segments. Ancient Greek color differentiation varied so from modern European systems that it was seriously suggested at one time that the Greeks must have been color-blind. On the one hand, Navaho Indians do not make our distinction between green and blue; but on the other hand, Russian has two quite different words for English "blue", reflecting two different kinds of color.7 We can say that violet shades into blue, which shades into green, which shades into yellow. But we can just as well say that violet shades into blue, which shades into turquoise, which shades into green, which shades into yellow. And for that matter, we could say that turquoise is a primary color, with blue and green as transitional shades on either side of it, designated as "turquoise-violet" and "turquoise-yellow". The advantage of classifying by continuum is that this emphasizes similarities rather than differences and is thus better able to do justice to those inevitable individuals that would otherwise fall between two stools. The problem of borderline cases is almost eliminated with a continuum. If something falls between red and violet, we can call it puiple; if it falls between red and purple, we can call it fuchsia. There is no limit to the increasingly refined distinctions that we can make on a continuum. Thus, in taking animal classification rather than color classification as our model we are admittedly sacrificing some very real advantages. For example, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year exhibits definite literary characteristics that a continuum would enable us to perceive better than does a taxonomy that excludes the work from the class literature. Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is thoroughly and unequivocally a work of fiction for all that it was inspired by a sensational real-life murder. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: 7 For these and other examples see Stephen Ullmann, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford, 1962), 246.

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A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences barely qualifies as fiction. But they are classified the same. Most of the "plays" of Shaw are so full of narration that, quite aside from any question of merit, they seem much different from the plays of Shakespeare, and at the same time they seem equally far removed from the novels of Hardy. Yet we must group them with either one or the other. The problem is to decide whether our primary concern is to make sense out of, to bring order to, the unequivocal bulk of literature or to the many kinds of peripheral and transitional works that nonetheless are in the minority. Distortion will of necessity occur some place; we can only choose to have it in one area rather than in another. And in the last analysis, it makes sense to talk about the peripheral and transitional only because we have an understanding of something sufficiently well established so as to have a periphery, of different adjacent categories that make it possible to have a borderline between them. Just as the concept "family resemblances" is seen to be meaningful ultimately because the notion of family has been established, so it is that pseudohistory depends on an understanding of history, and non-fiction novel depends on an understanding of novel. The egg-laying, duckbilled platypus is not done complete justice to (in the formal sense of treating like things like) by being called a mammal. Its existence by no means invalidates zoological classification, however, because it has a very explicable niche near the border between two adjacent classes. Hardly ever is a borderline case exactly on the border with no preponderance of characteristics tipping it to one side or the other. The platypus is an unusual mammal, but he would be an even more unusual reptile or bird. Another difficulty with continuum classifying, which Lovejoy's classic study of the Great Chain of Being reveals in both its logical and historical form, 8 is the postulating or discovering of the two poles between which all the individuals are to be located. Strictly speaking the poles are unattainable absolutes, with all individuals partaking in some measure of the characteristics of the two 8

Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).

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opposites. Thus, if literature were one pole, there would never be an absolutely unequivocal example, only works with a large measure of literary elements. And correspondingly, though the other pole were non-literature, there would be no works that did not have some literary aspect. Not just Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but the New York City telephone directory could be subjected to literary analysis. And even at that, we must decide what constitutes the "literary" as a prerequisite to establishing the nature of literary elements. Defining the adjective is as necessary and as difficult as defining the noun. Matters of degree, whether viewed in the layman's terms or in the statistical mathematician's, are absolutely dependent on pre-established notions of the things to be graded. The solidity of mathematical data is a mirage unless in non-mathematical terms we have first established the thing to be counted. Furthermore, just as works at the bottom end of the continuum would shade off into decreasing degrees of literariness, works at the top end would exhibit increasing degrees. And as a result, we would be obliged to elevate some unequivocally literary works above other unequivocally literary works. For example, Othello, Tom Jones, and "Ode to a Nightingale" would necessarily differ in degrees of literariness depending on what we took to be the essence of literariness. A taxonomy can say that plays, novels, and lyrics are different kinds of literature but all equally literary, that reptiles, birds, and mammals are different kinds of animals but all equally animalian. A continuum, however, is always obliged to rank. The difficulty of the continuum is further compounded when we seek to characterize the opposite pole from the literary. If literary is concrete and non-literary is abstract, we will have a different sort of system than if literary is fictional and nonliterary is factual. Fiction is perhaps always concrete, but not all concrete accounts are fictional - for example, the transcript of a trial or the report of a laboratory experiment. In addition to being concrete, these would be examples of the factual, but not all factual accounts would be concrete. Some - like Simpson's Principles of Animal Taxonomy, which has nothing about individual animals

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and very little about particular groups of animals - are factual and abstract. If non-literature is typified by history, then Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the kind of thing we would contrast with literature. Furthermore, we would be obliged to say that a historical novel, like War and Peace, or a history play, like Julius Caesar, was much less literary than a fantastical nursery rhyme like "Who Killed Cock Robin?" If non-literature is typified by philosophy, then we exclude Plato's dialogs - even though we might wish to include them because of their concreteness. We could, on the other hand, sort works according to their degree of linguistic uniqueness and ordinariness. This would allow us to group together the work of James Joyce and Edward Lear as the most literary, in contrast to the work of Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot as the least literary. By the same token, the novels of Trollope and Dreiser would probably not qualify as literature at all, so linguistically conventional are they, while the compositions of a young child, of a person attempting to learn a new language, of a madman, would rank with those of Joyce and Lear. And despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, this linguistic dichotomy would not coincide with the distinction between imaginative and unimaginative. Not only is this latter distinction not confined to language, it is not confined to literature. The work of politicians, scientists, or journalists is regularly and comprehensibly characterized as imaginative or unimaginative. And when a student hands in a composition that is not in accord with the conventions of his mother tongue, he is not praised for his imaginative use of language but is criticized for his slovenly use of it. Nor do the linguistic poles coincide, as often assumed, with that continuum that labels its elements aesthetic and non-aesthetic. Quite apart from how these two terms are defined, they are never reserved exclusively to literature. Thus Wellek and Warren's attempt to classify according to whether "the aesthetic function is dominant" 9 still begs the question of what sort of works are 9

Theory of Literature, 25.

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applicable to the continuum. Certainly they reject I. A. Richards' indiscriminate grouping together of works of pottery, weaving, and tragedy because of a postulated aesthetic function. 10 But at the same time they can be almost as imprecisely inclusive: ... we must realize that the distinction between art and non-art, between literature and the non-literary linguistic 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 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 expand or to contract: the personal letter, at times, was an art form, as was the sermon. ... (p. 25) A final example of an attempt to construct a continuum classification of literature is the distinction between classical and romantic. When literature is viewed as essentially an historical phenomenon (as is the animal kingdom), then such distinctions as classical and romantic suggest themselves as means by which differences of historical periods can be used to analyze non-historical literary characteristics. This sort of continuum has the advantage of being strictly internal, that is, not grading off into the nonliterary. A work is no more or less literary for being classical or romantic. But it nonetheless has the same problem noted with the above conceptions - being applicable to far more than literature. Architecture can be classical or romantic, so can music, so can painting. Individual people can be characterized as having a classical or romantic temperament. Theories of government and society can be classical or romantic. Distinctions of this sort are valuable - not, however, for analyzing the uniqueness of literature but for analyzing what it has in common with non-literature. Equally difficult is the problem of deciding whether this distinction should continue to be thought of as essentially historical, running through time from the classical up to the romantic, or whether the distinction is essentially logical and cyclical, with the determining characteristics defined in terms of opposition. The first possibility is like the evolutionary theory of animal classifica10

The Principles of Literary Criticism, 248.

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tion. Species evolve through time from the simple to the complex, with the complex necessarily springing from and after the simple. The second possibility is like the cyclical theory of historical classification, manifested pessimistically by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and optimistically by William McNeill's The Rise of the West. The problem with using biological evolution as the model is the realization that literature is not so obviouslyprogressive and that different kinds of literature do not so obviously rise out of other kinds. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or Virgil are difficult to characterize as simple. The works of Wordsworth, Byron, Charlotte Bronte, Holderlin, or Chateaubriand are difficult to characterize as complex. Equally difficult is to explain how nineteenth-century literature evolved out of eighteenthcentury literature, which evolved out of seventeenth-century literature, all the way back to say the eighth century B.C., where the Homeric epics show us something very close to the great-greatgreat grandparents of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads. Sometimes, of course, the direction of literary evolution is said to be reversed, and romantic works are seen as having declined and withered as compared to the works of classical antiquity. But in either case we are obliged to overlook the rather embarrassing matter of fact (not value) that a diversity of kind and complexity of literature exists today and existed as far back as we have historical evidence. As soon as we label eighteenth-century literature neoclassic, we are admitting that the historical continuum from ancient classicism to modern romanticism is something other than evolutionary. On the other hand, if we conceive of the classical-romantic continuum as an oscillation between two logically opposite poles, the one merely exemplified by early nineteenth-century European literature and the other by fourth-century B.C. Greek literature, then we must define the opposing sets of characteristics and define them in such a way that all works of literature will possess a preponderance of either one set or another. It is not enough that some, or even many, works of literature are amenable to such analysis; all works of literature, by virtue of their being literature, must be

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classifiable by their degree of classicism or romanticism. We will have said something rather precise when we say that the Aeneid is more classical than romantic and that Byron's Don Juan is more romantic than classical. But what will we have said when we say that Paradise Lost is intermediate between the two ? We will have said only what a continuum by its very nature allows us to say: it is less than the more and more than the less. Paradise Lost is not classifiable in and of itself but only relatively as compared to other works; as compared to the Aeneid it is romantic, but as compared to Byron's Don Juan it is classical. If we seek, moreover, as is usually done, to correlate the varying degrees of polar characteristics in individual works with the ebb and flow of historical periods, then we must decide for the great bulk of middling works whether they exemplify the movement from classical to romantic or romantic to classical. Such a task, no matter how we define the two poles, is one that necessarily involves establishing a correlation between characteristics of all literary works and all historical periods - a task that no one has ever been able to accomplish. The magnitude of the undertaking is sufficient explanation of the failure. Only with a phenomenon that, quite literally, arises each generation out of the womb of the previous generation has the attempt to correlate historical periods and individual characteristics succeeded in creating a consistent system of classification. This short excursion down the paths of alternative approaches to literary classification has by no means been exhaustive; it has attempted only to summarize the standard objections to classification by degree. Some phenomena, like color, do lend themselves to classification by degree rather than by kind, but literature is not such a phenomenon. Simply from an empirical point of view, it is too diverse to conform to any single bipolar continuum. And if we become pluralists, switching from one bipolar continuum to another when confronted by different works and different purposes, we will have failed to establish anything about the nature of literature qua liteiature. Nonetheless, there will be no system of classification that will ever be able to do complete justice to all facets of literature, and

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thus supplementary systems will always be required. 11 For some purposes we need to be able to refer to dog stories and war stories and nurse stories. For other purposes we need to be able to refer to tragedies and Bildungsromane and satires. Classification by subject and classification by theme have different strengths and different weaknesses and no necessary correlation. Neither is there any clear reason for thinking one of these two kinds of systems more revealing of the nature of literature than the other, the lack of which argues indeed against either one's being taken as primary. The establishment of one primary system of literary taxonomy depends on a convincing argument that, given the nature of literature as a phenomenon, one of the many possible ways of categorizing its subdivisions is the most revealing of this nature. But no matter which way we turn, we must at last take a stand on one conception rather than another and seek our reward in the consistency with which we explore the implications of our choice. The one most adequate system of literary taxonomy can be discovered in no other way than by hypothetical construction. The question can fruitfully be debated only in terms of fully worked out alternative systems. What follows is one such hypothetical system.

B. A T A X O N O M Y

The only system of classifying literature that has yet received any acceptance in literary study and that even approximates exhaustiveness is the triumvirate of epic, drama, lyric. Therefore the question must arise of whether these classes could provide the basis of a literary taxonomy. But the answer must be that they cannot provide such a basis because, although they do to some extent reflect naturally occurring classes, each one is closely associated with a serious classification problem. The traditional genre of epic is a clear manifestation of archetypal classification. Here the class is not defined inductively in reference 11

Cf. the biologist's increasing use of ecological classification (organisms of the sea, of the desert, of the rain-forest tree tops, etc.) to supplement the primary evolutionary system.

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to many instances sharing some common characteristics; rather, it is exemplified by one most perfect and unequivocal individual. Other individuals are related to this class of one depending on the degree to which they approximate the archetype. No one disputes the existence of a literary class, epic. And no one disputes the place of the Iliad as an unequivocal example of the class; indeed, the Iliad is often called the world's first true epic. What is disputed is, for example, whether the Odyssey, with its picaresque elements and its domestic motif, is as unequivocally epic as is the Iliad. Or, assuming that the Iliad and Odyssey are accepted, is Virgil's "literary epic", springing as it does from the pen of a single, highly educated poet rather than from the bards of an oral tradition, as unequivocally epic as they? Or, assuming that the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are accepted, is Beowulf - shorter, less unified, more fantastic than the epics of classical antiquity - to be accepted? Or, assuming that all four of these verse epics constitute a class, what is to be done with the prose sagas of Iceland and Ireland? Or, assuming that all of these are accepted because of their national and heroic character, what is to be done with Paradise Lost? Each new work must be debated in terms of the archetype, and there is no way to compel agreement because, however similar works may be, there is never anything quite like the original. What it is that makes for a systematic taxonomy is the same thing that makes for a discipline - the search for commonality. Perhaps criticism is the pursuit of uniqueness, but taxonomy must be the pursuit of commonality. Thus archetypal classification, though better than no principle of order at all, has no place in a systematic taxonomy. Archetypal thinking makes it too easy to solve problems of classification simply by creating a new class with the problem work as a new archetype. Frye's response to the problem of the epic is typical. When confronted, for example, with Goethe's Faust, he sees a new class: "mythological epics in which the myths represent psychological or subjective states of mind. Faust, especially in the second part, is the most nearly definitive example."12 12

Anatomy

of Criticism,

60 (italics added).

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Drama creates a different kind of classification problem. There can be no place within a taxonomy for cross-classification, for putting an individual in more than one species. But between different kinds of taxonomies, there is the possibility of membership in an infinite number of classes. A human being can be a male, a parent, a Canadian. A human being cannot, however, be both a male and a female. There is no necessary incompatibility between literature and philosophy. A dialog of Plato's can be both literature and philosophy; but it cannot within the class literature be both mediated and unmediated. The problem of drama is to decide what sort of thing as literature a play is - what is on the stage or what is on the page. Most plays, for instance those of Shakespeare, originally were, and continue to be, recognized as scripts for performance. Other plays, for instance Milton's closet drama Samson Agonistes, were not primarily intended to be scripts for performance and have not been nearly as widely watched as they have been widely read. But for the purpose of literary classification, questions of actual performance cannot be significant. The script of King Lear and the script of Samson Agonistes are equally literature and equally members of the same species of literature. No performance of any kind, however, is literature. Performances are not literature for the very reason that comic strips are not literature - their very essence involves more than a statement. A comic strip is not a comic strip without pictures, but pictures are not literature. Not only does a dramatic performance always and necessarily involve more than statement, it can, as pantomine, be a drama without a statement. Perhaps the only feature of the lyric on which literary scholars agree is that it is a first-person expression. "The lyric", says Kayser, "presents itself as the monologal expression of an 'I'." 13 And in saying this he merely sums up the consensus. But he goes on to add that the only problem this mode of presentation raises is deciding whether the 'I' of the monolog is a dramatic character (and the poem thus what German literary scholars call a "Rollegedicht") or the author himself. If this were all there is to identifying 13

Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk, 191.

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and classifying lyrics, the "problem of the lyric" would never have arisen. The problem is that lyrics that are the expression of a dramatic character and those that are the expression of the person of the author are not at all the same kind of statement. In the one case the lyric has a fictional speaker and is an utterance, a genuine monolog, and thus is the statement of an event. In the other case the lyric has no speaker - only an author - and thus is only a statement. There is no event because the uncontextualized statement of thoughts or feelings, however personal, does not constitute an event. This difference between, on the one hand, statements about thoughts and feelings, and, on the other, statements that present an event, or what the ancients, following Aristotle, called the imitation of an action, has been recognized since at least the eighteenth century. It was then that Thomas Twining in his book, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry (1789) took to task Charles Batteux for claiming in Les Beaux Arts (1773) that lyric poetry is an imitation just like all other poetry but differs from the rest in that it imitates sentiments instead of actions. Twining insisted that Batteux was thus extending the meaning of imitation beyond "all reasonable analogy" because when the lyric poet "is expressing his own sentiments, in his own person, we consider him not as imitating ,..". 14 On this point twentieth century theorists could take a leaf from Twining's book. For example, attempting to explain how the two different kinds of lyric statements are really the same, Susanne K. Langer involves herself in a contradiction. In Feeling and Form she says: ... the semblance most frequently created in a lyric is that of a very limited event, a concentrated bit of history - the thinking of an emotional thought, a feeling about someone or something. The framework is one of occurrent ideas, not external happenings; contemplation is the substance of the lyric. ... 1 5

What starts out as a difference of size here ends up as a difference of kind. At first the lyric seems to be distinguished from other 14

See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953), 350-51, n. 50. New York, 1953, 268.

15

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literature by the size of the event; then there ceases altogether to be an event. "A feeling about someone or something" is not an event, however limited, at all. A statement cannot both be a bit of history and yet not present an external happening. Events and contemplation are not just two different kinds of things; they are opposites. And all the lumping together of statements of events and statements of contemplation under the label "lyric" are still not going to make them one. The problem of the epic can be resolved by recognizing that archetypal classification has no place in a systematic taxonomy. The problem of the drama can be resolved by recognizing that supplementary systems of classification are quite acceptable but that cross-classification within a system is not. The problem of the lyric can be resolved by recognizing that the necessary price for gaining a precise definition of a traditional concept is the sacrifice of some of the instances usually covered by the concept. Now the question is whether these three traditional categories when sufficiently modified can form the basis of a literary taxonomy. The usual modification of epic is to convert it into a generic term for story. This is playing rather fast and loose with a concept that, whatever its inadequacies, has referred for centuries to a very limited class of works within the large and amorphous class usually termed stories. But the temptation to do this is easily understood: it seems to allow then for three large inclusive categories of distinctly different kinds. As to basic structure or form, a work of literature would be (1) an unmediated act of utterance - lyric, (2) a series of mediated utterances - drama, (3) a mediated narrative - story. When we analyze these three in detail for the purpose of defining and delimiting, we find that they do not cover all the logical and actual possibilities of literary structure. Nevertheless, within the framework of a fictional definition each can constitute a significantly different species. And furthermore, these three species are already differentiated into two fundamental genuses - unmediated and mediated. When we ask of a fictional statement how in general it can manifest itself, we find that there are just two possibilities: it can purport

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to be an utterance in the act of being uttered or it can purport to be an account divorced from a particular context of utterance. There are, to be sure, some difficult borderline cases, but these will not trouble us until we have first established the classes and their borders. When we have finished laying out the taxonomy in either/ or terms, we will shift the focus slightly and view the classes of the taxonomy externally as shading from non-literature into literature and from literature into non-literature and internally as shading from class to class. The emphasis in the next section on the continuum characteristicr of our system will not, however, thereby cancel out the more fundamental characteristics of genus and species. The taxonomy of literature to be developed here has two distinct genuses (unmediated and mediated) and five distinct species Monolog, Dialog, Script, Story, and Serial). Literature

What the five species have in common is the presentation of a single, unified, space-time event. What differentiates the five species is the way of presenting such a single, unified space-time event. The first distinction to be made in determining the way, or manner, or form of presentation is between mediation and lack of mediation. Is the event narrated or is it simply overheard? Within unmediated works we make a second distinction, determining whether the event is presented through the utterance of a single character (Monolog) or through the conversation of two or more characters (Dialog). Within mediated works we make a third distinction, determining whether the unified event has also a unified narration (Script and Story) or a series of two or more different narrations (Serial). The final distinction is between unified narration that, while clearly mediated, is always contemporaneous

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and in dialog form (Script) and unified narration that is not (Story).16 Following the logic of one picture being worth a thousand words of description, we can also claim that one example is worth a thousand words of explanation. Because the explanation of each of the species will necessarily involve us in lengthy analyses, the detailed presentation of the taxonomy will be prefaced by five short, uncomplicated examples of the five species. These have been written for the occasion and are modeled on the traditional folk motif of the fox and the cock. In large measure these examples, because they avoid the many problems that can result from narrative complexity and borderline ambiguity, are self-explanatory. To the extent that they are not self-explanatory, the discussion of them will be postponed until the species are examined in detail and in terms of various "real-life" examples.

Monolog:

The Clever Cock

Master Fox! ah - good morning. What brings you out in such wretched weather as this? A toothache, eh? You want me to pull the tooth for you? Well, I might be able to do it. But you'll have to show me which one it is. You have so many. That one is it, way back there? I see. Well, just be sure to open your mouth as wide as possible. But shut your eyes tight - this is going to hurt a bit. Is that as wide as your jaws will stretch? Are your eyes tight shut ? Good, we'll have you fixed up in no time. Ooh! hooh! hoooh! up here, Master Fox, look up here. Here I am on the roof of the shed. Ooh! hooh! hoooh! those who want to eat should keep their eyes open as well as their mouths.

Dialog: The Dialog of the Cock and the Fox "Master fox! ah - good morning." "And a good morning to you, Master Cock." "What brings you out in such wretched weather as this ?" 16

To avoid ambiguity in the use of thesefiveterms, they will always be capitalized when used as a species label. E.g., the use of dialog is not confined to Dialog.

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"Oh, Master Cock, I've been driven out of my den by a terrible toothache. Why, it may mean the end of me if I can't get someone to pull the tooth for me. You wouldn't be interested, would you, in helping a poor fellow creature?" "Well, I might be able to pull it for you." "With your strong beak, Master Cock, you could have this miserable tooth out for me in a moment." "Yes, well, let's have a look at it. You have so many." "It's this grinder - in the back here." "That one is it, way back there? I see. Just keep your mouth wide open. Be sure and close your eyes though - this is going to hurt a bit. But I'll have you fixed up in no time." "This is as wide as my jaws will stretch, and my eyes are closed tight." "Ooh! hooh! hoooh! up here, Master Fox, look up here. Here I am up on the roof of the shed." "What's this? My dear Cock, what are you doing up there? Come down, come down. Is that any way to do your friend a favor ?" "Ooh! hooh! hoooh! those who want to eat should keep their eyes open as well as their mouths."

Script: The Play of the Cock and the Fox Dramatis personae: Master Cock Master Fox Scene: A barnyard on a cold winter morning. Enter Master Cock, boldly, in white feathers and red crest. He pecks the ground and scratches for worms. Enter Master Fox, stealthily under the barnyard fence, in a red coat. Cock looks up, startled. COCK: Good morning, Master Fox, what brings you out in such wretched weather as this? FOX: And a good morning to you, Master Cock. As for me, I've been driven out of my den by a terrible toothache. (Putting paw to jaw) Ah! it may mean the end of me if I can't get someone to pull the tooth for me. (Looking sideways at Cock) Indeed, I was just coming to ask the favor of you. With your strong beak you could have it out for me in a moment. COCK: Well, I might be able to pull it for you, but you'll have to show me which tooth it is that's bothering you. Fox opens his jaws as wide as possible and points to a grinder at the back of them. Cock appears to examine it intently but from a distance.

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COCK: I see. Well, keep your mouth wide open and your eyes closed - this'll hurt a bit - and I'll have you fixed up in no time. Fox sits at the ready with his jaws wide and his eyes tight shut. Cock flies up to the roof of the shed. Fox waits, then opens his eyes. He looks around him, then up, and sees Cock. FOX: What's this? My dear Cock, what are you doing up on the roof? Come down, come down. Is that any way to do your friend a favor? COCK: (crowing) So much for you, Master Fox. Those who want to eat should keep their eyes open as well as their mouths. Fox gnashes his teeth, then exits, slinking under the fence.

Story:

The Story of the Cock and the Fox

One cold, frosty morning a cock was busy in the barnyard scratching for worms when a fox slipped stealthily under the fence and came toward him. The ground was hard and the cock had to scratch so industriously for his food that he might never have noticed the fox's presence. But suddenly the sun came out from behind a cloud and cast the fox's shadow on the ground around the cock. When the cock saw the dark shadow of that pointed muzzle, it was all he could do to keep from trembling all over from crest to claw. Pulling himself together, however, he turned casually to the fox and said, "Good morning, Master Fox, what brings you out in such wretched weather as this ?" The fox, who had just been ready to pounce, was so taken aback that it was all he could do to keep from grinding his teeth with anger and disappointment. But, quick-witted as ever, he answered, "And a good morning to you, Master Cock. As for me, I've been driven out of my den by a terrible toothache. Ah!" he sighed and hung his head, "it may mean the end of me if I can't get someone to pull the tooth for me." And here the fox looked sideways at the cock and said, "Indeed, I was just coming to ask the favor of you. With your strong beak you could have it out for me in a moment." The cock tilted his head in the manner of his kind and thought this request over for a bit. Then he said, "Well, I might be able to do it for you, but you'll have to show me which tooth it is that's bothering you." At this the fox opened his jaws as wide as he could, and, showing as sharp a set of canine teeth as the cock ever feared to see, he pointed to one of the grinders far back in his mouth. "I see," said the cock. "Well, keep your mouth wide open and your eyes closed - this'll hurt a bit - and I'll have you fixed up in no time." The fox closed his eyes - before which then passed visions of the tasty meal he expected to have any moment - and stretched his jaws. But as fast as the cock could flap his wings, he flew up to the roof of the shed.

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The fox heard the flapping of the cock's wings, and realizing what it meant, he opened his eyes and called out, "Come down, come down, my dear Cock. Is that any way to do your friend a favor?" "Ooh! hooh! hoooh!" crowed the cock, "those who want to eat should keep their eyes open as well as their mouths." So the fox lost his chicken dinner that day.

Serial: Cock VJ. Fox The Barnyard Reporter takes great pride in bringing its readers the exclusive eye-witness account of Master Cock concerning the alleged depredations near Henhouse by one R. Fox. Accompanying Master Cock's account is an extract concerning one of the incidents in question, taken from Fox's deposition made shortly after his recent capture. To be sure, Master Cock did not see Fox actually stealing any of the chickens. Nevertheless his account will give our readers an opportunity to judge for themselves Fox's plausibility in general. - Editor Extract from the Fox's Deposition ... No, I've never killed a lamb nor even come near a hen. Instead, I keep the rabbits down for you and the crows, too. The crows are the ones you ought to hang - not me. I've seen them jump a sheep that was down and peck out its eyes so quick that it didn't have time to get up even if it could have. And don't they love hens' eggs! They're tricky fellows, too - why, I couldn't match them for guile. Once when I was just settling down to make a nice meal of a - er - rabbit, two of them flew down at me and one started tugging on my brush. Well, I couldn't have that and got up to drive him away when his mate snatched my rabbit and flew off with it. But I got my revenge. The next day I saw that glossy black fellow sitting in a tree with a stiing of sausages that he had stolen from some picknickers hanging from his beak. Didn't I give him a line then. "Why, what a prepossessing creature you are," I says to him. Flattery works well with big words. "If you're as eloquent as you are handsome, you could be king of the birds." As if the crow doesn't have the ugliest voice in creation! But we poor creatures can only be flattered in our weak spots. If he had known he had a good voice, he wouldn't have paid me a bit of attention. But, no, he opens his beak to give me a bit of his "Gawr-rr-r, gawr" and of course out drops the sausage and away I ran with it as fast as I could go. But he was after me and soon his mate joined him.

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Well, I slipped behind a rock and ate those sausages so quick it gave me indigestion. Then I lay down on my back with my feet up in the air as if I'd just been killed by some spoiled meat. Along come the two crows and see me lying there. "My word, it looks like the fox has just died," the one says to the other. "Oh, he couldn't have. Didn't he just steal my hard-earned sausages?" "Sure he looks dead enough. He's not moving a muscle. I've never seen a fox that could stay still of his own accord that long." "Well, why don't you go up and see if his eyes move, love," says Master Crow to his mate. So she waddles up - I lying still as a stone all the while with my eyes rolled back in my head - and she peers into my mug. I can see well enough that Master Crow is hanging back, so I snap up his mate between my jaws and am off with her at a run and him cawing after. Finally, he gave me up and I finished her off. But she was a tough old bird and when I had snapped her up in my jaws I must have cracked a tooth, for it began to ache soon after. Gradually the toothache gets worse and worse, and within a short time the pain is so bad I can hardly bear it. Well, I'm walking along wondering what I can do to get some relief and I happen to pass the barnyard. What took place here no doubt accounts for the rumor getting started that I was after the chickens. But it wasn't like that at all. The truth of the matter was that I did have a toothache, and there was Master Cock in the yard pecking for worms. Why shouldn't I go ask him for a little help since I had just killed one of the crows that are always after his hens' eggs? And he seemed friendly enough when I came up to him - greeted me and expressed interest in why I should be out and about. So I told him I was suffering from a toothache and asked him, "Couldn't you have a look at it, maybe even pull it if need be, for you have a good strong beak?" He seemed agreeable. "Open your mouth wide and I'll see what I can do," he says. So I did. Of course when you stretch your mouth as wide as possible, you pretty much have to shut your eyes. So I'm sitting there patiently waiting on the cock. But as you can imagine, I'd had a rough morning, what with bolting those sausages, followed by a tough meal of crow, plus all that exercise, and I'm getting just a touch bilious. No wonder then that I burped! Of course the cock must have misunderstood, for he flew at once up to the roof of the shed. He accused me of wanting to eat him. Imagine that! Why should I be after chicken when I'd just eaten crow 1... The Cock's Account Everyone knows that I am not the sort of person to boast. If I hadn't been asked by all these good people to tell the truth about that rascal Fox, you can be sure I wouldn't open my beak about him. But it is

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true that he was after the chickens and after me too. So despite my natural modesty I must speak out where the safety of my charges is concerned. What would they do without their Master Cock to cry fox for them? I knew Fox was up to mischief that day even before I laid eyes on him. You see, he was sneaking up behind as I was pecking in the barnyard and cast his shadow over me. I would recognize the outline of those pointed ears and that sharp muzzle anywhere. But I kept calm in the emergency as any sentinel should, and turning around as casually as possible but before he could pounce, I said, "Good morning, Master Fox, what brings you out in this wretched weather ?" Well, I have to hand it to the old rascal - he acted just as if he could be found strolling through the barnyard everyday of the week. So it's, "And a good morning to you, Master Cock," bold as brass, though you could tell he was a bit put out at not having been quicker to the kill. He thinks it was just his luck and not my cleverness that stopped him. So he's going to try again. "As a matter of fact, Master Cock, I've been suffering all day with a toothache, and I came here expressly to beg you to take a look at the tooth. If it needs pulling, I'm sure you could do the job with your good strong beak." That was some quick thinking on his part that I would have to match, since we were almost toe to toe and I wasn't sure that I could get away from him fast enough if he thought he could pounce. So I say to myself, "Two can play this little game as well as one," and to Fox I say, "Well, I'll see what I can do. Open your mouth as wide as you can and shut your eyes and I'll stick my head right in your jaws and take a look at that tooth." Humph! he couldn't fool me. Toothache, my eye! When I said that about putting my head in his jaws, you could see him start to drool! So his tongue is already hanging out, but he closes his eyes tight and gapes his jaws as wide as can be. And I fly up to the roof of the shed as quick as the fox can wink. Fox sits there waiting for a couple of seconds and then - he snaps his jaws. And he did it with such fierceness that, safe on the roof as I was, that snap made me shiver. You would think that Fox would realize he had given himself away by now, but, no, when he opens his eyes and sees me up on the roof, he calls out in doleful tones, "Friend Cock, is that any way to do us a favor?" But I have started to crow now for all I'm worth to bring the hounds. When Fox hears this, he says to me in a pious voice, "Why all this crowing, Friend Cock? Come now, haven't you heard about the new edict that has been published abroad in the land? I just assumed that you knew it since everyone else does and you always keep up with the news by virtue of your position." That stopped me for a moment. I had to ask about this edict. "You mean you hadn't heard," he says, "that the king has bidden all of us in the animal kingdom to walk together, to be friends and live in peace with one another. We all obey the edict

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now, so you needn't fear me. Do come down, brother Cock, do." Well, I certainly bit on that one. There was nothing to do but start crowing again for the hounds, and soon they were coming on the run. It isn't long before Fox spots them and starts running the other way. "Oh, ho! brother Fox," I crow at the top of my voice, "tell them, tell the hounds about the new edict." He hears me all right, but he's going like a red streak and I haven't seen him since. 1. Unmediated The genus of unmediated works is defined negatively as the absence of narration, whether first-person or third-person. The statement of an unmediated event is not about an event; it is a statement that is an event. We understand an unmediated work by overhearing someone at some particular time and place speaking, and this act of speaking is the fictional event that renders the work literature. The genus of unmediated works is defined positively as the presence of clear indications in the statement that it can be interpreted as stemming from a specific, characterizable act of utterance. This demands much more than the truism that every statement implies a particular time and place at which the statement sprang into existence. In most cases this will include, among other things, instances of direct address and some indication of the context in which the person or thing is being addressed. References by the speaker to himself, to the immediate environment, and to the specific stimulus that gives rise to his spoken words are the typical kinds of evidence for a statement being an unmediated act of utterance. A person's thoughts may be, as in some "stream-of-consciousness" narration, the means of presenting a mediated event. But such thoughts, no matter on what subject, or with what degree of emotional intensity or particularity, or in how fine or memorable language, are not sufficient to reflect a specific act of utterance. If a statement presents itself with narrative elements, or if it lacks clear evidence of a specific, characterizable context such as renders the statement a word-by-word, and thus moment-bymoment, happening in the space-time world, it is not an unmediated work of literature. There is, however, more than one way in which

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an unmediated work can manifest itself, and thus more than one species of the unmediated genus. Depending on whether the words of the statement purport to be those of one person or more than one, the work is either a Monolog or a Dialog. a. Monolog If the only "problem of the lyric" were that statements of events and statements of contemplation, though different in kind, are lumped together under "lyric", then all that would be necessary to the defining of lyric is to eliminate those that are only statements of contemplation, leaving the monologs of dramatic characters to be identified with it. Despite Kayser's assertion, however, that the lyric is a monologal expression of an 'I', part of the problem of the lyric has been just that not all lyrics that present an event are monologs. Within a single sub-category of lyric - the sonnet and within a single sequence or cycle of sonnets composed by one person can be found sonnets that are monologs, sonnets that narrate an event, and sonnets that present no event whatsoever. This diversity of statements called sonnets, and thus lyrics, is well-exemplified by the sire of sonnet cycles in English, Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. To be sure, it is allowing them a great deal to say that these 108 sonnets do constitute a sequence, because even those scholars who think the collection a unified cycle disallow from it at least the first couple of dozen sonnets and sometimes more. And those that are then left are hardly linked by any cross-references to incidents. The repeated naming of Stella is not enough to enable us to infer a single event from the cycle. Thus most of the sonnets are really independent of each other in everything but the sonnet verse-form. The individual sonnet, however, very well may present an event. And even within the brief compass of fourteen lines the event may be narrated - mediated rather than unmediated. Simple as the action of it is, Sonnet U I I nevertheless narrates, in the first-person, pasttense, a story: In martial sports I had my cunning tried, And yet to break more staves did me address, While with the people's shouts, I must confess,

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Youth, luck, and praise even filled my veins with pride; When Cupid, having me, his slave, descried In Mars's livery prancing in the press: "What now, Sir Fool!" said he - I would no less "Look here, I say!" I looked, and Stella spied, Who, hard by, made a window send forth light. My heart quaked, then dazzled were mine eyes, One hand forgot to rule, the other to fight, Nor trumpets' sound I heard, nor friendly cries. My foe came on, and beat the air for me, Till that her blush taught me my shame to see.

There is clearly a moment-by-moment statement of an event here: Cupid calls to the narrator to look up; he does and is overcome by what he sees; the trumpets sound; the crowd shouts; his opponent charges; and then Stella blushes at his preoccupation. The event includes a bit of speech as well, complete with direct address. Such a statement does not differ - as far as its being literature is concerned - from a prose anecdote. On the other hand, sonnets occur in Astrophel and Stella that even though in the first-person and addressed to a particular person or personification, are not moment-by-moment statements of an event because either there is no indication of a context at all or the context indicated is not of the kind to establish an event. Surprisingly enough, those sonnets that address personified abstractions (such as Desire, Patience, Virtue, Hope) more commonly do contain sufficient context to establish an event than do those addressed to persons (such as "friend" and, most notably, Stella herself). Sonnet L, though addressed directly to Stella, is not a monolog: Stella, the fullness of my thoughts of thee Cannot be stayed within my panting breast, But they do swell and struggle forth of me Till that in words thy figure be expressed.

With these first four lines it would seem that the first-person is speaking to his beloved about how he is impelled to speak of her. But then in going on to explain how dissatisfied he is with his expression as soon as it has been made, he says, "With sad eyes I their weak proportion see." Perhaps "see" here can be taken merely

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as meaning "perceive". Yet the next lines put us out of doubt; the poet is expressing himself about his beloved in writing: ... I cannot choose but write my mind, And cannot choose but put out what I write, ... And now my pen these lines had dashed quite But that they stopped his fury from the same Because their forefront bare sweet Stella's name. Clearly the first-person is a poet composing a sonnet that begins with Stella's name. But as we saw in Chapter II, writing constitutes an event only when the act of writing is depicted, as Ovid depicted it in the tale of Byblis and Caunus in The Metamorphoses. Here it is not. The only reference to the act of writing is a protestation that the writer would have crossed out the sonnet had it not borne Stella's name. Her name at the "forefront" is no more than the salutation in a letter. Sonnet XCII, however, is unequivocally a Monolog and vividly so, as part of a conversation in which tiie monologist's words follow at once upon what someone has just said to him: Be your words made, good Sir, of Indian ware, That you allow me them by so small rate? ... When I demand of Phoenix-Stella's state You say, forsooth, you left her well of late. Oh God, think you that satisfies my care? I would know whether she did sit or walk; How clothed; how waited on; ... Say all ... Impatient with his acquaintance's laconic reply to what must have been his expectant "How is she?" the lover even manages to incorporate into his brusque utterance the short answer that he has just received. Thus is the conversation of which this Monolog is but a part clearly implied by it. Not as much of the conversation is incorporated into the Monolog addressed to Hope. Yet this sonnet, LXVII, too, clearly reflects the conversation, and thus the event, of which it is a part. When the sonnet begins, Hope has evidently just spoken, giving the monologist a favorable report of his beloved's attitude toward him as discernible in the expression on her face. The monologist

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interrogates Hope about the report and then bids Hope, "Look on again, the fair text better try;/What blushing notes dost thou in margin see?" Presumably Hope again reports favorably, and the monologist, wondering if he is not being deceived by Hope, nevertheless concludes, "Well .../I am resolved thy error to maintain,/Rather than by more truth to get more pain." In Sonnet XXI the individual addressed does not speak at all. Yet the sonnet is still an utterance occurring as part of a larger event - the rising of the moon: With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb'st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! ... Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace, To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, even of fellowship, Oh Moon, tell me, ...

Realism is no more necessary to the making of a Monolog than to any other kind of literature. The most realistic of the sonnets is no doubt the one addressed to Stella in which the poet writes about writing a sonnet addressed to Stella. And the implied conversation with Hope is no doubt among the least realistic. But it is real-ized; it is presented moment-by-moment as part of an event that can be envisioned. A conversation is being depicted as it happens. Even though what Hope has said and says in the course of the monologist's utterance is not stated, it can be plainly inferred. And even though the Moon does not answer her interrogator, something can be discerned happening in the sonnet addressed to her: as the Moon rises slowly in the sky, the lovelorn speaker gazes at it, exclaims upon how it is looking and behaving, and questions it just as if it would answer. The diversity of Sidney's sonnets demands the conclusion that the lyric as a class is not the same as the class Monolog. But then neither is lyric a subclass of Monolog, nor is Monolog a subclass of lyric. Poems called lyric may be monologs or dialogs or narratives or statements that have nothing to do with an event. Similarly, we shall have to conclude that the class Monolog comprises more than the lyric, indeed, more than poems. While

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Monologs are undoubtedly not so numerous in prose as in verse, yet prose Monologs do exist and in numbers sufficient to comprise more than an occasional exception to some general rule of lyric and Monolog identity. Dorothy Parker's "A Telephone Call", Ring Lardner's "Who Dealt?", the nineteenth-century American mock-sermon "The Harp of a Thousand Strings" are all Monologs, indistinguishable as members of the class from "Be your words made, good Sir", "My Last Duchess", or "Ode to a Nightingale". The God that Dorothy Parker's nameless female speaker in turn implores, argues with, berates, or the telephone that she curses and threatens to pull out of the wall and smash to bits are no more likely to answer back than the nightingale is to the speaker of Keats' ode, but they are just as sufficient to create an event. Sermons do not by any means usually constitute literary works, even when they are mock-sermons. But "The Harp of a Thousand Strings" does because its utterance is clearly part of an event. The preacher's words reveal their context to be that of a river flat-boat captain from Indiana delivering a guest-sermon to the congregation of a church in a town on the Mississippi where he has landed his boat in order to sell his cargo of liquor. The event of which his words are a part is thus fully specified: Thar may be some here today, my brethering, as don't know what persuasion I am uv. Well, I may say to you, my brethering, that I am a Hard-Shell Baptist. ... You see me here today, my brethering, dressed up in fine close ... I'm capting uv that flat-boat that lies at your landing. ... I'm not gwine ter tell you edzackly where my tex may be found.... My tex, brethren, leads me to speak uv sperits ... and then thar's the sperits as some folks call liquor, and I've got as good artikel uv them kind uv sperits on my flat-boat as ever was fotched down the Mississippi River. . . . "

This is not so much the transcript of a sermon or even mock-sermon as it is the presentation of a particular person speaking at a certain time and place to a specific group. Here we are very far from a "lyric cry" but right in the heart of Monolog. 1T

Sometimes attributed to Henry Taliaferro Lewis but first published anonymously in The Spirit of the Times in 1855 and reprinted in Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1937; rev. ed. 1960).

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The Monologs, both in verse and prose, so far cited, however, are the simplest kind of Monolog. And though simple as a class, Monologs can be made complex by having the speaker as part of his utterance tell a story. Since this is a form of narrative complexity, discussion of it has to wait until Chapter VI. Suffice it to say here that works such as Lucian's humorous lectures, the sewingmachine salesman's utterance that constitutes William Faulkner's first version of "Spotted Horses", even a short novel like Camus' The Fall are all basically Monologs, Monologs in which the speaker as he talks narrates an event to his listeners. Thus a Monolog can be of some length, if not nearly as long as many a mediated work is. On the other hand, there are probably no mediated works as short as a Monolog can be. The briefest of Aesop's fables, such as the one of the wolf and the kid quoted in Chapter II, are still not as short as a Monolog can be. The Somali balwo is a type of brief song that has become quite popular with city-dwellers in twentieth-century Somaliland. Hundreds of lyrics are composed to a few tunes. One of these lyrics, quoted and translated by B.W. Andrzejewski, could take the prize for the shortest possible statement that does present an event: "O Distant Lightning! Have you deceived me ?"18 Anyone who has had occasion to search the sky for a sign of rain and seen lightning that appeared to be coming nearer, only to watch it move gradually off in another direction, will at once recognize the event of this Monolog. The searcher of the sky is just on the point of concluding that there will be no rain after all. And his exclamation and question sum up the watchfulness, rising expectation, and sinking doubt of the event of which they are a part. So far all the examples of Monologs discussed have been utterances of human characters, and the situations in which the utterances were made, however unrealistic, have not been impossible. But numerous Monolog songs, especially among African negroes, are impersonations of animals. The Nyanja people of Lake Nyasa, East Africa, sing a Monolog purporting to be uttered by a male nightjar: 18

"The Art of the Miniature in Somali Poetry", African Language VI (1967): 9-13.

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Moon, you must shine, shine that I may eat the tadpoles; I sit on a stone, and my bones all rattle. If it were not for my big mouth, The maidens would be crying for me.19 Possibly the tune of the song emulates the doleful notes of the nightjar's call, so that his being the speaker is easily recognizable when the words are sung. Nevertheless, the event is clear enough from the words - if one knows anything about nightjars. Clearly the speaker is a nocturnal creature and, since he sits, is probably a bird. A nocturnal bird that sits on the ground, has a big mouth, and laments - the male nightjar is as identifiable in his Monolog as the doleful lover of Sidney's "With how sad steps, Oh Moon" is in his. The following Hottentot song is attributed to the baboon, whose common activity it does reflect, and yet the speaker might be human too: There, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you. Crack, crack, what a louse! It bit me, what a louse. Crack, crack, what a louse! It bit me, what a louse.20 Whether the speaker is man or beast, the event of which the utterance is a part is perfectly obvious. No doubt the height of impossibility, in one direction at least, is reached by the Song of the Roasted Swan composed in Medieval Latin and preserved in the Carmina Burana as number 92: Once I dwelt upon the waters With every beauty adorned; Then was I still a swan. Alas! Alas! Now black am I And roasted thoroughly. Round and round on the spit I go; My funeral pyre burns me so. Here comes the serving man to get me. ... 19

Tr. R.S. Rattray, Some Folk-lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja (London, 1907), 164. 20 Tr. R. Stopa, Studies on the Population and Culture of Africa South-West (Warsaw, 1938), 101.

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Now upon a platter I lie, And away I cannot fly. Teeth I see grinding to get to me. Alas! Alas! ... The three out of five stanzas and refrain quoted here suffice to show that the roasted swan's song is a lament uttered as he turns round on the spit, is then placed on a platter, and finally is carried to table. This is a swan's song indeed, his last words before being carved. No matter that the only sound a roasting bird can really make is the sizzling of its juices. The event is basically no more fantastic than the nightjar's address to the moon or the lover's implied conversation with Hope. This survey, brief as it is, of Monolog possibilities should serve to show that the term "dramatic monolog", applied most frequently to the Monologal poetry of Robert Browning, is misleading. All Monologs are dramatic insofar as they are Monologs. Frederick Burton's adaptation, cited in Chapter III, of the Ojibways' canoe song is as much a dramatic monolog as Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" or "The Bishop Orders his Tomb". Both authors are incorporating into the literary utterance - the Monolog - more of the context of the event than a real utterance would possess. This is commonly one of the chief differences between real speech - real sermons, exclamations, oratory, conversation - and that which is created by a literary work. To the Ojibway himself his song implies all of the event that Burton incorporated into his own adaptation. Creating an explicit Monolog by bringing into a statement references to the time, place, and circumstances of its utterance is one of the two principal ways of making literature out of song and poetry that are too tied to a particular cultural context to be comprehensible in and of themselves outside of it. This was Burton's method in adapting the songs of the Ojibway. The Ojibway themselves practiced quite another method, one, however, that is a logical alternative and has been resorted to in cultures throughout recorded history. As Burton observes it, ... With few exceptions, no Ojibway song is complete in itself. For entire comprehension it depends upon something external, a story, or a ceremony. ... The custom of preluding every song with an explanation

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of the circumstances alluded to in the text is evidently as ancient as any Indian custom that survives today; a custom, be it understood, that was not invented for the benefit of inquisitive whites, but that was and is maintained by the Indians themselves.21 As an example, Burton cites the Ojibway song, "My door is warm in winter time", which occurs as the climax of a story in which a hunter overtaken by a snowstorm gives up all hope of reaching shelter when suddenly he hears these words being sung in Ojibway, follows their sound, and reaches safety and hospitality. The one line is all there is to the song, but when it is sung, the whole context of the story is for the Ojibway implied in it. The song itself is insufficient to constitute a literary work, but the story that goes with it very well could, if it were told moment-by-moment. This "custom of preluding every song with an explanation of the circumstances alluded to in the text" occurs also in societies as far apart as twelfth-century Provence and tenth-century Japan. The manuscript anthologies of the songs of Provencal troubadours contain two kinds of prose narrative that provide contexts for the songs. The vidas (lives) are biographies of the poets, which may run from a few lines of information and evaluation to extended moment-by-moment narratives complete with dialog. Naturally these latter can hardly be anything but literature themselves. A poet's vida may introduce the part of the manuscript devoted to his poems or may be grouped with those of the other poets at the end. Though vidas and razos often came to the same thing, the razo (reason) started out as a prose introduction to a song, which identified the characters and explained how the poem came to be composed. It is now commonly thought that medieval performers alternated the recitation of these narratives with their singing of the songs. And in the thirteenth century Dante adapted this narrative frame to his accumulated songs and sonnets and called the work that resulted a new vida, The New Life. Evidently the medieval poet, like his Ojibway counterpart, felt that a good many lyrics could not stand on their own. But if Provencal lyrics are not always sufficient to create an event, how much less so are Japanese lyrics, where the poem in seventeen 21

American Primitive Music, 163.

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syllables, for example, constitutes a typical form. Already in tenthcentury Japan it had become customary to append to a poem included in an anthology a prose explanation of how or where it was composed, even though at this time the waka form of thirty-one syllables predominated. The following waka attributed to Ariwara no Narihira in the Kokinshu, number 923, There seems, indeed, to be somebody Who is taking them from her necklace and scattering them The white pearls are falling incessantly! While my sleeves are narrow. is practically incomprehensible without the prose comment that introduces it: "Composed when some people had gathered at the foot of the Nunobiki waterfall and recited poems." 22 The tenth-century Tales of Ise is an anthology of waka in which the prose comments have grown into narratives. The narratives in combination with the poems they introduce or include represent various stages of narrative development and Monologal independence. In the case of Section LIII (in Vos' edition), for example, the prose has obviously been derived from the poem, which is a Monolog, and adds nothing to it: Once a man met a woman who was difficult to meet. As, while they were talking about love and such things, the cock crowed, the man said, "Why, I wonder, Must the cock crow, While to my heart that is loving you deeply, Without other people knowing it, The night is still deep." In Section IV, on the other hand, it is the prose narrative that creates the event, and the poem would not, independent of the prose, be a work of literature: 22

And even so the speaker's reference to his narrow sleeves could probably be elucidated too. In the Orient narrow sleeves are a sign of poverty and low status. The rich can wear full sleeves because they do not have to work with their hands. The speaker envies the extravagance of the "lady" scattering pearls from within the waterfall. The translation of this poem and the following ones from the Tales of Ise are adapted from Frits Vos, A Study of the IseMonogatari, with the text according to the Den-Teika-Hippon and an annotated translation (The Hague, 1957), 2 vols.

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Once there was a woman in East Gojo who lived in the Western Pavilion of the Palace, where the Empress Dowager had taken up her abode. A man who at first had no specific intentions but afterwards was infatuated with her visited her, but about the time of the tenth day of the first month she had concealed herself elsewhere. Although he heard where her refuge was, it was not a place he could go to, so that he only became more and more sad. In the first month of the next year, when the plum blossoms were in full bloom, he went - thinking with longing of the happenings of the previous year - to the Western Pavilion. Though he stood there and looked, sat down and looked, it was entirely different from the previous year. Bitterly weeping he lay down on the shattered boardflooruntil the moon went down and, recalling last year's happiness, he recited: "Is there not the same moon ? Is not the spring The spring of yore? But I am the only lover Who is the same as before." Having recited this poem he went home weeping and weeping while the first streaks of light began to glimmer. Here the circumstances of the utterance, the event that encompasses it, simply cannot be inferred from the utterance itself. Therefore the utterance is meaningful only in the context of the narrative. In The Tale of Genji, also composed in tenth-century Japan, we have the outgrowth of such narrative presentation of verse utterances. This vast story contains hundreds of poems, few of which could stand alone as works of literature but have life in this work of literature as what people say to one another in particular circumstances. The existence and indeed early independent appearance of these two ways of treating versified utterances - by incorporating their context into them or by incorporating them into a context - confirms the marginality of "lyric" as a literary category. What with the statements of sentiment on the one hand and the utterances insufficiently specific in themselves to create an event on the other hand included under the label "lyric", there was no question that a definition of literature covering every work called lyric could ever be achieved. But the definition of literature developed here has enabled us to discern that core of lyric poetry that is literature and

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that along with other literary works clearly belongs to the class of Monolog. At the same time, though a fair amount of statements have been excluded from this class (and some thus excluded from literature), their nature in turn has become more discernible by contrast. In addition to being insufficiently particularized to create an event, works considered for the class Monolog may have another kind of flaw that keeps the event from being realized. There are a few British broadside and related nineteenth and twentieth century poems, most commonly criminals' "goodnights", that begin as utterances in a particular time and place by one particular person and end up as the utterance of quite another. This is not a question of a work beginning in medias res with speech that is eventually included within a narrative. The concluding account has nothing to do with the Monolog begun but rather describes or implies how the speaker's life ended. "McCassery", a Monolog sung by Jumbo Brightwell of Eastbridge, Suffolk, to A. L. Lloyd in 1942 contains this characteristic inconsistency. The first verse goes: Kind friends, take warning by my sad tale. As I lay here in Strangeways Gaol, My thoughts, my feelings no tongue can tell As I am listening to the prison bell. 23

Then for seven more stanzas McCassery explains to his kind friends how he came to be in gaol awaiting execution. But the last verse goes: In Liverpool city this young man was tried. In Strangeways, Manchester, his body lies, And all you young soldiers who pass by his grave Pray: Lord have mercy on McCassery.

Clearly the person who speaks this last verse is not the McCassery whose words constitute the rest of the song. And the young soldiers who pass by McCassery's grave are not the kind friends to whom he is speaking. The understandable desire to include in the statement an explanation of what happened to the speaker of it no doubt 23

Folk Song in England (London, 1967).

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accounts for this peculiar inconsistency. Nevertheless it destroys the unmediated event of the work. The London broadside, "The Murder of Maria Marten", shows all the inconsistencies to which this subgenre of Monolog, criminals' goodnights, is subject. It runs to eight verses and begins with the murderer William Corder's unmediated confession speech. With verse four, however, it shifts to a third-person, past-tense, account of the crime and its discovery. With the seventh verse it returns to Corder, but now narrating in the past-tense an episode from his trial. Then it concludes with verse eight: Adieu, adieu, my loving friends, my glass is almost run, On Monday next will be my last, when I am to be hang'd; So you, young men, who do pass by, with pity look on me, For murdering Maria Marten, I was hang'd upon the tree.24 A lot more is wrong with this than a ragged rhyme scheme or a passel of cliches. Even though the speaker of the first two lines in this verse is the same person as the speaker of the last two lines, the utterances occur in quite different circumstances as part of two different events. In the first two lines the speaker is William Corder awaiting execution next Monday saying goodbye to his friends; in the second two lines it is William Corder's corpse hanging from the gallows-tree addressing the young men passing by. Either event can be depicted as an utterance. A perfectly consistent Monolog ("Brother humans who after us live") has been made by Francois Villon out of the words of dead men hanging from the gallows addressed to men passing by. The speaker of a Monolog does not have to be alive, but he does have to be consistent. Considering how little guidance the composer of lyric poetry has had, as we quoted Elder Olson pointing out in Chapter I, it is not particularly remarkable that such inconsistencies should occur. What is remarkable is that, despite the fact that the idea of Monolog has only infrequently been articulated, it has nevertheless in widely different times and places frequently been realized. 24

Ballad LXXXIV in Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Edwin Rodway, eds. The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry XVthXXth Century (London, 1957).

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Perhaps this idea of Monolog is what Dante meant when he said, "... If we take a right view of poetry, [it] is nothing other than a rhetorical fiction musically composed." 25 b. Dialog Unlike Monolog, Dialog is, as we have seen, easy to explain and by and large easy to identify. In Chapter II the centrality of utterance to a fictional conception of literature was pointed out. Utterance, the temporal sequence of one word after another, is sufficient to create the moment-by-momentness of both Monolog and Dialog. And when monolog or dialog occurs within mediated works, it is often sufficient to provide the moment-by-momentness of what otherwise is presented as summary narrative and may thus be the event of a mediated work. With Monolog, however, it is necessary to infer the event of which the monologal utterance is a part; with almost all instances of Dialog the exchange of utterance is the event. In this respect Dialog resembles a mediated work because it requires a less fundamental kind of inference than is required with Monologs. Indeed, we saw and shall see again that a number of Monologs, such as Sidney's "Be your words made, good Sir", are just one side of a Dialog, so that in discerning the event of which the Monolog is a part, we are actually inferring that the Monolog is an implied Dialog. The example of Dialog taken up in Chapter II, "Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been ?", exhibits the simplest sort of dialog form. The first speaker asks a question and is answered by the second speaker; the first speaker then asks another question of the answerer and is again answered. In the following Dialog from the eighth-century Japanese poetry anthology, Manyoshu, or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, both the question and answer are a little more elaborate than those in "Pussy cat, pussy cat", but there is only one of each: "If the thunder rolls for a while And the sky is clouded, bringing rain, Then you will stay beside me?" 25

De Vulgari eloquentia,

II, 4.

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"Even when no thunder sounds And no rain falls, if you but ask me, Then I will stay beside you."26 Surprisingly little context for its event is supplied by this Dialog. The thunder in fact is not rolling and the sky is not clouded. And neither the question nor the answer could stand by itself as a Monolog, however brief, as the question of "O Distant Lightning" does. Yet the question and answer together and their structural parallelism with each other make it clear that an exchange of speech is taking place and thus that an event is being rendered moment-bymoment. Together they enable the reader to infer that the first speaker is a woman and the second a man; that they are lovers; and that the exchange takes place at a lovers' meeting, probably in the woman's quarters, from which the man is expected eventually to depart. Much more particularity is provided by other Dialogs of the same brevity from the same collection. "Had I foreknown my sweet lord's coming, My garden, now so rank with wild weeds, I had strewn it with pearls!" "What use to me a house strewn with pearls ? The cottage hidden in wild weeds Is enough, if I am with you." Nevertheless the situation is the same as in the preceding poem. And although the sex of the speakers and the place of the meeting are more explicitly indicated, still, neither utterance could stand on its own as a Monolog. It is the exchange that makes for the event. And so it is of just about every instance of Dialog one might encounter. But here as elsewhere there is always the exception that tests the rule. Here the unique instance raises the question of whether Dialog is definable as the unmediated exchange of utterances or whether it is merely the multiple of Monolog, definable as the unmediated utterance of simply more than one speaker. The 26

Both this poem and the next one are quoted from the English translation of the Manyoshu made by the Japanese Classics Translation Committee for Nippon gakujutsu shinkokai (Tokyo, 1940).

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test case is the twelfth-century minnesinger Heinrich von Morungen's "Owe, sol aber mir iemer me". "O woe, shall I then never more Be lighted through the night By her beautiful body Whiter than the snow? It dazzled my sight: I thought it was The moon's glow. Then day broke." "O woe, shall he then never more Here until morning stay? Will the night ever come When we do not have to say 'O woe, now is it day,' As he did lamenting when He just now by me lay? Then day broke." "O woe, she kissed me without count As I lay in sleep. Then tears fell upon me As she did weep. But so well did I comfort her That she no longer cried But clasped me to her side. Then day broke." "O woe, how often he Lost himself utterly In gazing upon me When he raised the covers My poor naked body to see! It was a wonder that He never wearied of it. Then day broke." The questions, the exclamations, the repetitions and lamentations clearly indicate utterance. Clearly also, two people, a man and a woman, are speaking and in immediate response to the same event, their recent parting from each other at dawn. But they do not clearly seem to be speaking to one another. Rather, they speak of each other after having parted. And though what each says parallels

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that of the other as in the two Japanese poems just quoted and though there are questions, there are no answers and thus, strictly speaking, there is no exchange. The two speakers are speaking simultaneously about one another but not in each other's presence. The poem resembles, if there were such a thing, the simultaneous occurrence of two Monologs and could best be presented in two parallel columns, with the man's two utterances in one and the woman's in the other. The poem is a Dialog insofar as Dialog is distinguished from Monolog by the number of its speakers. And it is Monolog insofar as no response to what is uttered occurs. Such an example forces us to conclude that Dialog ultimately differs from Monolog only in the number of speakers. Nevertheless the fact remains that, unlike Monolog, it is rarely what is referred to in a Dialog that enables it to constitute an event. Rather it is the exchange that creates the event - two or more people speaking to each other. Here our literary taxonomy has given rise to a paradox analogous to that occurring in zoological taxonomy, where a few rare members of the class Carnivora are in fact not carnivorous. In the case of Heinrich von Morungen's poem we have a Dialog that is in fact not a dialog. At this point the limits of what a taxonomic system can do have been reached. But the limits of a system can be reached only when the system has been achieved. The task involved in identifying and classifying Heinrich von Morungen's Dialog makes it that much easier and simpler to identify the rest of the members of the class since they do not raise any problem but are obviously dialogs in the everyday sense as well as Dialogs in the taxonomic sense. Exemplars of the class there are aplenty, but even a list of Dialogs selected at random would show that they have two things in common besides being Dialogs: (1) they are predominantly associated with oral presentation, and (2) they run to no great length. Works of the Dialog class characteristically occur in English ballads, Spanish ballads, children's singing games, Polynesian chants, Franciscan hymns, ancient Chinese lyrics, Provencal tensos and partimens, German lieder, etc. Even prose works that are Dialogs such as "The Domestic Servants" and "Pretty Katy" are short tales from the Grimm brothers' collection of oral tradi-

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tional literature. Dialogs not associated with oral presentation, such as A.E. Housman's "Terence, this is stupid stuff", William Butler Yeats' "For Anne Gregory", Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci", remain nevertheless relatively short as literary works go. Marc Connelly's prose Dialog "Coroner's Inquest" is a short story, and Franz Kafka's prose Dialog "The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment" is just that, one of two versions with the same name, the other being a narrative. The implication of this data seems to be that there is something about the Dialog, whether in verse or prose, that keeps it short and closely related to its oral presentation. This brevity and oralness is undoubtedly accounted for by the difficulty in reading of following the changes of speakers without the aid of either speaker tags (e.g. He:) or narrative tags (e.g. He said). Particularly if more than two speakers are depicted, so that the reader cannot even depend on the predictability of simple alternation, a dialog of any great length must be edited for reading comprehension, usually by the appending of speaker tags. Oral presentation of pure Dialog has the advantage over written presentation for two reasons: (1) literature that is transmitted orally is usually constructed on a pattern of repetition; and (2) the change of speakers in Dialogs that are presented orally can be signaled either by real change of speakers or change of voice by one speaker. As we shall have occasion to see in Chapter VI, oral literature is characteristically distinguishable from written literature by virtue of its structure of repetition. In written literature, repetition is generally avoided as redundancy. If a reader misunderstands what he has just read, he can always go back and reread. If a listener misses something, however, he can only hope that it will be repeated. And if the work he is listening to is one that has been in oral circulation, what he has missed very likely will be repeated. A Dialog such as the following needs no speaker or narrative tags to inform the reader of who is speaking in each instance: Old woman, old woman, shall we go a shearing? Speak a little louder, Sir, I'm very thick of hearing. Old woman, old woman, shall we go a gleaning? Speak a little louder, Sir, I cannot tell your meaning.

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Old woman, old woman, shall we go a walking? Speak a little louder, Sir, or what's the use of talking? Old woman, old woman, shall I kiss you dearly? Thank you, kind Sir, I hear you very clearly.27 Here repetition is exploited as fully as possible, indeed offers a paradigm of possibilities. Nevertheless even in those oral literary works where repetition is not so all-pervasive, significant elements of the event are emphasized by means of it. Spanish ballads that are Dialogs commonly begin with a hemistich that consists of nothing but the repeated identification of the person first addressed: "Ñuño Vero, Ñuño Vero", "Durandarte, Durandarte", even "Rosa fresca, rosa fresca", the only name by which the woman speaker in that brief Dialog is known. A ballad collected from oral tradition in twentieth-century Spain, "The Signs of Her Husband", shows the use of this doublet direct address opening: "Little soldier, little soldier, from where have you come?" "I have come from the war, from the war of Aranjuez." "Have you seen my husband ever in Aranjuez?" "If I have seen him I do not remember: give me the signs of him." "My husband is tall and fair, a tall and fair Aragonese. On the point of his lance he carries an embroidered handkerchief. I embroidered it myself when a girl, when a girl I embroidered it. One I am embroidering now, and another will I embroider. Seven years I spent hoping, and another seven will I hope. If by the fourteenth he does not come, I will become a little nun." "Hush little Isabel, hush; hush, for God's sake, Isabel, I am your beloved husband; you are my beloved wife."28 Though this Spanish Dialog is not so repetitive as the English one just quoted, it does show repetition of all the significant details of the exchange - who is being addressed, where the man has come from, what the husband looks like, how long the woman has been waiting and will wait, the use of her name which reveals the identity of the soldier, and the relationship of the two speakers thus revealed. In the Dialogs just cited the persons speaking are of particular 27 Quoted here in the version from Joseph Ritson, Gammer Gurton's Garland (London, 1784). 28 José María de Cossío, ed. Romances de tradición oral (Buenos Aires, 1947).

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importance to the point of the event. But even when the identity of the speakers is of no importance, change of speeches can be clearly indicated by means of repetition. The Hawaiian chant "The Water of Kane" exemplifies the use of repetition to mark speaker changes without identifying or giving information about the speakers. The first verse runs: This I ask, this question, This question I ask of you: Where is the water of Kane? There in the rising place of the Sun, The Eastern Portal at Hae-hae, There is the water of Kane.29

Each of the subsequent five verses begins with: "This question I ask of you,/Where is the water of Kane ?" And each of the answers begins with "There" - "There in the setting place of the sun", "There on the peaks, on the ridges", "There at sea, in the bay", "There above is the water of Kane", "There below, in the ground, in the spring water" - and, except for the climactic last stanza, ends with: "There is the water of Kane." The identical repetition of the question and the parallelism of the answers with concluding identical repetition clearly mark the changes of speaker even though no speakers are identified and the Dialog is not about them. In the oral presentation of any of these songs, moreover, changes of speaker could be made even more obvious by real changes of speaker or, where there was only one real speaker, by voice variation. But while repetition shows up even when an oral literary work is put in writing, real speaker changes and changes of voice do not. In the following Zulu song a Dialog between the male and female African hornbill is depicted. When this Dialog is spoken, the hen's words are rendered in a high-pitched voice and the cock's in a deep bass voice. Of course there would be no need or occasion to have speaker tags with such a presentation. Yet this is how the collector put the Dialog in writing: Hen. Cock. 29

Where, where is the meat ? There's none, it's up in the trees above.

Adapted from Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii:

The Sacred Songs of the Hula (Washington, D.C., 1909).

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Hen. Cock. Hen. Cock. Hen. Cock. Hen. Cock.

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Where, where are the worms ? There are none, there are no worms. Are there none, are there none over there ? Oh! get away with you! Where will I get them from? Look for them, look for them over there. There are none, there are none over there. I am going, I am going, I am going home to my people. Go, go, you have long since said so.30

Along with the repetition within the speeches evident in transcription, each speech in oral presentation is repeated twice. The speaker tags are entirely superfluous to the oral presentation and do not represent the way the work originally occurred. Do these speaker tags so often introduced into unmediated works by collectors, editors, and translators alter their basic nature to mediated ? Do Dialogs by virtue of this editorial interference then become narratives ? There are no speaker tags in Dialogs presented orally. Indeed, even in oral narratives, narrative tags - of the "Achilles said", "Agamemnon replied" sort - indicating speaker changes may drop out of the dialog for long stretches because they are redundant where structural repetition and oral presentation occur. For the reader of Dialogs, however, speaker tags are of great service. If quotation marks become at all numerous, they cease to be of any help, and even with the separate paragraphing of alternate speeches, who is speaking is still often difficult to discern. Therefore the collectors, editors, and translators can hardly be criticized for deviating from the original in order, to facilitate comprehension. At the same time, if the use of speaker tags wrought an essential difference in the nature of the literary work, our taxonomy would soon cease to reflect accurately the frequency and distribution of the Dialog class. Speaker tags are not after all narrative. They do not make any assertions; they do not add to the event or change its nature from that of people speaking to each other. The information they provide is of the same sort as that provided by so many ad hoc titles given to Monologs. To classify one thirteenth-century 30

R.G. Dunning, Two hundred and Sixty-four Zulu Proverbs, Idioms, etc.

(Durban, n.d.).

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Sicilian dialog between a lover and his lady (the anonymous " G o away from my door") 31 as a Dialog because it has no speaker tags and another thirteenth-century Sicilian dialog between a lover and his lady (Cielo D'Alcamo's "Dialog between Lover and Lady") as a Script or a Story because it has speaker tags seems as unreasonable as to classify the latter as a Script or a Story because it has a title and the former does not. The title, "Dialog between Lover and Lady", provides no less information about the speakers than the speaker tags "He/She" ("Lui/Ella") do. In sum, since speaker tags do not alter the nature of the event, since they are often added silently, and since the work is comprehensible, though not so readily so, without them, it can be concluded that their presence or absence is a matter of indifference with regard to the essence of the Dialog as unmediated utterance. Such a conclusion allows the recognition and classification of many more works as Dialogs. Now we can include works of greater length, many of them in prose. The prose dialogs of Plato, those of Lucian, and that of the fifteenth-century Johannes von Saaz in New High German, The Plowman of Bohemia, are then indeed Dialogs - works whose words are the unmediated utterances of two or more speakers - even though they all make use of speaker tags. Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Lord Bathurst", his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot", his imitation of "The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace", and his "Epilogue to the Satires" are then all, despite the various labels under which they appear, Dialogs because in each the event is the exchange of speeches and the change of speakers is indicated by a mere capital letter. Yeats' "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" and his "Dialogue of Self and Soul", which have speaker tags, are then just as much Dialogs as his "For Anne Gregory" and "The Mask" or Jacopone da Todi's "Dialogue of the Body with the Soul", which do not. The Elizabethan jig that made such a hit on the Continent in its German version, "Roland genandt", is thus a Dialog in its first edition of 1599, which has speaker tags, as well as in its second edition of about 1600, 31

"Levati dalla porta", original, translation, and references in Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, 100-101.

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without speaker tags.32 Thus the subsequent 319 lines of the sixteenth-century English poem "The Nutbrown Maid", which have speaker tags, will be just as much a part of the Dialog as the first thirty-nine lines, which have no speaker tags.33 The attempt has been made here to present a reasonable case for the inclusion of speaker tags in unmediated works. Every taxonomist desires to avoid the appearance of arbitrariness. But as we have seen, and shall see in the discussion of the continuum, at some point in every taxonomy a certain amount of arbitrariness can no longer be avoided. Here it is necessary to draw a line somewhere, and as reasonable a place as any is between speaker tags and narrative tags. Unlike speaker tags, narrative tags, however brief, do either alter the classification of the work or render it inconsistent. At the place where the line is drawn - in this case between speaker and narrative tags - the difference never appears very conspicuous, and the allocation to different classes seems arbitrary. How noticeable is the difference between these two stanzas, one from Child 95A and the other from 95B, both versions of the English ballad, "The Maid Freed from the Gallows"? "O good Lord Judge, and sweet Lord Judge, Peace for a little while! Methinks I see my own father, Come riding by the stile." "It's hold your hand, dear judge," she says, "O hold your hand for a while! For yonder I see my father a coming, Riding many's the mile."

Yet the first is from a Dialog and the second is from a Story; the first is an unmediated work and the second is mediated. This distinction is made on the sole basis of such narrative tags as "she says" in the second stanza quoted. No other kind of narration occurs in B but these narrative tags at the end of the first line of each stanza. Such narrative as this can hardly be said to convey 32

Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago, 1929), 219-22. 33 E.K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick, eds. Early English Lyrics (London, 1907), poem XIX and pp. 334-36.

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more information than such speaker tags as "he" and "she". And, as we shall see in the next section of the taxonomy, like speaker tags, narrative tags and even large units of narration are not infrequently added to works, particularly Dialogs and Scripts, by collectors, editors, and translators to facilitate comprehension of the event. But as soon as a narrative assertion is made, even if it is only "he said" or "she said", the work becomes mediated. In this taxonomy narrative constitutes a difference of kind no matter how meager it is, or else it renders the unmediated work inconsistent with itself. If the line were not drawn at narrative tags, it would have to be drawn at some other narrative feature. For instance, the little Spanish ballad of "The Cock and the Fox", which was collected in twentieth-century Spain and gave us the plot for our cock and fox sample works, is pure dialog for fifteen of its sixteen lines. But the tenth line consists of a narrative assertion, "And the cock flew up to the roof."34 The famous Spanish ballad "Away, away, Rodrigo" ("Afuera, afuera, Rodrigo") occurs in two versions that differ principally only in that the one published in 1550 is a Dialog, and the other published in 1548 is a Story - by virtue of one sentence in the middle of the dialog, "On hearing this Rodrigo turned away deeply grieved,"35 A seventeenth-century London broadside, "A Merry Discourse between the Tinker and Joan", is a dialog with speaker tags for seventeen of its eighteen stanzas. The last stanza, however, which the editor assigns with a question mark to the tinker, is instead a noli me longere by the author: "And thus you have heard the end of my song,/Which I would be loath any should wrong. ..." 36 This stanza, moreover, is not exactly narration in the sense that it narrates anything of the event. Rather, it merely brings in a narrator, or mediator. But his presence is sufficient to render the work mediated rather than unmediated. None of these little bits of mediation thrown into a predomi34

Cossio, ed. Romances de tradición oral. Silva de varios romances and Cancionero de romances. 36 Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, text 17. Baskervill points out that popular London "playhouse" dialogs were sometimes expanded with narrative parts in order to be long enough for broadside publication (p. 166). 35

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nantly xlnmediated work seem significant in themselves. Yet to draw the line between Dialog and Story or Script on the basis of the difference between narrative tags and narrative lines or narrative lines and narrative sentences or narrative sentences and narrative stanzas would be no less arbitrary than to draw it between speaker tags and narrative tags. Ultimately, proportion does enter into the distinction, however. None of the works just referred to are of any great length, and though the narrative matter occupies a small part of each, there is no gross disproportion in making the otherwise unmediated matter subordinate to it. However, in John Bunyan's The Life and Death of Mr. Badman Presented to the World in a Familiar Dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive we have a novel-length Dialog (with speaker tags) in which four sentences of narration occur. Is the work thereby mediated in nature or merely inconsistent with itself? In a popular modern edition The Life and Death of Mr. Badman runs to about 150 pages. The work opens as a Dialog and concludes as one. The conversation begins with the two neighbors greeting each other in the early morning and ends with their farewells at sunset and takes place for the most part as they sit together under a tree. The first narration occurs between the fifth and sixth utterance: "Now as Mr. Wiseman said this, he gave a great sigh." The second occurs at the end of the ninth utterance: "And as he spake this, the water stood in his eyes." The last two narrative sentences occur at the end of the twelfth utterance: "So they agree to sit down under a tree. Then Mr. Wiseman proceeded as followeth." All appear on the second page. This essentially past-tense narration is never resumed. The context of the conversation is perfectly clear without it. Its pastness violates the contemporaneousness of Dialog. And it occupies an indescribably small proportion of the total work. Evidently, once Bunyan got the dialog going, he had no need to resort to narration to convey the rest of the event. With very little effort indeed he could easily have incorporated these narrative bits into the dialog. Since The Life and Death of Mr. Badman is a Dialog for all but these four sentences that occur near to each other in only one place in the work, it is clearly a Dialog but inconsistent.

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Of course Mr. Badman also has speaker tags, supplied by the author, and is thus already closer to being mediated than is a Dialog without speaker tags. This kind of inconsistency can nonetheless occur in Dialogs without speaker tags as well. The early thirteenth-century French verse play of the Prodigal Son, "Courtois d'Arras", survives in four manuscripts, three of them each giving a slightly different version but none dividing the dialog or assigning speakers. The work would then in every version be an unequivocal Dialog, except for the fact that each text contains a very few lines of narrative, such as the following: Now Courtois has set out on the road, His only desire to have a good time; His purse he carries well-stuffed; It is so large and so heavy indeed That he does not think to see it ever run out.37 The versions vary in length from 664 lines to 700 lines, and the narrative lines vary from six to nine in number. The narration thus constitutes only a hundredth part of what is otherwise a completely unmediated work. Moreover, the narration cannot be taken as turning the Dialog into Script, because, with its reference to what the protagonist is thinking, it is not consistent with the nature of Script as we shall see it in the next section. The only reasonable conclusion under the circumstances is that in respect of this narrative element the work is, in however minor a way, inconsistent with itself. The unmediated classes of literature, Monolog and Dialog, are more "natural" as oral literature than as written. As soon as they are written down, they inevitably run the risk of ceasing to be unmediated. What is supplied by the context and character of an oral presentation is made up for in writing by speaker tags, narrative tags, "stage directions", footnotes, titles, and other sorts of editorial apparatus designed to reconstitute the original event. And thus the Monolog or Dialog easily ceases to be a Monolog or Dialog and becomes a Script or Story. We must not allow the preoccupation of literary scholars with written literature 37

LI. 91-95, ed. Edmond Faral (Classiques Français du Moyen Age, Paris, 1911).

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and editorialized versions of oral literature to blind us, however, to the wealth of literature in the unmediated classes. Recognition of the concept of unmediatedness should go far to rectify the balance in literary scholarship between oral and written literature as clearly discernible and studiable parts of the entire phenomenon. 2.

Mediated

The genus of mediated works could be easily explained as developing out of unmediated works by means of introduced narrative elements. But we must be careful of pressing the comparison with evolutionary animal taxonomy too far. There is little evidence for the evolution of literary genres from lyric simplicity to serial complexity. It is clear that Serials are a late development of the Story, dependent as they seem to be on printing as a rationale for juxtaposing different accounts of the same event (note that the attempt to put our fox and cock fable into Serial form is a bit forced). But there is also evidence to indicate that Monologs are a later rather than an earlier development. It makes as much sense to think of unmediated works as breaking off from the context of Stories as it does to think of Stories as growing up to provide the context for unmediated works. The conception of literature being developed here sees the story as a more unequivocal example of literature than the lyric. Almost two centuries of romanticism have given the lyric its very long day in court, and the linguistic conception of literature is a reflection of the attempt to develop vague romantic notions of criticism into precise literary theory. It is now time for the story to have its day in court - for literary scholars to see if Donne's poems are not more like Trollope's novels than Trollope's novels are like Donne's poems. In the most inclusive sense, "story" can be used synonymously with "literature". It is in this sense that Gerald F. Else says of Aristotle's conception that "literature is essentially stories".38 But more precisely, stories are narrated or mediated fiction. And 38

Aristotle's

Poetics:

The Argument,

52-53.

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furthermore, because drama is a clear-cut, traditional alternative form of mediated fiction that is not story, Story is best thought of as just one kind, or species, or genre of mediated fiction. But whatever the distinctions within the genus of mediated literature, all the members of the class share a common element: a method, either first or third person, of presenting a series of related moments. We do not overhear a mediated work; we are told about it. This mediation may be merely commentary on the event or the work, or it may be information about the event presented either in sum or moment-by-moment. a. Script For the very reason that "play" is the traditional term for that literary kind associated with the stage, we will forfeit any claim to it and allow it to serve as the label for stage productions. "Script" does not share the inherent ambiguity that lumps together what appears on the stage and what appears on the page. Scripts might be thought of as essentially preparatory and subordinate to productions, but they are not confused with productions. The examination of Scripts as a species of literature will of necessity overlap the discussion in the next chapter of the elements of narration. Scripts are partly defined by their being narrated contemporaneously and impersonally. Stories can be narrated in a variety of possible combinations of person and time, but there are no past-time Scripts or first-person Scripts. All Scripts are thirdperson, present. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, not all third-person, present narration results in Scripts. For the discussion of Scripts, then, the less precise notion of contemporaneous narration will suffice. Script is an intermediate form between Dialog and Story. Like Dialog, it is by its very nature contemporaneous - the event purports to be happening at the very time that the reader comes to know of it. But like Story, the exchange of conversation occurs within a narrative context - "stage directions", list of dramatis personae, speaker tags, etc. Speaker tags are the most conspicuous feature of Scripts, but they do not constitute the defining feature. Not only do some Dialogs but also a few Stories (e.g. Diderot's Rameau,s Nephew) employ this convention, and for

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the very reason that it is employed in Script - to increase the sense of immediacy in an extended dialog, to hinder as little as possible the rapid flow of conversation. The more a conversation is sustained, the more cumbersome is the "I said", "he replied" form of narration. Dialog introduced by speaker tags is still in some sense detachable and independent - closer to being overheard than to being heard. But dialog integrated into narrative sentences is part and parcel of the narrative structure as a whole. As a bare minimum the "stage directions" provide the context for the dramatic dialog; in addition, they may also provide some of the moment-by-momentness. In this respect, Scripts do not differ from Stories. The typical Stories of Ernest Hemingway and Ivy Compton-Buraett rely heavily on dialog for the creating of momentary action. The Stories of Joseph Conrad and Isak Dinesen present their moments both as dialog and as narrative. But whether the moments are presented as dialog or as narrative, the works are equally mediated. Our example provided above, "The Play of the Cock and the Fox", begins with characteristic mediation: Dramatis personae: Master Cock Master Fox Scene: A barnyard on a cold winter morning. Already the work is established as unequivocally mediated. But there is more to come before the dialog begins: Enter Master Cock, boldly, in white feathers and red crest. He pecks the ground and scratches for worms. Enter Master Fox, stealthily under the barnyard fence, in a red coat. Cock looks up, startled.

Here the action begins, described moment-by-moment. The script of a typical Shakespeare play, on the other hand, does not narrate moment-by-moment - stage directions being of the more limited "enter", "exit" sort. Radically opposed to the Shakespearean convention is the script of a typical Shaw play, where the "stage directions" cease to be limited to direct description and come to include overt commentary. But Shaw presents problems of the borderline case that are

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best discussed when we convert our taxonomy into a continuum. So let us take an example from Shaw's mentor, Ibsen, who, unlike Shaw, provides extensive narrative elements without allowing them to develop into overt commentary beyond the situation at hand. Here is the opening of A Doll's House as translated by William Archer. First there is the static description of the setting: A room comfortably and tastefully, but not expensively, furnished. In the background, to the right, a door leads to the hall; to the left, another door leads to HELMER'S study. Between the two doois a pianoforte. In the middle of the left wall, a door, and nearer the front a window. Near the window a round table with armchairs and a small sofa. In the right wall, somewhat to the back, a door; and against the same wall, farther forward, a porcelain stove; in front of it a couple of armchairs and a rocking-chair. Between the stove and the side door a small table. Engravings on the walls. A whatnot with china and bric-a-brac. A small book-case of showily bound books. Carpet. A fire in the stove. A winter day. Then there is the creation of dramatic action: [A bell rings in the hall outside. Presently the outer door is heard to open. Then NORA enters, humming contentedly. She is in out-door dress, and carries several parcels, which she lays on the right-hand table. She leaves the door into the hall open behind her, and a PORTER is seen outside, carrying a Christmas-tree and a basket, which he gives to the maid-servant who has opened the door.] A second point that can be made by comparing "The Play of the Cock and the Fox" with Stories is the literary irrelevance of problems of actability. Putting a cock and a fox on stage involves more than mere impersonation when the cock ai the climactic moment must fly up to the roof of the shed. The theater, whether narrowly conceived of in terms of the proscenium arch or broadly conceived of in terms of a Greek amphitheater, can do little with literary forms such as the fable. It is revealing that George Orwell's Animal Farm was made into an animated cinema cartoon rather than a stage play. But such a limitation has little relation to Scripts as a literary genre. We may choose, if we like, to say that only in "closet drama" can Samson bring the roof of the temple crashing down on himself and Cock fly up to the roof of the shed, but in Script anything is possible.

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An interesting characteristic of this particular fable as Script is that it succeeds in meeting the almost unattainable neoclassical goal of strict unity of time, place, and action - not just in the modified sense of a single day and the same vicinity, but uncompromising coextensiveness. The time of the event lasts just as long as the presentation of the work. The place of the event is a single scene that is no larger than the space trod by the characters, space that is visible by a single person from a single perspective. The action includes nothing but what contributes directly to the resolution of the problem situation. However, unlike the plays of Racine, which sustain this unity for two hours or more, "The Play of the Cock and the Fox" lasts for only about ten minutes. Literary fashions come and go, but the basic literary possibilities remain the same. The presentation of a fictional event may be uninterrupted - and thus coextensive with the event (the neoclassical fashion), or it may condense great chunks of time, place, and action into a very short compass (the Renaissance and modern fashion). Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, for example, is set "in several parts of the Roman Empire": Egypt, Syria, Greece, Italy. But as long as the presentation is essentially moment-by-moment, a work is neither more nor less literary for being presented the one way rather than the other. Racine's Berenice covers about two hours; Ibsen's Peer Gynt covers about fifty years. A taste for one is difficult to correlate with a taste for the other, but both are unequivocally Scripts - and, furthermore, Scripts of the same basic kind. Within the Script species there are two fundamentally different kinds of events that can be presented. Because of its dual nature as a literary genre and as the basis of a stage production, a Script may portray either an event that is occurring in the world or an event that is occurring on a stage. This is not, however, a question of realism versus fantasy. Shakespeare's history plays do not differ from his Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest; in all of them, as in Berenice and Peer Gynt, the event is set somewhere other than on a stage. Julius Caesar, like Berenice, is set in Rome. Much less precise, but equally somewhere in the world, is the setting of The Tempest on "an uninhabited island" in an unspecified ocean.

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This is typical of Scripts, which thus differ in this respect not at all from the other species of literature. A minor, but persistent convention, however, locates the event of a Script on a stage, in front of an audience. Works as far apart in time and subject as Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Jack Gelber's The Connection have as the main event something purporting to take place on a stage in front of an audience. The modern writer most associated with this convention of Scripts is probably Thornton Wilder. For example, the event of The Skin of Our Teeth is not something purporting to be happening in New Jersey but in a theater. Throughout the Script occurs unmistakable evidence of this, as in this sample from the first scene: VOICE, off stage: "Make up something! Invent something! SABINA: "Well ... uh ... this certainly is a fine American home ... and uh ... everybody's very happy ... and - uh ..." Suddenly flings pretense to the winds and coming downstage says with indignation: "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. ... I took this hateful job because I had to. For two years I've sat up in my room living on a sandwich and a cup of tea a day, waiting for better times in the theater. And look at me now: I - I who've played Rain and The Barretts of Wimpole Street and First Lady God in Heaven!" The STAGE MANAGER puts his head out from the hole in the scenery. MR. FITZPATRICK:

"Miss Somerset! Miss Someiset!"

Within this event, as the subject of the play being presented, is a fantastical account of the Antrobus family living in New Jersey from the Ice Age to the age of modern warfare - a time span, however, that allows the characters to age only a few years. For instance, the daughter, Gladys, is a teenager in the first scene and is a young mother in the last scene. In one sense there are two distinct events in The Skin of Our Teeth. The main, inclusive event is about stage managers, actors, members of an audience. In this event the leading female character is Miss Somerset. The subordinate, internal event is about the Antrobus family, its servants, and acquaintances. In this event the leading female character is Sabina. The character Sabina is played by the character Miss

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Somerset, who is played by some real-life actress, who in the first New York performance was Tallulah Bankhead. In another sense, however, there is only one event with two aspects; if we seek to separate the stage performance by Miss Somerset from the New Jersey adventures of Sabina, we find that they are only two sides of the same coin. We can think of them separately but cannot divorce them in practice. But more of this question later when we analyze narrative complexity and the creating of discrete internal events. The point at present is simply to distinguish between the two kinds of Script events: those in the world and those on the stage. Wilder's Our Town follows the same convention of stage event, complete with a character called "Stage Manager" and audience participation. In The Skin of Our Teeth the audience is called upon to "save the human race": SABINA, after placing wood on the fireplace comes down to the footlights and addresses the audience: "Will you please start handing up your chairs ? We'll need everything for this fire. Save the human race. - Ushers, will you pass the chairs up here ? Thank you."

In Our Town, however, some members of the audience actually have speaking parts: STAGE MANAGER: "Now is there anyone in the audience who would like to ask Editor Webb anything about the town?" WOMAN IN THE BALCONY: "Is there much drinking in Grover's Corners?"

As in The Skin of Our Teeth, the Stage Manager here intrudes himself between the other characters and the audience, not just by repeatedly addressing the audience as audience but even by interrupting the Grover's Corners event and having the characters enact earlier scenes: Just as Emily Webb and George Gibbs are to be married, he comes forward while her parents are talking about the wedding "Thank you very much Mr. and Mrs. Webb. - Now I have to interrupt again here. You see, we want to know how all this began - this wedding, this plan to spend a lifetime together...." STAGE MANAGER:

Several pages later, after George and Emily have reenacted a key scene from their highschool days (in which the Stage Manager

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obligingly assumes the role of soda jerk at the drugstore) we return to the wedding day, some years later: "Well, - " He claps his hand as a signal. "Now we're ready to get on with the wedding." He stands waiting while the set is prepared for the next scene, STAGE HANDS remove the chairs, tables and trellises from the Gibbs and Webb houses. They arrange the pews for the church in the center ot the stage. The congregation will sit facing the back wall. The aisle of the church starts at the center of the back wall and comes toward the audience. A small platform is placed against the back wall on which the STAGE MANAGER will stand later, playing the minister. The image of a stained-glass window is cast from a lantern slide upon the back wall. When all is ready the STAGE MANAGER strolls to the center of the stage, down front, and, musingly, addresses the audience. "There are a lot of things to be said about a wedding; there are a lot of thoughts that go on during a wedding." STAGE MANAGER:

The Matchmaker, though not so obviously a stage event, is one nonetheless. There are references in the stage directions not only to the stage but also to the "actors". There are occasional soliloquies that the stage directions inform us are "addressed to the audience" and that contain references to "ladies and gentlemen". There is a concluding scene in which the dialog between the characters slips out of character and is directly addressed to the audience: MRS. LEVI, to audience: "There isn't any more coffee; there isn't any more gingerbread, and there isn't any more play - but there is one more thing we have to do. ... Barnaby, come here." She whispers to him, pointing to the audience. Then she says to the audience: "I think the youngest person here ought to tell us what the moral of the play is." BARNABY is reluctantly pushed forward to the footlights. This is not a detachable epilog but an integral part of the dialog, and as such is incompatible with an event in the world. But it must be admitted that for most of the work, the event seems much more to be happening in Yonkers and New York City than it does on a stage. Somewhere here we would have to say that a stage event less consistently and unequivocally drawn than this one verges on inconsistency. The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town never lose sight of a basic stage event, but The Matchmaker requires a careful reading to prevent the secondary event from seeming to be the primary one.

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This convention of moving back and forth between two quite different kinds of events is not without its potential for selfdefeating inconsistency. Audience participation in its extreme form, as in vaudville routines, destroys the possibility of a unified event of any sort. What has the virtue of "theatricality" when presented on a stage may fail to present a consistent event as literature. But short of this, it is possible to increase the interaction with the audience even more than in The Skin of Our Teeth. The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a notable example of bringing in the audience: INDUCTION Several Gentlemen sitting on Stools upon the Stage. The Citizen, his Wife, and Ralph sitting below among the Audience. Enter Speaker of the Prologue. Speaker of the Prol. "From all that's near the court, from all that's great, within the compass of the city-walls, we now have brought our scene -" Citizen leaps on the Stage Cit. Hold your peace, goodman boy! S. of Pro . What do you mean sir ? And from this opening scene to the end of the play, the Citizen, Ralph his apprentice, and Nell his wife are on stage, sometimes interrupting the story of love and adventure being enacted, sometimes taking part in its enactment. After helping his mistress o n stage, Ralph goes backstage, from which he eventually emerges, to the great delight of his master and mistress, as a grocer-errant in the subordinate, internal event. H e goes aquesting in and out of the love story of Luce and Humphrey that extends over several months and f r o m London to Moldavia. But the main event - the performance attended by the Citizen, Nell, and Ralph - as in every Script whose event takes place on a stage, observes the strictest unities. It can do this as a Script but not as a play. When a work like The Knight of the Burning Pestle is enacted, there is nothing essentially fictional about its event: the event is a stage production. In Script form there is no actual audience and actors: in play form there is an actual audience and actors. The fictional event is, then, the love and adventures of Luce and Humphrey - what in the Script is the play within the play.

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The play within the play Hamlet is a different sort of thing because the event of Hamlet purports to be taking place in the world (Denmark) rather than on a stage. As Script, as literature, Hamlet, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Skin of Our Teeth have a main event and an internal event, but as a production, the love and adventures of Hamlet in Denmark continue to constitute the main fictional event and "The Murder of Gonzago" to constitute the internal event. Because of their dual nature as production and as literature, it is not surprising that Scripts often manifest inconsistencies. As literature, a Script cannot have as its event both something happening in the world and something happening on a stage. One sort of inconsistency results from characters in the event momentarily stepping out of context and addressing the audience - not consistently enough to create an event set on the stage but obviously enough to destroy the event set in the world. This is a comic theatrical device as old as Aristophanes, and one is not necessarily condemning it as theater in calling it inconsistent as literature. In the midst of Aristophanes' Clouds, whose event is clearly taking place in Athens, the Chorus of Clouds, speaking heretofore as clouds over the city, suddenly steps out of this role and says, in the role of Aristophanes, the playwright whose earlier version of the same play had been much criticized: Dear audience, openly I shall speak to you, yes, and truly, I swear by Dionysus, who is my patron. So surely may I be deemed a poet and the prize obtain, as I deemed you a clever audience and this the best of my plays, which had cost me much labor, and which I thought you would approve. But I had to retire defeated by unworthy rivals. This is why I blame you who permitted it when I took such pains for your sake. This parabasis continues for many lines, stops, and is never picked up again. Thus, for all that it was an acknowledged element in Greek theater, it is a literary inconsistency. This convention of parabasis has continued as part of the comic theater up to the present day. Here is Moliere's The Miser, with Harpagon, frantic over the theft of the money he had buried in his garden, rushing into an empty room:

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Thiel! thief!... Who could it be? Where has he gone? ... I am going to go and fetch the law and have everyone in the house interrogated maidservants, menservants, son, daughter, even myself. Look at all the people here! I don't see anyone who does not look suspect. They all look to me like my thief. Eh! What is that one there speaking about? About the one who robbed me? What is that noise up there? Is that my thief there? Please, if anyone knows something about my thief, I beg you to tell me. Is he not hidden there among you? They are all looking at me and beginning to laugh. (Act V, vii)

Clearly with "Look at all the people here!" Haipagon has turned to address the audience. But nothing has prepared us for the event being set on a stage and nothing more is made of it. A second sort of inconsistency results not from what the characters do but from what the "narrator" does. If the characters are consistently speaking and behaving in the world but the stage directions refer to a stage, or to a combination of stage and world, then this makes for an inconsistent literary event. Arthur Miller's All My Sons is set in "The back yard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town", and nothing that the characters say or do indicates otherwise. Yet the rather extensive stage directions are an unaccountable mixture of backyard and stage. Characteristic of this unresolved inconsistency that occurs throughout the work is the introductory paragraph: The stage is hedged on right and left by tall, closely planted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere. Upstage is filled with the back of the house and its open, unroofed porch which extends into the yard some six feet. The house is two stories high and has seven rooms.

In a script aimed at production, not only is this sort of inconsistency not significant, it may even (as its widespread occurrence indicates) have definite advantages. But in a Script to be read as a work of literature, it causes a basic difficulty in envisioning the event. If there are unequivocal references to a stage, then a Script cannot be said to be a consistent portrayal of an event in the world. But if the characters exhibit no awareness of being on a stage, then a Script cannot be said to be a consistent portrayal of an event on a stage. As literature, Clouds, The Miser, and All My Sons are inconsistent.

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In attempting to discern the event in older drama there is one pitfall that is important to note: that is the intrusion, sometimes unacknowledged, of editors' stage directions to supplement the meager narration of many surviving texts. No genre has lent itself to so much unacknowledged modifying as has Script. The event of Dryden's The Conquest of Granada is what happens in Granada in the fifteenth century. All of Dryden's "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, iii, he breaks into a dialog 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 that regularly occurs in the translating of Greek drama. More often than not the translator fails to decide whether he is offering a translation of the original or a production 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 directions. And furthermore, these directions are not even in accord with the Greek stage but with a proscenium arch. The opening of Agamemnon reads: Argos, before the palace of King Agamemnon. The Watchman, who speaks the opening lines, is posted on the roof of the palace. Clytaemestra's entrances are made from a door in the center of the stage; all others, from the wings.39 SCENE:

Is this part of the statement of event or a detachable editorial 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 39

The Complete Greek Tragedies: Volume I, Aeschylus, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1959), 35.

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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 work is about a stage production or about "A bare and desolate crag in the Caucasus" (p. 311). But if this opening commentary 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 translations of his plays are of little help in determining this. A final word on verification is in order. Present-tense works, that is, those that 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 are not written as fact. Julius Caesar is not an account; it is a creation. King Henry VI does not tell what happened in fifteenth century England and France, nor is it a contemporary account handed down to us from the fifteenth century. It creates something happening now in the fifteenth century. And as such, it is literature. There is only one way a present-tense play can be verifiable. 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. Scripts in which the event is a stage production, when read contemporaneously with an actual production, are not literature but accounts of verifiable events. This is hardly a crucial matter 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 be a statement but to be a production - that is, to be like a ritual or ceremony rather than like a history. Lyric poetry, having had its origin in song, and specifically in songs addressed by a singer to a listener, is similar to Scripts whose event is a stage production. To the extent that a recital of, for example,

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"Western Wind" is actually addressed to the wind, the poem ceases to be literature. 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 fictional. These are historical questions, however, and we can do no more than mention them here. b. Story This, the largest species of literature, requires the least amount of analysis. There is, in a fictional conception of literature, no question that stories are literature. Furthermore, stories are not conspicuously something besides literature. Finally, the one kind of narration most like story - history - has already been discussed in working out the definition. Something that does require explanation - the point at which Script becomes Story - is best treated below as part of a continuum. In seeking to define Story as a species it would be less than adequate, but not entirely erroneous, to say that Story is simply those works of literature that cannot be more narrowly defined as Monologs, Dialogs, Scripts, or Serials. Unlike Serials, Stories have a unified narration. Different accounts can, under certain circumstances, be unified by a common subject if the common subject is a single, unified event; but this sort of work is a Serial. Unlike Scripts, Stories are not narrated in that peculiar combination of third-person, present-time impersonality that presents only the action at hand and a description of its immediate context. Rarely is the dialog of Stories laid out with speaker tags - although a few Stories do employ this convention. But while the essence of the moment-by-momentness in Script is dialog, Stories may have, quite apart from the question of speaker tags, little or no dialog. Admittedly, Story is the most amorphous of the five species. But it is delimited, on the one hand, by its unified narration and, on the other hand, by its sustained use of narrative sentences to create, if not the event as a whole, at least the framework of the event. The basic point to make about Story as a species is the great

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variety that is encompassed by it. Stories can exist in verse as well as prose; they can be moment-by-moment completely as dialog or completely without dialog; they may or may not have a plot. Let us begin, then, with as unlikely an example of Story as we can find. Here is one by Emily Dickinson: A bird came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw. And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass. He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around They looked like frightened beads, I thought He stirred his velvet head Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, plashless, as they swim. Most obviously, this Story, whether we also call it a poem or not, is in verse. Almost as obviously, it is moment-by-moment without containing any dialog. To be sure, the narration is firstperson, and the narrator is a participant in the event he narrates. But no one speaks as part of the event; the work as a whole is a statement made after the event is over. The event, lasting only a very few minutes, begins when a bird comes down a walk and ends when the bird takes flight after being offered a crumb. Least obviously, because of the ambiguity of the traditional concept of plot, this Story, though it describes an action, does not develop a plot. There is no growing problem that is eventually, through the efforts of the participants, solved or resolved. There is nothing essentially plotless about the situation of trying to feed

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a bird. Though it would probably take more words than Dickinson has used, a plot could be developed around a person trying, for one purpose or another, to lure a bird out of his natural feeding habits by means of food offered to it. Like a courtship, the bird would be both drawn and repelled; but after much indecision, and a final hopping up almost to the hand, the bird for one reason or another would turn away from the siren call. "A bird came down the walk" is a Story that is narrated in just a hundred words. The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night is no more or less a Story for being narrated in three thousand pages. Dickinson's Story is a single, unified event with no structural complexities or internal events. The Arabian Nights is no less a Story with a single, unified event for containing within itself hundreds of internal stories within stories. The one is narrated in the first person, the other in the third, but these distinctions, like that between prose and verse, have nothing per se to do with Stories. Our "Story of the Cock and the Fox", provided above, indicates how brief prose Stories can be. The Iliad, Ramayana, and Mahabharata - which run to many thousands of lines each - indicate just how long verse Stories can be. All of this points to the wide diversity of Stories, but it would be quite misleading to think of all these different manifestations as being equally common. The verse "epics" noted above are unusual by any standard. And almost as unusual is "A bird came down the walk". Dialog (in the broad sense of the direct words of a character in an event, whether mediated or unmediated) is so fundamental a literary element as to almost constitute a defining feature. But not quite. Some Stories do narrate actions moment-by-moment with none of the moments being words spoken in context, but it is interesting to note just how marginal as literature some of these works are - for the very reason that they present so few moments. A revealing example of this is Hawthorne's "Wakefield". In a Story of eight pages, whose event covers twenty years, there are just four very brief scenes that could be said to be depicted moment-by-moment; a few moments when Wakefield walks out of his house, a few moments the next day when he walks by the

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house, a few moments ten years later when he bumps into his wife on the street, and a few moments at the end of twenty years when he walks back into his house. "Wakefield" is really quite a curious Story because of its obvious failure to accomplish what it avowedly sets out to do. The narrator, speaking as the author, tells how he recollects a brief newspaper account about a man who inexplicably walked out of his house one day and then equally inexplicably walked back in twenty years later. Hawthorne says that this bald summary cries out for explication, for motives and details that will make it comprehensible and explain how it is that those of us who would never do such a thing yet find the situation one that appeals to our sympathies. The reader is invited either to construct his own version, "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...". Thus concludes the first page of Hawthorne's Story, but the event still does not begin, and will not for another page, where we are provided with these two sentences of moment-by-moment action: He holds out his hand, she gives her own, and meets his parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten year's matrimony; and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open, and a vision of her husband's face, through the aperture, smiling on her, and gone in a moment. There is no dialog here or in the other three little scenes - which is in itself no necessary criticism except that Hawthorne, who is unquestionably attempting to write a fictional account, seems unable to create the details that he found lacking in the journalistic account. And this is almost the same as saying that Hawthorne seems unable to create dialog. It is a feeble argument to say that he is deliberately detaching himself from the particular intimacies of the situation in order to get an Olympian perspective and understanding, because the whole rationale of the attempt that is "Wakefield" is to supply the particular intimacies that are lacking in the original and that render it so inexplicable. Nor is it true that Hawthorne is oblivious to these requirements of a Story. Halfway through his account, only half a dozen sentences of which have

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presented action moment-by-moment, he senses that all this talk of Wakefield has done very little to exemplify him. The narrator laments: "Would that I had a folio to write, instead of an article of a dozen pages! Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity." But without being able to create dialog, Hawthorne is unable to sustain his Story for even "a dozen pages". And as if in answer to his own implied criticism, Hawthorne turns to the literary task at hand: "Now for a scene!" the narrator exclaims. Yet what a disappointment. The scene, again totally without dialog, consists of Wakefield accidentally bumping into his wife as she was going to church ten years after his disappearance. He recognizes her, but she fails to recognize him; and that's all that comes of this scene. We must wait ten more years for the next and final scene. And even there, where Hawthorne's overtly stated moral seems to demand that Wakefield be ignored or rejected or unrecognized by his wife, we are shown him walking up his steps toward the door behind which sits Mrs. Wakefield only to be told that, "We will not follow our friend across the threshold." Instead of the event we are treated to the moral: Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. It is not the presence of an overtly stated moral that is unliterary but the substitution of a moral for the presentation of action. Emily Dickinson's Story, because of its brevity and the restricted nature of the event, is not deficient for having no dialog. But Hawthorne's Story, because it purports to portray human beings intimately interacting with each other in a sustained event, is deficient for having no dialog. He has forsaken a basic convention of Stories without substituting for it some other means of creating action moment-by-moment. This is the kind of judgment, evaluation, or criticism that cannot

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be avoided in literary scholarship. It is not for the disinterested scholar to approve or disapprove of men leaving their wives or of events narrated in the present tense or of the overt stating of a moral. Literature as a phenomenon is quite compatible with all of these. But there are some literary standards that arise out of the very nature of the phenomenon, out of the very attempt to create an unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. To violate one of these norms is to be self-defeating. For Hawthorne to have attempted the Story of "Wakefield" without the use of dialog proved to be very nearly self-defeating. This question of the "natural laws" of literature is a very important one, and only a manifestation of it can be noted here. In the final chapter the question will be raised again, but for the present we must keep our attention focused on dialog. Plato's Republic, "Charmides", "Lysis", and "Parmenides" are usually spoken of as dialogs. Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is entitled such, and Diderot's short novel Rameau's Nephew is set up with speaker tags like a Script. Yet all of these, different though they are from "A bird came down the walk", are Stories. Most of Plato's dialogs are just that - unmediated presentations of conversations without any narrating of information or supplying of context. (The usual list of Dramatis Personae and statement of scene is the contribution of later editors.) But the four noted above, though they are composed primarily of conversation, are as a whole narrations. In the Republic, for example, Socrates, Glaucon, Adeimantus, Polemarchus, Cephalus, Thrasymachus, and Cleitophon sit around in Cephalus's house and discuss justice and the ideal state. But we know of this because some time afterward Socrates gives a recollected account of it. The work as a whole is his first-person, past-time narration. So is Rameau's Nephew, one of the rare Stories that employ speaker tags for all the dialog, a first-person, past-time narration, though indeed, the work is little more than the extensive dialog that comprises it. But before the hour-long exchange between HE (Rameau's Nephew) and MYSELF (the unnamed narrator) begins, there are four pages of narrative introduction. And at a dozen breaks in the dialog there are paragraphs of narrative commentary

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and description - more perhaps than would be found in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel but less than in one by Conrad. But whereas in Compton-Burnett and Conrad the dialog itself is narrated, either directly ("he said", "I replied", "Jim mumbled", "she continued") or indirectly ("he said that"), the dialog in Rameau's Nephew is presented as in a Script. However, the narrative context is the crucial factor for identifying the work as a Story rather than as a Script or a Dialog. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion there are no speaker tags, but there is very little more narration than narrative tags of the "Demea said", "Philo replied" sort. Yet clearly it too is narrated - not overheard but recounted afterwards by someone who was present. Like the Republic, on which it is obviously modeled, Hume's work is a first-person, past-time narration. The fact that the moment-by-momentness consists entirely of people conversing does not make it any less a Story. The final point to be made about Stories is the same point that we made about Scripts: the matter of fundamental inconsistency, of an event presented in two or more entirely different sorts of ways that cannot both be as claimed. There is nothing new in criticizing Thackeray for failing to make up his mind as to whether he is inventing events for the "puppet stage" or whether he is recounting true histories, part of which he himself witnessed in the real world. This is a fundamental criticism and not a matter of one's taste in Victorian novels. The fantasy of Bram Stoker is as legitimately literary as the realism of Walter Scott. The overt moralizing and commentary of George Eliot are as legitimately literary as is the editorial objectivity of Wilkie Collins. But the narration of Vanity Fair cannot both be a made-up story, a "puppet show" manipulated by the author as puppet master, and a true biography and history that the narrator witnessed when he traveled in Europe at the same time as did Becky Sharp, Jos Sedley, Major Dobbin, Emilia Osborne, and young George. At various places in the work the narrator speaks about his "story" and "puppets": I warn my "kind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villainy and complicated - but as I trust, intensely interesting crime. ... And as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a

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man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platfoim, and talk about them. (Chapter VIII) ... come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out. (Chapter LXVII) But at other places especially near the end of the work, the incidents are reported from eye-witness, and the narrator will sometimes beg off from describing what he did not see: It was on this very tour that I, the present writer of a history of which every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first, and to make their acquaintance. ... Every woman in the house was sniveling at the time; but I suppose it was because it was predestined that I was to write this particular lady's memoirs that I remarked her. (Chapter LXII) Whatever the other merits of the novel, it has failed here to establish a minimum level of consistency - not of character or theme - but of basic literariness, of what is being claimed. Dostoevsky begins "The Heavenly Christmas Tree" unequivocally as a work of fiction: "I am a novelist, and I suppose I have made up this story. I write 'I suppose,' though I know for a fact that I have made it up... ," 40 Defoe begins Moll Flanders in quite the opposite fashion: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders: Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu'd variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv'd honest, and died a penitent - written from her own memorandums These are equally acceptable literary conventions, as indeed are much less overt manifestations of the story and history approaches. The point here is not what the work is obliged to do but what it must refrain from doing. Stories must refrain from making inconsistent claims as to what they are. Quite apart from the question of establishing or destroying illusion is the question of basic sense or meaning. The basic intellectual requirement of consistency is no less applicable to statements of fiction than to statements of fact. 40

Tr. Constance Garnett.

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A slightly different manifestation of narrative inconsistency can be setn in Robbe-Grillet's "stream-of-consciousness" novel Jealousy. The narration is third-person, present, with everything described through the eyes of the jealous husband. The event is several days in the plantation life of Franck, "A", and "A's" unnamed husband, including a day's trip into town by Franck and "A" and their overnight stay because of an alleged auto break-down. The problem arises from the increasing incoherence of the husband's thoughts (which are our only source for the event). The first half of the story all seems to be taking place in the presence of the husband, but toward the end things that he could not possibly know about are narrated from his perspective. Furthermore, the contemporaneous narration is violated by the same incident being presented more than once and sometimes in different versions. This is not the sort of indeterminacy that we saw in "Ode to a Nightingale" where the utterance simply lacked sufficient evidence for making a decision on such a question as the sex of the speaker. All works of literature are indeterminant in this way simply because the possible features of an event are infinite. The indeterminacy in Jealousy is more serious because basically inconsistent. The automobile either breaks down or it does not; Franck and "A" either commit adultery or they do not; the husband either murders "A" or he does not. Just as the criticism of Vanity Fair for destroying the illusion of reality misses the fundamental problem of literary inconsistency, so the praise of Jealousy for creating so intensely the illusion of a disintegrating jealous personality also misses the more basic point. If the sine qua non of literature is a determinable space-time event, then whatever its other virtues, a work is seriously flawed as literature if we are unable to agree on the basic nature of the event. The ultimate goal of a story is not simply to succeed in creating an event, any more than the goal of a building is simply to stand erect. But if a story does not unequivocally succeed in creating an event it will be as inadequate to its purpose as a building that has trouble standing erect.

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c. Serial

Looking at our taxonomy as a whole we see in Monolog a beginning that is never very far from dropping back into ordinary nonliterary statement. At the other end, we see in Serial a conclusion that is never very far from fragmenting into multiple works of literature. The usual problem of classifying a Serial is not whether or not it is literature but whether or not it is a single work of literature. This problem arises from the very defining feature of the species : multiple narration of a single event. The basic question we must answer is, how far can narratives differ and still constitute a single work? And to begin our analysis with examples rather than principles, let us look at Rnut Hamsun's Pan, subtitled "From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers", and compare it with "Cock vs. Fox". Pan is the closest thing to being multiple works that multiple narration can get while still possessing a basic unity of event. The first nine-tenths of the work are an account of a few months in 1855 that Lt. Glahn spent living on the edge of the woods in northern Norway, narrated by himself two years later. He hunted and loved, was rejected by one and rejected another, and then leaves on the mail boat that brought him, having killed the woman who loved him in an attempt to kill the one who rejected him. In the last couple of dozen pages, separately entitled "Glahn's Death : A paper from the year 1861", another and unnamed narrator writes about killing Glahn, who had gone to India to hunt and to seek death. On the negative side, there is little to account for the juxtaposition of the two narratives except their having been found together among Glahn's papers after his death and provided with a common title explaining this. Furthermore, there is little to fill in the time between the few months in 1855 and the few weeks in 1861. If this is a Serial, it is a Serial in its starkest, most juxtaposed form. On the positive side, there is always a presumption of unity in a person's life, especially when death has capped it. And with this particular person, the death in 1861 is clearly seen as the result of what happened in 1855. While the juxtaposed narration of Pan might be described as picaresque, the episodes narrated are not at all

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picaresque - so closely related are they. The major section of the work could stand alone as an independent work and so could the minor section. But then any novel could be, as Victorian novels in fact were, broken up chapter by chapter and still be literature. The point is not how much a work can be divided and subdivided without the fragments ceasing to be literature, but rather how much presumption of unity is inherent in an event. There is no question that the two parts of Pan could stand alone; the question is, can they stand together as a single unverifiable, moment-by-moment statement of an event. We must be careful, because we may find ourselves committed to finding all the historical novels in which Napoleon plays a role fitting into a single work, unified by a common event. Before committing ourselves, then, let us first look at a much less equivocal example - an example that has different narratives subsumed under a common editorial narration. For our purposes, "editorial narration" is that sort which introduces or repeats the moment-by-moment accounts of others but does not itself provide any moment-by-moment account. One manifestation of this is the Editor of the Barnyard Reporter bringing together and introducing the two accounts in "Cock vs. Fox". Not only does this Serial have a common event but also it has a clear rationale for the juxtaposition of the different accounts. Furthermore, the commonality of the event here is much more obvious than it is in Pan. Though they emphasize different aspects of what happened and disagree on their interpretations, the overlap is the conspicuous feature. As to the particulars of the event, nothing the Fox says is contradicted by what the Cock says. But of course, as with Pan, the two accounts could stand alone as literature. They would not be the same work; they could not have precisely the same event; they would not be as complete or probably as good; but they would unquestionably be literature. As a principle that would allow both Pan and "Cock vs. Fox" to be grouped together as Serials we can say that narratives that are explicably grouped together with a common title constitute a single work if there is a conspicuous unifying element in their events. Unity of theme, of character, of location, of time are not

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enough. There must be a clearly delimited space-time action. Not everything that happens to a character necessarily constitutes a single event by virtue of the unity of a life. And while a lifetime may be a single space-time occurrence, miscellaneous episodes in a single day may not be. In the next section, for example, is a unified narration of an ««unified collection of fox anecdotes ununified because there is no attempt to link the events together as a single space-time occurrence. Hamsim presents us with two different narratives that appear together with a common title and create a single event by virtue of a cause-and-effect relationship of the crime-and-punishment sort. This is a unity of plot, of complication and resolution. In "Cock vs. Fox" the unity of event is not a matter of plot but of diverse overlapping perspectives on the same incident. The interest of the work is in seeing how much diversity is possible from participants in the same event. But what makes the work a work is the agreement between the two accounts that allows us to know of an otherwise unknowable event. Heretofore the implication has been that Serial works consist of just two narratives, presented one after the other. But this is only the simplest manifestation of the species. Wilkie Collins, perhaps the author most associated with the Serial form, employs a dozen different narratives to tell the story of The Moonstone. And furthermore, these multiple narratives are unified both by plot and by diverse overlapping perspectives of the same incident. And The Woman in White and The Moonstone both have the additional feature of an editor who is also one of the narrators. Just as the narrator of a Story (fictional, like Moll Flanders, or real, like Christopher Isherwood) can quote himself as a character, so the editor of a Serial can quote his own account. The event of The Moonstone is the history of this rare gem from the time of its theft during the Battle of Seringapatam to its return to India fifty years later, focusing, however, on the last two of these fifty years. The very slight editorial frame is provided by Franklin Blake, for some time suspected of having taken the stone after it had been given to the woman he hoped to marry. His editing consists only of soliciting the accounts from

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the other participants, bringing them together, providing explanatory titles, and adding a few footnotes. None of this is momentby-moment. However, as the following list of the narratives shows, he also provides part of the narrative diversity that he himself edits: The Storming of Seringapatam (1799) Extracted from a Family Paper [Written by an unnamed cousin of the thief, Col. Herncastle.] The Loss ot the Diamond [c. 1810-48] The events related by Gabriel Betteredge, House-Steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder [nee Herncastle]. [Except for a brief background of his early service, Betteredge tells of 1848-49, when the diamond was given as a birthday present to Lady Verinder's daughter Rachel and then stolen. Covering the same restricted period are:] Contributed by Miss Clack, Niece of the late Sii John Verinder Contributed by Mathew Bruff, Solicitor, of Gray's Inn Square Contributed by Franklin Blake Extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings The Story resumed by Franklin Blake Contributed by Sergeant Cuff In a Letter from Mr. Candy Contributed by Gabriel Betteredge Statement of Mr. Murthwaite (1850) In a Letter to Mr. Bruff [Just prior to this last short account are two that are even shorter, one by Sergeant Cuff's Man and one by a Ship Captain, which provide information but no moment-by-moment accounts],

A mystery or detective story obviously lends itself to Serial treatment, and Collins makes full use of the possibilities of letting the different aspects of the mystery come to light - clue by clue - as each of the participants recollects in tranquility the exciting period of the Moonstone's disappearance. Blake orders the accounts more or less chronologically, but there is so much necessary overlap that each narrative also serves to give the different viewpoint of each character as he or she looks at many of the same incidents. More like "Cock vs. Fox", in being primarily a Serial of diverse perspectives on the same incidents, is Smollett's epistolary novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. More like Pan, in being primarily a Serial of plot development, is Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. But Humphry Clinker and Dracula have in common a feature not observed in the previous examples. Instead of one

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finished account following another finished account, the Serial form here is like decks of cards being shuffled together - small parts of larger accounts laid out according to chronology rather than authorship. In The Moonstone there is a rough chronological order but only insofar as is compatible with each person giving his full uninterrupted account. Thus, while the chronology of the event is from first to last, there is much backtracking when each person begins his narrative. The two narrative devices that readily lend themselves to alternating running commentary are letters and diaries. In Humphry Clinker half a dozen characters send letters to friends back home telling of the daily progress of a tour of Wales, England, and Scotland. One way to have created a Serial out of this tour would have been to have different characters write completed accounts oi it after it was over (as in "Cock vs. Fox"). Another way would have been for the characters each to have recounted a part of the trip (as in The Moonstone). But the way that Smollett chose was to have each of the two main characters (the letters of the other characters are few, short, and provide no moment-by-moment narration) keep a kind of running journal that is sent out at intervals to a regular correspondent. These two batches of letters, from Matthew Bramble and his nephew Melford, are brought together by the editor, Jonathan Dustwich, and arranged chronologically, irrespective of authorship. The fictional exchange of letters between Dustwich and a London bookseller that introduces the work is not part of the event nor does it provide a frame event. There is no moment-by-moment narration here, but there is an editorial frame that provides a rationale for the collecting and ordering of the diverse accounts that tell of the Bramble expedition. Of the same sort, but more complicated, is the narration of Dracula. The event is the adventures of the six months that lead to the death in Transylvania of Count Dracula the vampire. It extends from Transylvania to England and back again and is editorially pieced together from several different and different kinds of moment-by-moment sources. Three characters keep extended journals; there are letters, newspaper stories, medical reports. There is even a ship's log and the transcription of a dictaphone

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recording. These have been broken up into approximate chronological order and supplied with informative titles and labels. A concluding note by one of the characters seven years after the event refers to the collected papers of the adventures being kept in a bank vault. Presumably the writer of this note is also the editor of the papers as we have them. In any case, the event itself provides more than enough unity to create a single work out of this bank vault of diverse accounts. So much for the positive side of Serial. What of the negative side? How can a Serial go wrong? A collection of only partly unified tales is not necessarily a flawed Serial for being a collection of independent works. It is not better to write a unified Serial than an ununified collection. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific are just over the line into multiple works, but it is not difficult to envision them as Serials with a bit of revising. The proper place to analyze these is in the next section as part of a continuum; all we need to note here is that a work of literature is not necessarily flawed or inconsistent simply because it is one kind rather than another or because it is multiple works rather than one work. A work is inconsistent, however, if the narration unaccountably switches back and forth from one sort to another just because the author finds himself unable to say what he wants within the initial limits he has set for himself. Serial is not a species by default, composed of works whose narration fails to be sufficiently unified to qualify as Story. All of the Serials discussed so far have not only a clear unity of event but also some rationale for the grouping together of the various narratives. A Serial is not a casebook from which the reader picks and chooses elements to create his own work. A Serial, though it consists of a series of different narrations, is still, like all works of literature, a unified statement - that is, it comes equipped with its own rationale for being. If there is no such rationale, if it signifies nothing that diverse accounts are presented together, then a Serial is basically flawed as literature. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, in all its inexplicable diversity of narration, has laid itself open to this charge of "signifying

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nothing". Indeed, judging from the title, it has even courted it. Faulkner himself admits something of this narrative failure - an admission that critics like Cleanth Brooks construe to be part of the greatness of the "novel": In 1929 also appeared Faulkner's first great novel, The Sound and the Fury, a work still regarded by many critics as his finest. ... Faulkner said that he began to tell the story entirely "through the eyes of the idiot child since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother [Quentin], That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother [Jason], That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman."41 And this was not the end. Faulkner's continued dissatisfaction with getting his story told finally resulted in a twenty-page introductory "Appendix" that provides two hundred years of summarized history leading up to the event and seventeen years of moment-by-moment account depicting the fate of the characters that the original narratives left in limbo. Quite apart from the fact that half the work, especially the part "narrated" by the idiot Benjy, is of the same "stream-of-consciousness" variety that rendered the event of Jealousy fundamentally indeterminable, the five different accounts that comprise The Sound and the Fury provide no rationale whatsoever for appearing together under one title. Benjy and Quentin provide first-person "stream-of-consciousness" accounts. Jason provides a standard first-person account. The account of Dilsey is standard thirdperson, as is the "Appendix". The same kind of problem occurs with Faulkner's next novel, which he wrote while working the night shift at a power plant: "On these nights, between 12 and 4,1 wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a word" (p. 327). Fifteen participants in what is this time a clearly delimited event give accounts that are broken up and ordered chronologically (as in Dracula). Some are 41

Cleanth Brooks, "William Faulkner", a 4000-word essay in The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Max J. Herzberg (New York, 1962), 326-27.

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"stream-of-consciousness", some are not. Some are in the firstperson, some are in the third. Some are unaccountably omniscient; some are not. Some purport to be contemporaneous with the event narrated; some are after the fact; and a few seem to be about the future. The chapter titles are the names of the different characters, and usually this refers to who is narrating. But sometimes the title refers to the character who is the subject of the chapter. No rationale is provided for the differences among the accounts or for the grouping of them together. It can be argued that Faulkner was not interested in providing such an outmoded unity of narration, that rather he was attempting to symbolize the confusion of life by the confusion of art. And if this was his deliberate attempt, one can only admit that he has succeeded - just as he succeeded in the original version of The Wild Palms in making a whole volume out of two unrelated short novels by alternating a chapter of one with a chapter from the other as if they constituted a single work. Later editions print the stories separately as "The Wild Palms" and "The Old Man", but they first appeared as a "Serial". If real confusion is the goal, one hardly needs to go to literature to find it; it can be readily found on street corners and in college freshmen's compositions. For literature to portray the theme of confusion is not at all the same thing as for it to be itself confusing. A final example of Serial inconsistency is in order to demonstrate that there is more involved here than just confusion. A lack of narrative rationale is not necessarily confusing in the way that Faulkner can be. Dickens' Bleak House consists of alternating sections of Esther Sommersom's first-person, past account and an omniscient third-person, present account. Esther is writing about something that has passed; the third-person "narrator" is writing about the same thing as it is happening. Yet the two narratives are coextensive. The author's motivation for this alternation is clear enough: There are distinct advantages of character portrayal to be gained by having the protagonist write what he perceives, but on the other hand, not everything relevant to the story is perceived by the protagonist. The author is free to choose his own conventions, but he is obliged to stick to his choices once he has made them.

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One does not gain the advantages of third-person and first-person narration by unaccountably switching from one to the other when the need arises. Only when it is done accountably is the work unequivocally a Serial. Much more can be said about the different kinds of Serials, especially about narratives that are inserted into other narratives rather than being juxtaposed with them. But these are matters of transition from Story to Serial and require the drawing of finer distinctions than we are prepared to make here. Having completed our survey of the five species as distinct, immutable classes, however, we can proceed now to the analysis of the five species as reference points in a continuum - where a work is not just a Serial but more or less a Serial.

C. A CONTINUUM (NOT AN EVENT - NOT A SINGLE EVENT)

A pure continuum, purged of all taxonomic features, would have no two individuals occupying exactly the same niche between the two poles. Just as no two individuals are identical, so no two individuals would have exactly the same proportion of polar characteristics. However, in converting our taxonomy into a continuum, we shall be retaining a large measure of the original five classes. Each class will be further subdivided to include borderline cases on either side, but actually we are simply refining the taxonomy rather than replacing it with a true continuum. Instead of five basic divisions, there are now seventeen, including at one end a class of works that do not quite qualify as presenting an event and at the other end a class of works that do not quite qualify as presenting a single event. Thus, everything already said about the five species of literature is compatible with what will be said about the seventeen sectors of the literary continuum. Table 1 shows not only the five unequivocal classes but also their borderline cases as well. The works listed are, of course, only examples and not archetypal instances. Because the emphasis in a continuum is on the nature of the two extremes, let us begin by adding to our collection of five fox

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THE FORMS OF LITERATURE TABLE 1

CLASSES AND BORDERLINE CASES

Not an Event

M o 0 1 o g D i a 1 g S c r

1

"A Modest Proposal" (Swift) "The Canonization" (Donne)

2

"Facing West from California's Shores"

3

"Dover Beach"

(Arnold)

4

"Who Dealt?"

(Lardner)

5

"Heavenly King, Glorious God of Light" (de Bornelh)

6

"Lord Randal"

7

"The Play of Robin and Marion"

8

"The Arkansas Traveler"

9

The Importance of Being Earnest

(Whitman)

(Wilde)

10

The Skin of Our Teeth

S t o

11

Arms and the Man

12

The Saga of Hrafnkel

13

"The Bascombe Valley Mystery"

14

Steppenwolf

15

The Moonstone

16

Pan

17

The Sherlock Holmes Stories (Doyle) Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)

(Wilder)

M E D

(Shaw)

1

I

S e r i

a 1

A T E D

(de la Halle)

P t

y

U N M E D j

(Doyle)

(Hesse) (Collins)

(Hamsun)

A T E D

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and cock stories the two poles that will convert the series into a continuum. "The Cock Speaks Out", like Donne's poem "The Canonization" and Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal", contains rhetorical elements, but because it lacks specific characteristics of a space-time event, it is not literature. To be a "fictional statement" is not enough in itself to constitute a fictional event. Mandeville's Travels is unquestionably fictional, but there is no clearly delimited event in space and time. The famous early medieval forgery buttressing the temporal power of the papacy, the Donation of Constantine, is fictional, but again, does not create an event. We can infer from the following statement a specific speaker who seems to be responding to something previously said about the Edict of the Peaceable Kingdom, but nothing is provided to establish a specific scene or context or setting. A monolog is not necessarily a Monolog. There may be "poetry of statement", but there is no literature of statement. The Cock Speaks Out The Edict of the Peaceable Kingdom indeed! I want no more of these edicts. Let the Lion lie down with the Lamb; I don't care who sleeps with who as long as I'm not obliged to have dinner parties with that Fox. I don't want to eat with him, I don't want to sleep with him, I don't want to play dentist with him. Let the Lion lie down with the Fox, and we poor defenseless creatures will sleep with our own kind. Talk about the problems of legislating morality - why, laws of this sort are just invitations for every crook to live off the fat of the land. No edict in the world can make a teetotaler out of a drunkard or a lap dog out of a fox. This old cock speaks from experience. When the fox couldn't get me to play dentist with him, he pulled this Edict of the Peaceable Kingdom business on me, licking his chops all the while he was telling me about it. When I see him scratching for worms with the rest ot us peaceable chickens, then I'll believe that a new day has arrived. But come to think of it, we would all have to live in peace with the worms. Well, I can always peck for corn, but that pointed snout wouldn't get very far with a kernel of corn. I can't even envision what a peaceable fox would look like. Let the Peaceable Kingdom rot. All I want is a peaceable farmyard. Turning Swift's essay into a work of literature would require some conspicuous changes, but far fewer would suffice for "The

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Cock Speaks Out". Let us assume that Cock is declaiming to his hens in the farmyard shortly after having eluded the Fox's attempt to catch him with the toothache ploy and then, when that failed, with the Edict of the Peaceable Kingdom. One of the hens, with typical cloistered naivety about reforming the world by fiat, has expressed more interest in the Edict than in the Cock's escape. All that is needed to establish the Cock's statement as an act of utterance, as a Monolog, is a modification of the opening and concluding sentences: The Edict of the Peaceable Kingdom, indeed, Pertelote! You stand there on the very spot where the Fox tried to eat me alive and spout that nonsense.... ... Let the Peaceable Kingdom rot, you gullible hens. And quit your cackling; all I want is a peaceable farmyard.

At the other end of the continuum are literary works, works that present fictional events. But these works are collections of one sort or another, not statements of single, unified events. A work at this pole may be as elaborate as Ovid's world history in story form or as simple as a sermon containing parables. It is always possible to extract independent works of literature from such collections, but the collection as it stands is not a single work of literature. Our example below is a personal essay on the character of the fox, illustrated with three short tales that the narrator claims to have heard many years earlier on a visit to fox country. The tales are not about the same fox, nor about the same place. Nor is the narrator's visit to the village on the northwest coast of England and his hearing of the tales sufficiently particularized to constitute a unifying frame event. The work as a whole is not the creation of a fictional event but the analysis of the character of the fox and its use in animal tales.

The Character of the Fox Animal tales have, at least among adults, almost ceased to be told in our society. Perhaps this is because we have almost ceased to share our society with animals. We no longer have with any of them the relation-

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ship - common to mankind for most of his stay on this planet - of that hostility mixed with admiration out of which so many animal stories have been created. Man has succeeded in getting rid of most of his animal foes and so has little opportunity for the keen observation hostility motivates. It is as if only after the character of an animal has been established by observation that he can be used in fiction, and then often for quite other purposes than appreciation of his intrinsic character. Once understood, an animal takes on a human character and can be used just as well to represent a human foe or even a human aspect of oneself. But when the real-life relationship disappears, so too, it seems, does the fictional use of the animal character. This point was brought home to me when I had occasion to spend some time in a village on the northwest coast of England in the earlier part of our century. There the inhabitants had as keen an appreciation of the character of the fox as any French'peasant of the Middle Ages had of his Reynard. Since the livelihood of almost all the villagers in some way depended on their sheep and a regular supply of fowl and eggs on their farmyard poultry, the fox was foe. On the steep shores ot this seacoast the fox cannot be hunted by gentlemen on horseback as in the southern shires. He makes his earths in inaccessible rocky crags and from there raids the surrounding countryside. On their part the villagers relentlessly seek out his family there and try to destroy his home. The constant warfare has given each side a keen knowledge of the ways of the other, so that every villager can tell you a fox story or two, often based on his own experience. Moreover, this familiarity having created a recognizable character, the fox has come to figure in stories that he never could have in real life, and telling stories about the fox has become a way of telling stories about other men or indeed about mankind. Perhaps this is something of the way that animal tales took root in some era long gone when man and beast fought it out as equals. One evening, I remember, I was having a pint at the local pub when I overheard a trapper telling this story: The Trapper's

Story

I had been working all day setting out traps and had only one more to lay when I came upon a huge warren. Well, I thought to myself, I'll lay a good one here and I'm sure to catch a rabbit or two or even a fox come to catch himself one. I hid the trap in some long grass and tied it fast to a tree - for there was a stand of timber near the warren - and had just gone off into the timber, taking a short-cut home, when I thought I heard something behind me. I turned just in time to see a fox come creeping up to the warren. He stood quite still and peered around

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for a bit. It was getting darkish, but no rabbits had come out of the warren yet. Then suddenly the fox sank down and rolled over on his back with all fours in the air as if he'd had a stroke. Oh, ho, I thought to myself, I'm in luck here, and was going to return and pick him up, when something made me stay just where I was. For one thing, since the fox's legs were all sticking up in the air, I knew he hadn't stepped in my trap. What had made him fall over like that then? It was wondering about this that made me stay back hidden in the trees and watch for a bit. After all, if a trapper knows luck, he knows patience better. Pretty soon an old buck came out of one of the holes. He looked about sniffing the air and suddenly spotted the fox. Back into his hole he dashed. But the fox never moved a muscle. I was almost sure that he was dead. In a few moments two rabbits came out of the warren and peered at the fox. There he lay still as a stone. I could swear the rabbits were talking it over the way they looked from the fox to each other and back at the fox again. Then they hopped a little closer, keeping a careful eye on him all the while, but the fox never stirred. Well, you know how curious rabbits are. I guess the fox knows too, for with all their nervousness they were getting closer and closer to the fox, and just as I became as sure as the bunnies were that the rascal was as dead as a doornail since one of them was right next to his head looking into his sly mug - up jumps the fox, catches the nearest rabbit by the neck in his jaws and kills it. You could see it go limp. The other rabbit ran off fast as light, but the fox had all he needed for dinner. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. Foxes are no friends of mine. Yet I had to hand it to that one, he's smart, no getting around it. But in a few moments I wasn't feeling much like laughing any more. The fox had started trotting off with his catch when all of a sudden he dropped the rabbit and came towards the timber where I was hiding. But evidently he didn't get close enough to smell me, though I might have shot him if I'd had a gun. It wasn't me though he was after - it was my trap! Yes, indeed, he had spotted the trap I had set in the grass, came over to it, and started digging around it. At first I couldn't work out what he was up to. The fox threw up earth for quite awhile with me standing there watching him just as if I had good sense. Then I heard the trap snap shut and it came to me what he had done. He'd tossed up enough earth onto the springplate so that the weight of it had sprung the trap. And that red rascal wasn't satisfied with this either, for as soon as it had snapped, he started worrying it, tearing at it like a dog with a bone. And then finally he had it - he'd pulled it out. He flung it down, and then I think he might have carried it off. Plenty of sprung traps have been found in foxes' earths. But this one had his rabbit to carry. So I was in luck. Off he trotted with just his dinner.

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A fox story of quite a different kind I heard one day when I was invited by an estate agent with whom I had become friendly to go with him to visit a tenant-farmer whose rent was in arrears. The landlord by whom the agent was employed never showed himself on the estate but was all for the money, which he needed to keep himself in cards and women. The agent sympathized with the tenants but was constantly being pressed by the landlord for the rents. The farmer was a hard-working fellow, to judge only by the look of him. His reason for not paying up on rent-day was that he had asked the landlord for an abatement in his rent because of the improvements that he had been compelled to make on the property and the landlord had refused. The improvements were not stipulated in the lease and thus had been undertaken entirely at the tenant's discretion. The farmer's claim was that he hadn't any choice, what with the cow barton falling down and the fences needing mending to keep the foxes out. Though bitter about the landlord, the farmer was otherwise a pleasant fellow, who enjoyed telling a good yarn. The Tenant-Farmer''s Fable

Once a wren and a fox agreed to go shares on a grain crop. The wren cleared the land and plowed it up, got the seed and sowed it. And all the while she never saw a hair of the fox. Finally came time to crossplow and weed, so the wren sent for the fox to help. "I have so much to do right now," says the fox, "that I haven't any time to help you. You can do it yourself, can't you, little by little?" So the wren crossplowed and weeded. Came time to harvest, so the wren sent for the fox to help. "I have so much to do right now," says the fox, "that I haven't any time to help you. You can do it yourself, can't you, little by little? It will all be counted in, you can be sure, when sharing-up time comes." So the wren harvested the grain. And she carted it away, and she threshed it, and she cleaned it. Came time to share up, so the wren sent for the fox. And the fox came right over, looked around and says, "Very well, since you did the most work - cleared the land, plowed it up, got the seed, sowed it, cross-plowed, weeded, harvested, carted, threshed, and cleaned - you deserve the biggest share. So, you can have that big stack of chaff and straw over there and I'll take this little pile of grain here." Oh, ho, the wren was angry at this, but what good could it do her? The fox says, "Easy now, easy, or I'll forget that we're partners and remember that you're just a little wren." Says he, "I'll be back tomorrow with a cart to pick up my share, and it had better all be here." Well, the wren goes wandering out along the road all upset and weeping when who should she come upon but a young hound. "What's the matter," he says, "why do you weep, little wren?" And the wren answers, "So little am I, brother, that I know much about the treachery in this world," and she told him how hard she had worked and how the wicked

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THE FONDS OF LITERATURE

fox had tricked her. "Don't weep any more, my little wren," says the hound when he hears this. "Just you hide me in your haystack and when the fox comes tomorrow to pick up his grain, I'll take care of him so that he'll never be greedy again." The wren gladly agreed and they went back to the barn and hid the hound well in the haystack, leaving only an eye-opening. The next morning the fox arrived with his cart, and the first thing he noticed was that the wren's haystack seemed bigger than it was the day before. "Have you been putting some of my grain into your pile, you thievish bird?" cried the fox. And although the wren denied it, the fox insisted on taking a look. He peers about and suddenly spots the eye of the hound looking out. But he thinks it's a grape - you know how those rascals love grapes - and he shouts, "A grape! a grape!" And the hound says, "Leave it alone, it's not ripe yet," and with this he jumps out at the fox, catches him, and bites him to death. The wren and the hound divided up the grain fair and square and went shares on what they made by selling the skin of the fox. It is plain that there was as much of the landlord as the fox in the farmer's tale. So human a character as the fox showed himself must inevitably end up in a sermon. I was not surprised then, when attending the local chapel service, to hear the preacher make use of the fox in one of his parables of the human situation. To be sure, the story is set in a vineyard and there are no vineyards in that country, and thus it smacks ot the book. But the villagers listened eagerly to a story about a fox when they might not to one about themselves. The Preacher's Parable

There was once a great drought in the land where a fox hunted for his living, and the fox was becoming leaner and hungrier by the day. So he set out in search of a better place and traveled on for a good while until he came upon a vineyard, which must have been well-watered, for it was full of the richest and ripest-looking grapes the fox had ever seen. Alas, the vineyard was surrounded by a fence whose palings were too close together for the fox to think that he could get through them. He came up to the fence and gazed longingly through it at the luscious grapes. As he forgot himself in contemplation of the forbidden fruit, his muzzle slipped between the palings, and then as he moved, he found that he could get his head in too, and so Jean had he become with his long fast that he succeeded in squeezing through the palings entirely and thus found himself alone in this paradise of grapes. The fox bounded from vine to vine devouring the fruit. For three days he gorged himself. Then the grower came to tend the vines, and the fox had some trouble to keep

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287

himself hidden and undetected, for the grower saw that his grapes had been eaten. The fox realized that he would have to leave the vineyard. So as soon as the grower had gone, the fox sought out the place in the fence where he had squeezed through three days ago. First he put his muzzle between the palings. Then he tried to force his head through. That was a bit tight, but finally he made it. But when he sought to press on through with his body, he couldn't move an inch's worth. He pushed and twisted, scraping himself all up, but to no purpose. He was too fat ever to get through. Then he went from opening to opening and tried each to see if one might not be a little wider than the others. It was no use. So the fox turned away from the fence and from the grapes too and went into a far corner of the vineyard. Now for three days he tasted amid this plenty until he was again as lean as when he had entered the vineyard to eat the grapes, and so he was able to leave it. Such is the life of man. Poor and wretched he comes into the world, and however richly he may partake of life's feast, poor and wretched must he depart from the world at last.

Obviously, each of the three tales could stand alone as a single, unified fictional event. And with some modification, the essay as a whole could be converted into a frame event that included three different characters telling, in the narrator's presence, the three tales. But this would require the addition of more material than with "The Cock Speaks Out", and, furthermore, would change the basic point of what was originally an essay. A sermon with a parable is not the same thing as a story with a moral. Another possibility of creating a unified event out of the three tales is to link them together in a kind of miniature picaresque sequence. But this would require the same fox, going down the same road, having the three adventures. It would not do to have the realistic trapper's fox and the fantastical farmer's fox appearing as the same creature, quite apart from the difficulty involved in having the setting of one tale in Northwestern England and the setting of another in a land of vineyards. As they stand, rather than how they might be modified, "The Cock Speaks Out" and "The Character of the Fox" represent the two poles of our literary continuum. This continuum, or rather modified taxonomy, has seventeen positions on it, and these two works are numbered one and seventeen.

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1. There are two characteristic ways that works present themselves for consideration as Monologs without quite creating an act of utterance. The first of these is exemplified by Swift's "A Modest Proposal". In this type, irony and facetiousness pushed to an extreme, often with authorship concealed by studied anonymity or a pseudonym, seem to justify the label "fictitious". But a fictitious utterance is not in itself an act of utterance - an utterance in a particularized fictional context. Satire is not a literary genre; it may take a literary form (as in Gulliver's Travels), or it may take the form of an argumentative essay (as in "A Modest Proposal"). It is easy enough to prove that the author of this essay did not really, as he claimed, think that breeding Irish children to sell for table consumption when weaned was the best solution to the problem of Irish poverty. Nor is it true of the childless, wifeless, Swift that "I have no Children, by which I can propose to get a single Penny; the youngest being nine Years old, and my Wife past Child-bearing." Not every untrue statement is either a lie or an error - but neither is it an unverifiable moment-by-moment statement of an event. "A Modest Proposal" is on its way to being fiction and could have been presented as an act of utterance by providing some indications of a context within which the speaker utters it - sitting in a London coffee house, walking down a Dublin street, addressing Parliament. The question is not whether it would have been a more effective satire but simply whether it would have been literature. The second characteristic way that works present themselves for consideration as Monologs is exemplified by Donne's "The Canonization". In a sense "The Canonization" is closer to being an act of utterance than is "A Modest Proposal" because of its introductory direct address: "For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love." This is the very same characteristic that we analyzed in "The Cock Speaks Out" and found ultimately to be insufficient to constitute an act of utterance out of an utterance. But Donne's poem was chosen for more than simply reinforcement. One of the most revealing works of modern literary apologetics and critical theory is Murray Krieger's The New Apologists for Poetry For all its courageous attempt to avoid extremism and to

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confront the paradox of autonomy and referentiality with the sword of "contextualism", it is a prime example of the linguistic conception of literature. ... language must be considered as a formative factor in the complex process of creation. I must say that the poet's original idea for his work, no matter how clearly thought out and complete he thinks it is, undergoes such radical transformations as language goes creatively to work upon it that the finished poem, in its full internal relations, is far removed from what the author thought he had when he began. I might be tempted to say rather than the other way around, it is language that has created the poetic idea as this idea comes to be the complex of words that constitutes the completed poem. 42 Despite a feeble but very revealing claim that this linguistic conception must be as applicable to fictional prose as to metaphysical poetry, Krieger completely ignores the term and concept of fiction. And this admittedly unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable claim is buried in a footnote halfway through the book: In this essay I mean to use poetry in its broadest or Aristotelian sense as including all imaginative literature, fiction as well as verse. Yet in this and later discussions it may seem at times that I am using the term to mean verse as distinguished from all prose writings, fiction as well as nonfiction. The reason for this seeming ambiguity is that I am discussing poetry on the levels of language and of conventional literary forms, and it is quite difficult to distinguish on these levels between fictional and nonfictional prose. Somehow the language of prose fiction must also be shown to develop the contextual characteristics necessary to form an autonomous world if contemporary organic theory is to discover a way to treat prose fiction as a form of poetic discourse. I do not believe, as later in this study the neo-Aristotelians will be seen to believe, that the treatment of poetry primarily in terms of language prevents the inclusion of prose fiction as a form of poetry. I would rather argue that if we refrain from treating poetry in terms of language, as the neo-Aristotelians would, then it would become impossible to distinguish at all between verse and prose fiction or to justify the conventional forms of verse. Nevertheless the crucial task of showing how, theoretically, the prose-poetry distinction here developed allows fiction to be considered poetry remains a difficult one - just one of the many thorny problems I am bequeathing to future theorists in this tradition, (pp. 72-73) 42

Minneapolis, 1956, 23.

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As a neo-New Critic, Krieger is committed by an "act of faith" to the centrality in poetic theory of the individual experience of the individual poem, to the "value" of its "effects"; and this seems to him to rest squarely on "the complexities of poetic discourse" (pp. 11-12). Not surprisingly then he chooses as his inductive starting point "The Canonization", a work that seems to him, and to the linguistically-oriented New Critics, one of the most obvious and unequivocal examples of poetry. The test of any adequate poetic theory, as Krieger sees it, is the ability to account for two things: the uniqueness or autonomy of the individual poem, and the cognitive reference that the poem makes to the real world. His paradoxical theory for overcoming the need of poetry to be both referential and autonomous, despite its being one of the most sustained and intelligent attempts to provide a foundation for the linguistic New Criticism, failed to convince even those critics it was trying to account for. And finally, even Krieger became dissatisfied with it (as the title of his later article "Contextualism Was Ambitious" reveals).43 The lesson to be learned from Krieger's attempt is not what some have concluded - that the very attempt to provide a theoretical foundation is too ambitious - but that no adequate theory of literature can be based on Metaphysical poems like "The Canonization". The reason is simple: it has an element of direct address but not sufficiently sustained and particularized to be an act of utterance, a fictional event. Who is speaking, who is spoken to, where the utterance is being uttered, why it is being uttered - these are not indicated in the poem. Whether the argument in the poem is logical or "a parody of logic" (p. 14) is of course important for determining its meaning. But parodies, whether in prose ("A Modest Proposal") or in verse ("The Canonization") are not thereby fictional events. The kind of modification made on "The Cock Speaks Out" could be made on "The Canonization" but not necessarily to any good purpose. Creating facetious arguments in memorable language can have a 43

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXI (1962): 81-88. For further analysis of Krieger's problem, as it grew out of a positivistic conception of meaning see "The Truth of Literature" in Chapter VIII below.

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rationale of its own quite apart from any literary rationale. Our attempt here is only to establish that works like "The Canonization" do not quite present a fictional event. But lest it be thought that there is no place for Metaphysical poetry in a fictional conception of literature, here is Donne with a similar work of direct address that also takes a cavalier attitude toward conventional logical arguments. The significant difference, however, between "The Flea" and "The Canonization" is that here, in just the first stanza of a four-stanza poem, we are provided with a clearly particularized act of utterance: a man is speaking to his reluctant lover; she has been refusing to sacrifice her maidenhead to his desire; a flea hopping from him to her has sucked blood from both; he argues that this merging of blood is no different than the merging that he has been seeking and she refusing. Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know'st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do. And in the last stanza the scene is further particularized by how she responds to his flea argument, by squashing the flea: "Cruel and sudden, hast thou since/Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?" There is nothing borderline about "The Flea"; it is an unequivocal Monolog. 2. The second step of our continuum is those works that just barely qualify as fictional events by virtue of possessing a minimum indication of an act of utterance. The crucial missing element with "The Canonization" was a particular context, a scene. In Walt Whitman's poem "Facing west from California's shores", however, the scene is clearly indicated in the opening line. Facing west from California's shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves towards the house of maternity,

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the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd, Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago ? And why is it yet unfound?)

The problem here is not with the scene but with the utterance: there is no indication that the person facing west from California's shores is speaking to anyone, and there is no moment-by-momentness unless he is speaking because a person's thoughts do not constitute a recognizable space-time event. As a bare minimum someone speaking one word after another is necessary to create a "happening". In Whitman's poem there is no obstacle to our taking the words to be spoken aloud, rather the difficulty is a negative one: we usually assume that words spoken aloud are addressed to someone or something in the presence of the speaker. But just as we can accept the convention in drama of characters soliloquizing, so we can accept the same convention in a poem, though in a sense it requires even more suspension of disbelief than most fantasy requires. Here is an oration with no immediate motivation or rationale, an orator with no audience. Yet, our task is not to judge believability but minimum criteria of eventness. And as such, "Facing west from California's shores" does barely qualify as an act of utterance, as a Monolog. 3. To qualify as an unequivocal example of Monolog, a work should provide clear indications both of setting and of direct address. Here is the first of four stanzas in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": The sea is calm to-night, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the Straits; - on the French coast, the light Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

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Come to the window, sweet is the night air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the ebb meets the moon-blanched sand, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Once again someone is on the seashore speaking, but this time the speaker is clearly speaking to someone else and for a particular purpose. The speaker is calling the listener (or "love", as the last stanza reveals) to come to the window to share the sweetness of the night air and a particularly attractive view across the Straits to the French coast. Whatever else the poem does or says, it clearly presents an unequivocal act of utterance. Two people are in a building on the beach; one of them is at a window looking out; this person speaks of what he or she sees, then calls the other to join him or her at the window. The moment-by-momentness is constituted by the words spoken in a one-way conversation. Call it an act of utterance; call it a dramatic monolog; call it a Monolog. Whatever term is used, an unequivocal fictional event has been created. 4. The way that an unequivocal Monolog begins to shade into a Dialog is by the introduction of implied responses to what is being uttered. In an unequivocal Dialog there is an actual alternating of utterances by two or more speakers. In a Monolog tending toward Dialog there are only the words of one speaker, but these words alternate with implied responses to what the speaker says. Our example of a Monolog given in the taxonomy section ("The Clever Cock") is of this transitional sort. What the Cock says makes sense only if we interpret his monolog as being periodically interrupted by the Fox, whose words, however, we are not given. We only infer them from the Cock's responses. Here is the opening exchange: Master Fox! ah - good morning. What brings you out in such wretched weather as this? A toothache, eh? You want me to pull the tooth for

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you? Well, I might be able to do it. But you'll have to show me which one it is. You have so many. That one is it, way back there ? I see. This convention can be found both in verse and prose. Robert Browning uses it in some of his dramatic monologs (e.g. "Andrea del Sarto"), and Ring Lardner uses it in some of his short stories (e.g. "Who Dealt?"). The most sustained prose example is probably Camus' short novel The Fall, which not only passes over the replies of the interlocutor but also extends intermittently over six days. However, because part of what the speaker says is also a momentby-moment account of his earlier life, there are problems of narrative complexity that preclude its use as a simple example in the continuum. "Who Dealt?", however, will serve the purpose very well. The work is clearly a Monolog, in which two married couples are playing bridge. The speaker is one of the women, and she talks almost non-stop - but not quite. At a dozen places in the story what she says clearly implies that one of the other three has interrupted with a brief remark: No thank you, Arthur; no more. Two is my limit and I've already exceeded it, with two cocktails before dinnei and now this. All right, Tommie; I won't say another word. Do you feel the same way about Arthur, Helen? You do? And you married him four years ago, isn't that right ? Helen, do you mind telling me where you got that gown? Crandall and Nelson's? I've heard of them, but I heard they were terribly expensive. We can if we like call this sort of work a borderline case, but it is not straddling the fence and causes no embarrassment to the taxonomy. There is no question which side of the border it is on because a work that presents the actual words of only one speaker cannot be a Dialog. To be sure, the event of most Monologs is uninterrupted, but this is not a defining characteristic - any more than being interrupted (as is the event of almost all Stories) is a defining characteristic of Stories. 5. Our example of Monolog tending toward Dialog had much implied dialog but no actual dialog. Our example of Dialog tending

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toward Monolog, on the other hand, has little exchange, but what it does have is actual - the words of two different speakers. Works of this sort are quite capable of standing alone as Monologs if the words of the secondary speaker are dropped. Thomas Hardy's poem "Under the Waterfall" could be used to exemplify the point: a woman says that when she plunges her arm into a basin of water, as she is doing now, it brings back the memory of a "fugitive day". A companion (perhaps they are doing the wash together) asks what and why, and this brief four-line response in a fifty-line poem is all that we hear from her. The rest of the work is the first speaker giving an account of how she and her lover, picnicking by a waterfall, dropped a wine glass into the pool, and then searched unsuccessfully for it. But like Camus's The Fall this borderline Dialog contains within it a narrative complexity that we are not yet prepared to deal with. Not only is there an unmediated event, but part of the utterance is itself the narrating of another, mediated event. A simpler example is the twelfth-century French poem by Giraut de Bornelh, "Reis glorios, verais lums e clartatz".u The first six stanzas are a monolog uttered by a man who has stayed awake all night to be the lookout for his friend who has been sleeping with another man's wife. Dawn is about to break, and the impatient watchman is urging the friend to get up and depart before he is discovered. But the lover does not respond until at last it becomes clear that the impatient watchman will not be still. Here are the two concluding stanzas (in Shapiro's translation), the first by the watchman, the second by the lover: "Good friend, why did you earnestly implore me, Upon the terrace, not to yield to sleeping? Throughout this night gladly have I been keeping A faithful watch. Why do you now ignore me? And soon it will be dawn." "Good friend and true, now taste I such delight That nevermore wish I to see the morn. The fairest creature e'er of mother born 44

Tr. Norman R. Shapiro as "Heavenly King, Glorious God of Light" in Anthology of Medieval Lyrics, ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1962).

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Lies in my arms. Thus caie I not a mite For jealous sire nor dawn." There is no back and forth exchange of conversation as we usually expect in a Dialog, just the minimum of two different people speaking. And up to the last stanza, the poem is well established as a Monolog; the scene and situation are clearly implied by the words of the one speaker. But the addition of the last stanza changes the character of the work, and what could have stood alone as a Monolog becomes a Dialog. 6. If the previous step in the continuum is characterized by a single exchange, then of course this step (the unequivocal Dialog) will be characterized by multiple exchanges. They may be as few as two (e.g. "Pussy cat, pussy cat") or as many as two dozen (e.g. Marc Connelly's short story of a cross-examination, "Coroner's Inquest"). Usually there will be only two speakers, but the Grimms' tale "Pretty Katy" has six different speakers. The limiting factor on both the number of exchanges and the number of speakers is the difficulty of making the differences comprehensible without employing even speaker tags. The creation of dialog in a Script or a Story can easily involve dozens of speakers and hundreds of exchanges, but only because these are set in a narrative context. Understandably, then, unequivocal Dialog accommodates itself very well to oral literature, where the same kind of limiting factor operates. As we have seen in the taxonomy, ballads in dialog form are very common. For instance, all fifteen versions of "Lord Randal" in the Child collection are unequivocal Dialogs, as are also the three versions of "Edward". These follow the basic question-and-answer pattern that characterizes much Dialog as a species of literature. This characteristic is not, however, a defining one, because, though it is manifested in longer, written, prose works like "Coroner's Inquest", it is absent from an equally obvious Dialog, "Whistle, daughter, whistle", from oral tradition. Below, both to exemplify further unequivocal Dialog and to contrast the question-and-answer exchange with the conversational exchange, are the opening stanzas of "Lord Randal" (Child 12D) and the whole of "Whistle, daughter, whistle":

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'O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son? O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?' 'I hae been to the wild wood; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.' 'Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Randal, my son? Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young man?' 'I din'd wi my true-love; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.' "Whistle, daughter, whistle, And I'll give you a sheep." "Mother, I'm asleep." "Whistle, daughter, whistle, And I'll give you a cow." Mother, I don't know how." "Whistle, daughter, whistle, And I'll give you a man." "Mother, now I can."45 7. If, as was claimed in the taxonomy, speaker tags are the most conspicuous feature of Script, then it is not difficult to see what kind of Dialog would be borderline with Script - any Dialog that has speaker tags. The distinction on the basis of speaker tags is not as insignificant as it might at first seem. For the use of speaker tags in all Scripts but in only some Dialogs reflects an important difference of degree between Dialog and Script: the generally greater number of both speakers and speeches in Script than in Dialog. And this greater number of speeches and speakers in turn reflects the generally wider scope of the event depicted in a Script. Therefrom arises the need in Script not only for the regular use of speaker tags but also for the use of narration. Most of the Dialogs with speaker tags so far discussed seem, as we in fact argued, more like unequivocal Dialogs than anything else. Nevertheless there are Dialogs with a number of speakers and evidently composed, because they are entitled "play", with performance in mind, thus clearly exemplifying the transition to Script. Adam de la Halle's "The Play of Robin and Marion", though 45

Games a?id Songs of American Children, ed. William Wells Newell (New York, 1883; 1903), no. 33.

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a Dialog, is called a "play", has seven speaking parts, consistently makes use of speaker tags, and is 762 lines long. The occurrence in the text of music transcribed for the numerous songs is another indication that the work was intended for performance. Although the cast of characters is not large, speaker tags are quite necessary because some of the lines of verse are broken up between two speakers, and on one occasion, when six of the characters are "counting out", a couple of lines are broken up between four speakers each. Yet since so much of the event is referred to quite directly in dialog and since the event continues without lapses of time straight through to the end, neither stage directions nor any other kind of narrative is necessary, and the work has none. 8. Still, despite the fact that Adam de la Halle succeeded in composing one entirely self-explanatory Dialog, his other play, "The Play of the Foliage" ("Li Jeus de le fuellie"), which has speaker tags and nineteen speakers and runs to 1099 lines, also has two narrative tags and is thus over the line into Script. Each one is an assertion that a group of the characters - the fairies, the company sings the following verse, though in the first instance a musical transcription accompanies the lines and in the other instance reference is immediately made in the dialog to the fact that the preceding line was sung. Nevertheless stage directions regarding singing are usually functionally necessary and occur not uncommonly where there is little or no other narration. The early seventeenthcentury broadside, "A Country New Jig Between Simon and Susan, to be sung in merry pastime by bachelors and maids", is essentially a dialog with speaker tags, which contains, however, one narrative assertion, "All together sing",46 that makes it a Script. Yet since the work is already a song, this narrative assertion could surely have been taken care of by speaker tags. On the other hand, in John Heywood's The Play Called the Four PP, "Here they sing" is one of only two narrative assertions in the play (the other being "Here the 'pothecary hops"). And this stage direction is certainly functionally necessary because neither words nor music for the "singing" is supplied. 46

Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, text 4.

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Such examples of narrative tags or narrative assertions being limited to one or two in a play could be enumerated at great length. Some of them seem necessary supplements to the dialog and some do not. Jean Bodel's "The Play of Saint Nicholas", which runs to 1538 lines, has only one bit of narration, the assertion, "Now the Saracens kill all the Christians." This is a part of the event that would be impossible to depict in the dialog alone. On the other hand, the fifteenth-century Noah play from the English mystery play cycle of Wakefield also has just one narrative assertion, "Then he advances to his wife." Since Noah says before the stage direction is given that he is going to see his wife and after it addresses her as such, this narration seems redundant. But by and large the narration introduced into dialog is functionally quite necessary. To be sure, in full-length plays of thousands of lines, such as those of Shakespeare's, there may be proportionately few narrative elements and many of them limited to entrances and exits and drums and trumpets ("Flourish within"). As was indicated in Chapter II above with the quotation from Othello, the speeches of such plays are so clear and particular that it is relatively easy to infer most of the event from them without the aid of narration. However, such a stage direction as this one from Macbeth, "Enter the Ghost of Banquo and sits in Macbeth's place", could not be inferred from the dialog. The dialog makes clear only that Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost in his seat and none of the other persons present do, not that the ghost is really there. If we take a look at our paradigm example of this borderline sector of the continuum, the nineteenth-century American skit "The Arkansas Traveler", we can see why at least some narration is so often necessary. This work, of which four different people have claimed authorship, runs to about a thousand words and has three "stage directions". The first sets the scene: "A lost and bewildered Arkansas Traveler approaches the cabin of a Squatter, about forty years ago, in search of lodgings, and the following dialogue ensues."47 The Squatter shams an inability to understand what the 47

According to the version attributed to Col. Sandy Faulkner by B.S. Alford, who entered it in the Office of the Librarian of Congress in 1876, but says that it was composed in 1840. It is reprinted in James R. Masterson, Tall Tales of

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Traveler is talking about when he asks for food, drink, and a place to sleep. They are getting nowhere with each other when the Traveler asks the Squatter, who is evidently playing his fiddle in between his replies to the Traveler's questions, why he doesn't play the rest of the tune. The Squatter replies that the Traveler can play it himself if he knows it, and then occurs the second stage direction, "(The traveler takes the fiddle and plays the whole of it.)" This narrative assertion introduces the musical transcription of the fiddle tune, "Arkansas Traveler", and has the same informative function as the various directions about singing already cited from so many earlier plays. The Traveler's musicianship stimulates the hospitality of the Squatter so much that now the Traveler cannot get on with his journey. One of the Squatter's daughters, Til, appears to announce that they don't have enough knives to set the table and is thus the only speaker in the skit besides the Traveler and the Squatter. The third bit of narrative information - "(After about two hours' fiddling.)" - is necessary, as we have seen narration required for before, to indicate the passage of time. Most Dialog becomes Script by just this kind of expansion. There is, however, another way in which Dialog can be turned into a mediated genre, borderline though it may be: that is by the use of synopses. The work first published anonymously in 1499 and later attributed to Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, or the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, is a principal example of the way

in which dialog of any length requires the introduction of some kind of narration. In its final form Celestina runs to twenty-one acts, adding up to the length of a moderately-sized novel. It has fourteen speakers, and speaker tags are used throughout. But there are no stage directions, no narration whatsoever interspersed among the speeches. Nevertheless a dialog of this length and complexity can not stand entirely on its own. The work is prefaced with a synopsis of the whole event that even concludes with one assertion as to how the first act opens. Then each of the twentyone acts begins with a synopsis of what happens in the act, complete Arkansas (Boston, 1943), and B.A. Botkin, A Treasury of American (New York, 1944).

Folklore

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with information about the persons who speak in it. These synopses, narrated in third-person, present-tense give the story away, to be sure, and thus Celestina is not narrated contemporaneously and cannot be a Script. Here is an example of mediated elements introduced into a Dialog so as to create not a Script but a Story. What makes the Story unusual is that there is consistent use of the present tense but with a result that is past time narration: the event has already occurred before the account of it begins. 9. The most characteristic kind of Script is one like Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest - with speaker tags, list of dramatis personae, and a moderate amount of third-person, present-tense narration directly and consistently related to the event being depicted. The event of The Importance of Being Earnest covers the intrigues of two friends, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, during a few days in London and a Hertfordshire manor house. The opening of each act is clearly and briefly described as the act begins. For example. Act One opens: Morning-room in Algernon's flat in Half-Moon Street. The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room. LANE is arranging afternoon tea on the table, and after the music has ceased ALGERNON enters. The Act Three setting is even more simply described: "Morningroom at the Manor House. GWENDOLEN and CECILY are at the window, looking out into the garden." Wilde's musical directions are nearly as brief as those of the earlier plays we have cited: "[Enter JACK followed by ALGERNON. They whistle some dreadful popular air from a British Opera.]" And like Heywood, he allows the music to be supplied by the actors. Some of the narration is superfluous, like that interpolated in the following exchange: Well, produce my cigarette case first. Here it is. [Hands cigarette case.] Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable. JACK

ALGERNON

But most of it is functionally necessary, as in the following example, where the point of what is narrated is that it cannot be spoken:

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goes to the door. She and JACK blow kisses to each other behind LADY BRACKNELL'S back, LADY BRACKNELL looks vaguely about as if she could not understand what the noise was. Finally turns around.] [GWENDOLEN

Gwendolen, the carriage!

Wilde's narration is thus both succinct and to the purpose at hand. Yet, economical as it is, there is little doubt that proportionately it exceeds that of all but a few plays composed before the nineteenth century. It was at this time that Script narration began to greatly elaborate, as more and more of the dramatic event was conveyed by means of scenery, properties, and the naturalistic movements of the personae, and less and less by the dialog alone. The Importance of Being Earnest is an example of a Script that originates in written composition for the purpose of being enacted. But there is another way in which a work that is centrally Script can also originate - in the transcription of an enactment. Most folk plays are transmitted orally and come to be written down only when someone transcribes them. The end result of the transcription is the same, however, as that of a work written to be enacted - a work of literature that is a Script. Our example of this kind of Script, the Oxfordshire St. George Play, was transcribed by the Rev. Frederick George Lee, who said of its transcription: "The text was taken down by myself from the lips of one of the performers in 1853. I first saw it acted in the Hall of the old Vicarage House at Thame, in the year 1839. ... Nothing whatsoever has been altered or added by myself." To this last claim J.M. Manly, who quotes it, adds in brackets "[except stage directions]".48 Lee was somewhat ingenuous on this literary point, for it is his "stage directions" that make the work a Script instead of a Dialog. Like Wilde's, some of Lee's narration is superfluous information about the event. For example, Giant Blunderbore announces himself and then introduces his man Jack with: "And this here is my little man Jack - / A thump on his rump and a whack on his back!" Then follows the "stage direction", "Strikes him twice", a bit of action that is perfectly clear from the "thump" and "whack" of the speech. On the other hand there is nothing in the dialog to 48

Lee's remarks and the text are printed in Vol. I of Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakesperean Drama (New York, 1897), 2 vols.

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convey that St. George strikes the Dragon nor that the Dragon attacks King Alfred. So the stage direction following St. George's lines - "Strikes THE DRAGON, who roars and comes forward" - is really necessary, as is the further information after the Dragon's first speech that he "Tries to bite KING ALFRED". But of course the stage directions of a transcription can be just as inconsistent as those of a Script written for production, as is this one of Lee's: "Some of the performers show signs of fighting again." Performers exist in a different event than do Giant Blunderbore, Jack, King Alfred, St. George, and the Dragon. But in this inconsistency the tran-Script is, alas, no different from many a composed Script. 10. The means by which Scripts shade into Stories is the introduction of narration above and beyond the brief description of the present moment. Stage directions in Scripts qua Scripts do not make surmises about the motives or thoughts of characters, do not relate present action to action of another time and place, do not provide information about the past or the future. But again, the problem is where to draw the line. The later plays of Shaw are clearly over the line into Story, and even his earliest plays contain more than the traditionally limited stage directions. Shaw's first venture into drama with Three Unpleasant Plays (Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession) is already borderline. Not only are motives and intentions characterized in the detailed stage directions, but also these narrative elements are sometimes integrated as a running commentary into the dialog itself. But because Shaw is the best example of drama that has already slipped over the line into Story, let us look elsewhere for borderline Script. The three Thornton Wilder plays discussed in the taxonomy chapter are equally conspicuous for detailed stage directions, and, in addition, these narrative elements are completely integrated into the dialog. Indeed, the dialog is treated in a most undramatic way by being set off by quotation marks. What keeps these plays still in the Script category is the care that Wilder takes to keep the stage directions confined to the action at hand. Yet upon occasion the dialog, the thing itself, is almost buried in the narrative des-

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cription and analysis, as in this speech from the cemetery scene in Our Town: SIMON STIMSON: " H O W do you do, Emily." EMILY continues to look about her with a wondering smile; as though to shut out from her mind the thought of the funeral company she starts speaking to Mrs. Gibbs with a touch of nervousness.

The stage directions are not set off by italics or brackets; rather, as in prose stories, they are the basic narration. And it is the actual words of the characters that are set off. Partly this is just a typographical convention, but partly it is evidence that the traditional Script form is not sufficient for presenting all the information that the author wants known about the event. As we have seen, the plays of Shakespeare rely almost entirely on dialog t o create the particulars of the event; what the dialog does not create is left to the actors and the director. But as plays become more and more read and written as literature, it is not surprising to find an increase in narrative explicitness. Thus the plays of Wilder, f o r all their theatrical success, are almost as close to Story as they are t o Script. 11. While these plays of Wilder are almost as close to Story as to Script, the later plays of Shaw are closer to Story than t o Script - so detailed and pervasive is the narration. The dialog is not set off by quotation marks, but the narrative commentary is so extensive as sometimes to require paragraphing. Furthermore, Shaw is not above violating the fundamental contemporaneousness of Script by references to what has not yet occurred. This is especially true of his historical plays - e.g. The Devil's Disciple (about the American Revolution). Here, in Act I, in an excerpt from one of the play's shorter paragraphs of narration, is Shaw the novelist: This is the signal for the breaking-up of the party. Anderson takes his hat from the rack and joins Uncle William at the fire. Titus fetches Judith her things from the rack. The three on the sofa rise and chat with Hawkins. Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own house, stands inert, crushed by the weight of the law on women, accepting it, as she has been trained to accept all monstrous calamities, as proofs of the greatness of the power that inflicts them, and of her own wormlike insignificance.

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For at this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen years off. This is unquestionably a transitional element between Script and Story, but it is also an inconsistency. With one or two of these minor exceptions, the account is presented as being contemporaneous with the event that is happening in New Hampshire in 1777. It is not a past-time narration of things over and done with. Thus, it cannot consistently refer to the publication in 1792 of a work not yet even conceived. Transitional elements need not, however, be inconsistent. In Shaw's Arms and the Man, for example, the first appearance of the romantic hero is introduced by a long paragraph on Byronism in England. This is much more than a stage direction, but there is nothing anachronistic about it when compared to an event purporting to occur in the Balkans in 1886. Here is just an excerpt from that paragraph (in Act II): The ridges of his eyebrows, curving with an interrogative twist round the projections at the outer corners; his jealously observant eye; his nose, thin, keen, and apprehensive in spite of the pugnacious high bridge and large nostril; his assertive chin would not be out of place in a Parisian salon, shewing that the clever imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilization in the Balkans. The result is precisely what the advent of nineteenth century thought first produced in England: to wit, Byronism. By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but oi himself, to live up to his ideals; by his consequent cynical scorn for humanity; by his jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his concepts and the unworthiness of the woild in disregarding them; by his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his sensitive observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the Grandmothers of his English contemporaries. Whatever its merits, this is a very long way from a description of contemporaneous action. And the proportion of narrative in Arms and the Man is small potatoes as compared to that in Man and Superman. In this play, appropriately subtitled "A Comedy and

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a Philosophy", there are as many words of narration as dialog, narration sometimes running uninterrupted for several paragraphs at a time. But none of the "philosophy" results in an inconsistency. A work that is written with speaker tags and is performed on the stage is not thereby prohibited from discoursing at length on sundry relevant topics. It simply becomes a Story thereby rather than a Script. And by the same token, a work that is written with speaker tags but not performed on the stage is not thereby in a different class as long as it contains the same extensive narration. Neither performance nor perform ability is a relevant factor in separating the Scripts from the Stories. Diderot's short novel Rameau's Nephew, as mentioned earlier, is not a play but nonetheless is in large part composed of dialog, and all of the dialog is set up with speaker tags. Indeed, as to proportion, there is more dialog in Rameau's Nephew than in Man and Superman. The event is the meeting and lengthy conversation of the unnamed narrator (MYSELF) and Rameau's nephew (HE) in a Paris cafe. There are three pages of narrative introduction and a dozen instances of interspersed "stage directions" (some of paragraph length). The nephew does most of the talking and, being a very animated fellow, acts out (as we learn from the narration) much of his anecdotal conversation - some of which recounts scenes from his own life and some not. The story would make a fascinating stage play, but only if an actor could be found who was as extraordinarily clever a mimic as the nephew is described as being. As it stands, however, it is necessarily a Story because the narration clearly exceeds the limits of contemporaneous description. And, unlike the Shaw plays (even The Devil's Disciple), Rameau's Nephew is consistently related in the past-tense by a clearly delineated first-person; it is about an event that is claimed to have already occurred. In this sense, it is less borderline, less Script-like, than Man and Superman. 12. To go from Rameau's Nephew as a marginal Story to The Saga of Hrafnkel as an unequivocal Story is most obviously to drop the speaker tags. The borderline cases previously discussed all had elements of narration, but they also had extensive dialog

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set up with speaker tags. This is a mixed form of mediation. To be an unequivocal Story is to drop one of these - to become, as it were, all "stage direction". When dialog does occur in a Story, it is incorporated into the narration as a whole, not set off by means of speaker tags. The anonymous thirteenth-century Icelandic saga that represents unequivocal Stories for us here ought to be contrasted to the Dickinson poem used to represent Stories in the taxonomy chapter. Otherwise we are likely to think of The Saga of Hrafnkel as being more representative than any one Story can possibly be. The saga is anonymous; the poem has a known author. The saga is prose; the poem is verse. The saga has many characters; the poem has just two. The saga contains dialog; the poem does not. The saga is narrated in the third-person; the poem is narrated in the first. The saga has a plot; the poem does not. The event in the saga is interrupted and measured in years; the event in the poem is uninterrupted and measured in minutes. What the two have in common, by virtue of which they are both unequivocal Stories, is a fictional event that is told, recounted, narrated - not presented, either as an unmediated act of utterance or as a contemporaneous "happening" mediated only by speaker tags and stage directions. Monologs, Dialogs, and Scripts reflect events happening contemporaneously; Stories are about events. Even when a Story is narrated in the present-tense we are not witnessing an event but hearing an account of it secondhand, as we do when we listen to a radio sports announcer. The moment-bymomentness of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods" is not something spoken to someone as part of an act of utterance but what the person and his horse are doing - though it is narrated in the present-tense by the person as an interior monolog. However, these are matters for the next chapter, where we shall analyze in detail the different kinds and combinations of narrative person and time. The final point to make about what "A bird came down the walk" and The Saga of Hrafnkel have in common as Stories is that in both the narration is unified. There is only one source for the momentby-momentness that constitutes the event. Whatever may have been the different sources of information for the various incidents in

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the saga, the reader is not party to them. When the reader is party to multiple sources of moment-by-momentness, the work is a Serial. But the transition from Story to Serial is rather complex. 13. We have defined Serials in terms of multiple juxtaposed accounts. A Story is tending toward Serial when it contains within it - but unintegrated - separate, independent accounts. At this point we are prematurely introducing the notion of narrative structure, the subject of Chapter VI. But this cannot be helped. One kind of narrative structure results from characters within a work telling, as part of the event, about part of that same event. This is not what is meant here by Story tending toward Serial. Such an internal narration becomes a unified part of the larger narration when the speaking of it is part of the moment-by-momentness of the event. The account is not inserted into the event but is a part of it. A typical manifestation of this transitional form - which is still, however, Story rather than Serial - is a newspaper account about part of the larger event in a detective story. Two examples from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are "The Adventure of the Second Stain" and "The Bascombe Valley Mystery". The narration in both is Dr. Watson's first-person, past-time memoirs. Within Watson's account is Watson and Holmes discussing a case they are working on. The news story is not presented in quotation marks, either as part of a reporter's act of utterance or as Watson reading it aloud to Holmes. It is simply inserted into Watson's larger account. We are told that Watson read it and that "It ran in this way:". Then follows the news story, indented but without quotation marks. Watson, though he narrates the work as a whole, is not narrating here but rather editing - allowing some other narration (in this case, third-person) to provide part of the moment-by-momentness. A much more extensive inserted account is Marlow's seventy-five-page, firstperson letter in Lord Jim, which, although closer to the border of Serials than these two Sherlock Holmes stories, is still, as we shall see in Chapter VI, internal narration. In an unequivocal Serial the editor does not provide any of the moments himself. But in borderline cases the moment-by-

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moment action is provided both by the overall narration and by inserted narration. On which side of the border a mixed work is to be found depends partly on which narration provides the bulk of the moment-by-momentness. 14. In the works cited above, Watson is primarily a narrator rather than an editor. Thus the works are Story tending toward Serial. In Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela, however, the unnamed editor of the letters provides only one moment-bymoment episode, the bulk being narrated by Pamela in her letters. Thus the novel is Serial tending toward Story. If the brief newspaper account in "The Bascombe Valley Mystery" were dropped, the work would be an unequivocal Story. And if the brief editor's account in Pamela were dropped, the work would also be an unequivocal Story. As the novel stands we could almost call it inconsistent, for we are obliged, on the basis of one scene that Richardson could not find a way for Pamela to recount and of which the unexplained "editor" has intimate but evidently not personal knowledge, to deny the basic character of the work as Pamela's first-person narrative. (In none of the few letters sent to Pamela are there moment-by-moment accounts.) Though it seems at first reading that the editor's scene is really the inserted element in the work, we are finally obliged to admit that the only way to explain both Pamela's narrative and the editor's is to recognize that hers comes to us through his, not his through hers. We learn of Pamela's letters only because the editor presents them to us; thus his is the inclusive narrative, hers the subordinate narrative. The obvious difference of proportion is irrelevant to determining narrative priority. The crucial consideration in analyzing narrative complexity is to determine what account is the reader's source for what other account. Only very rarely, as in Pan, are two or more accounts juxtaposed with no subordination to a more inclusive narration. This inclusive narration may be literary (provide moment-by-moment accounts itself); or it may simply be editorial (provide other accounts that in turn provide the moment-bymomentness). The inclusive narration in Pamela provides moment-

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by-moment accounts itself, and the work would not be a serial unless it did because Pamela provides the only other momentby-moment accounts. On the other hand, the inclusive narration in Humphry Clinker provides only an introduction to other accounts that in turn provide the moment-by-momentness. And Humphry Clinker is a Serial quite apart from its editorial narration because the letters of two different people provide moment-bymoment accounts. Pamela is located here on the continuum because the inserted account (her letters) is such a prominent part of the account as a whole. To consider it as a Story tending toward Serial would be to over-emphasize the significance of the inclusive narration. But a better example of Serial tending toward Story (because more Serial-like) is the sort of novel that comes in two distinct parts, more or less equal in size and significance. The first part is a detailed moment-by-moment account, but it is also an editorial introduction to someone else's account of the same event. The usual pattern is for the first narrator to record his encounter with the enigmatic protagonist. Then the protagonist disappears, leaving behind a manuscript (often a journal) that provides a detailed account of that part of the event heretofore unknown to the first narrator. Two good examples of the type are Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf. Lermontov, however, makes extensive use of structural complexity, such as internal narration and ruptured chronology, and as a result A Hero of Our Time is too difficult to analyze for the present purpose. Hesse, on the other hand, though his novel is more complex in subject, has provided a simpler Serial structure. The event of Steppenwolf is nine or ten months in the life of middle-aged Herr Steppenwolf, living in a respectable German boardinghouse and yet living an unconventional life, which, partly at least with the aid of drugs, leads to episodes of fantasy. The first account is about Steppenwolf as seen from the outside by the respectable nephew of the woman whose boardinghouse it is. His account begins when the enigmatic boarder takes up residence in the house and ends when he disappears, leaving behind his meager belongings and a manuscript about his life during the

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previous months. The second account, which the nephew appends to his own, is Steppenwolf's intimate but schizophrenic version, covering the same time and place as the nephew's but including a whole new set of details unknown to those with whom he lived. The work is a Serial because there are two distinct moment-bymoment accounts of the same overall event. But it is only a borderline Serial because strictly speaking the two accounts are not juxtaposed as equals; the second comes to us only through the editorial efforts of the previous narrator. If Herr Steppenwolf had, as part of an act of utterance, sat down one evening with the nephew over a bottle of port and told him about his past life, this would have been an integrated, unified part of the event - an instance of internal narration. As such there would have been no separate, discrete accounts and thus no Serial, borderline or otherwise. But this is a matter of narrative structure and the proper subject for Chapter VI. 15. As we saw in the taxonomic analysis of Serials, there are various possible ways to construct an unequivocal Serial: in epistolary form (like Humphry Clinker), in the form of completed manuscripts (like The Moonstone), in the form of diverse accounts broken up chronologically (like Dracula). Unlike the borderline cases just analyzed, the different accounts that comprise an unequivocal Serial are juxtaposed so that no account is presented by means of or through another account. And unlike the borderline cases to be analyzed next (number 16), all of these works have a clear editorial rationale for appearing together. The different moment-by-moment accounts that comprise an unequivocal Serial are subordinated to the editorial framework but not to any other moment-by-moment account. There is nothing in the essence of Serials that requires that they make use of written documents, but in actual practice the genre seems very much dependent on written sources to meet the requirements of its fundamental convention. There are no known Serials in oral literature, and the "oral" cock and fox tale created for the occasion makes use of writing, since we come to know of the two accounts secondhand through a newspaper story.

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Whether or not the original "depositions" were written, the newspaper story of necessity is. Serial is thus a genre that clearly lends itself to an evolutionary analysis. Only with the establishment of mass printing and the rise of the epistolary novel in the eighteenth century do we begin to find Serials (a statement bald enough to be easily refuted by a single exception but not in danger of being invalidated). This is not, however, to claim any necessary correlation between Serials and epistolary novels. A work is epistolary if it is written in the form of various letters. John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) is written in the form of two letters and is thus epistolary, but it is simply a first-person, past narration, not a Serial. Fanny telling her life story in two letters is no different than Fanny telling her life story in one letter or Fanny telling her life story in a manuscript. There is no Serial if there are not different narrators contributing different accounts comprising the narrative as a whole. But on the other hand, there are works in epistolary form that do have different narrators that nonetheless fail to be literature because the letters fail to provide moment-bymoment accounts. A fictional exchange of conversation is a moment-by-moment, space-time event simply by virtue of being spoken; it is an unmediated work. But a fictional exchange of letters is literature only if one or more of the letters provides a moment-by-moment account. Ring Lardner's "Some Like Them Cold" is the exchange of a dozen letters between a man and a woman who met for a few minutes in a Chicago train station. But neither their references to their meeting nor to what happens to them afterwards are recounted moment-by-moment. To point out the absence of this characteristic literary feature is not, however, a criticism. The purpose of this fictional exchange is to characterize two common representatives of American "pop" culture of the 1920's - their dialects, their aspirations, their standards. This can be accomplished without creating a literary event, and very effectively - as Lardner proves in several works - simply by giving them the opportunity to write about themselves. The point to be emphasized is not one of difference in quality but difference in kind. A written statement

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is not a happening in space and time, nor is an exchange of written statements. Thus it is that Serials are mediated works; they are not just multiple narratives but multiple narratives that are about fictional events. Very like Lardner's twentieth-century collection of letters, "Some Like Them Cold", is Montesquieu's eighteenth-century collection, The Persian Letters. Neither presents a single, unified, moment-by-moment event. There are no moment-by-moment accounts at all in Lardner's collection. In Montesquieu's collection there are several, but these are, in comparison to the size of the work, few and far between, and furthermore they tend to be about other events than the life of the correspondents. Like our example, "The Character of the Fox", The Persian Letters could be modified to provide a unifying event, but as it stands, Montesquieu's work contains, but is not, moment-by-moment fiction. It consists of 161 letters from eighteen persons over a nine-year period - some persons writing only one letter, some (especially Usbek) writing several dozen. The rationale behind the correspondence is the trip made by two Persian aristocrats (old Usbek and young Rica) to Paris. These two write of the strange land and customs; those back home provide news to the wanderers, especially to Usbek about his seraglio. There are several long and short internal events related in different letters but very few moment-by-moment accounts of what Usbek and Rica are doing. The work as a whole is very digressive, but it concludes with greater and greater focus on the disruption back in Usbek's seraglio and on Usbek's cruel, jealous responses. Yet, though the letters fly fast and furious, the letters are what letters usually are - summary accounts rather than particularized ones. The editorial framework is a person (presumably Montesquieu) who provides footnote annotations and an introduction that claims that Usbek and Rica had been his house guests. The avowed purpose of publishing their letters is to compare and contrast the customs of diiferent peoples and cultures, and only incidentally does Montesquieu, in a later appendix ("Some Reflections on The Persian Letters") comment in passing on "the unexpected discovery of a kind of story in them". His candid and accurate

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admission is as pertinent to Lardner's fictionalized contemporary anthropology as to his own: in both there is "a kind of story", but these fictional situations stop short of being stories in the strict moment-by-moment sense: ... In ordinary stories, digressions are allowed only when they constitute in themselves a separate, new story. ... But in the epistolary form, where chance chooses the characters and where the subjects dealt with do not depend on any preconceived design or plan, the author allows himself to add philosophy, politics, and ethics to the story.... 16. We have already made clear the feature characterizing those Serials that border on multiple works - the lack of an editorial framework for the multiple accounts. And we have already discussed at length the most ununified Serial in our collection - Pan. But one of our basic arguments for considering Pan a unified event raises questions about the potential unity of works that appear in a series over a long period of time. Do the dozens of Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a single event and thus a single work? Do the half-dozen Leather-Stocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper constitute a single event and thus a single work? When we said of Pan that "there is always a presumption of unity in a person's life, especially when death has capped it", we seem to have opened the door to the possibility of creating single, unified works out of what have heretofore been thought of as multiple works. And if works in a series can constitute a single event, is it a Serial that results ? The answer to the second question is not difficult because a work cannot be a Serial unless it meets the basic criterion of different, multiple narrations. The five novels about Natty Bumppo (or Leather-Stocking) are all narrated in the same way - firstperson, non-participant, past. This is the ancient tradition of the anonymous story-teller, with references to the unnamed narrator and often to his audience but not narrated from first-hand experience. It is narration equally applicable to the fantasy of Beowulf and the realism of Trollope. The proof of Serial multiplicity is different first-persons. But in the Leather-Stocking novels, though the events may be different, the narration is the same.

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With the sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, however, there are not only different first-persons narrating, but there is also some third-person narration. Fifty-six of the stories are narrated by Watson; two are narrated by Holmes; and two are narrated in the third-person. These, then, are at least candidates for a Serial. But the question remains: do the different Leather-Stocking novels and the Sherlock Holmes stories constitute single works unified by the protagonists' lives? The answer is admittedly a bit equivocal: no, because first and foremost they were not presented together under a common title. Would they have constituted single unified works if they had been presented under a common title ? Probably not, because Cooper presents only five relatively brief episodes in a very long life, with few links between the episodes and no rationale for the seemingly arbitrary sequence. It is true that Natty Bumppo dies on the last page of The Prairie, but this is not the last novel of the series. Chronology of the Event 1. The Deerslayer 2. The Pathfinder

Chronology of Publication 4. The Pioneers (1823) 3. The Last of the Mohicans

3. The Last of the Mohicans 4. The Pioneers 5. The Prairie

5. The Prairie (1827) 2. The Pathfinder (1840) 1. The Deerslayer (1841)

(1826)

Partly this is a matter of external evidence (the facts of publication), but partly it is a matter of internal evidence (the facts of the event). The Victorian tradition of serial publication of novels in periodicals resulted in almost inevitable inconsistencies, inevitable because the beginning installments were published before the concluding ones were written. Thus when the novels were finally published in book form, the author usually availed himself of the opportunity to iron out as many inconsistencies as possible. These works were intended to be unified, and this was one of the ways the author expressed his intention. Wilkie Collins, for example, acknowledges in the prefaces to both The Woman in White and The Moonstone that he has availed himself of this opportunity. Works written at different times and for different occasions are

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even more in need of final revision than the episodes of a regularly appearing series. Events originally designed to stand alone do not usually fuse later on when juxtaposed unless there is a conscious attempt to revise them with an eye to creating a unity. No such final attempt was made after the eighteen-year publication career of the Leather-Stocking novels or after the forty-year publication career of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Cooper could have rearranged the five novels to conform to the chronology of episodes, or he could have provided some kind of narrative framework to account for the ruptured sequence. Then he could have provided some information, if only in summary form, about the intervening years in Natty Bumppo's life. But he did not, and there is no very strong reason why he should have. What he wrote was five separate works about different stages of one man's life, and there is no reason to think that one giant work would have been more desirable than five related but independent works. The life of Sherlock Holmes is more in accord with the history of publication, but even here there are discrepancies. For example, A Study in Scarlet, the first published work, is not Holmes' first case, and his final case ("His Last Bow", one of the two narrated in the third-person) appeared ten years before the last collection of stories was published. There is also less of a finale to Holmes' life than to Bumppo's because, though Holmes has been retired for several years when he solves his last case, he is still alive and healthy when he makes "his last bow". However, the major obstacle to considering the sixty stories as one work is the inconsistencies among individual stories. The individual stories are consistent in themselves, and thus there should be a reluctance to put inconsistently together works that an author left consistently separate. Not only are there numerous inconsistencies in dating the cases and relating them to each other, but also the seemingly monogamous Watson mentions so many different marital arrangements that one authority on Holmesiana claims that he must have been married at least five times. Little is gained and something is lost by attempts to glue the different stories into one giant account. The best rule of thumb for deciding questions of unity vs. diversity is that no sacrifices should be made to achieve unity,

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because unity is not a virtue once a work can clearly stand on its own two feet without the aid of works that might be grafted onto it. And in any case, the question should arise only when forced upon us by a common title. Such a case is the ancient Indian work, The Panchatanira. The five books and the introductory event that comprise the usual versions share the common title. However, the introductory event is not a consistently developed frame event (as in the Arabian Nights), nor do the five different events in the five books dovetail with each other (as in The Moonstone). And, indeed, the "pancha" of "panchatantra" signifies fiveness rather than oneness. There are some factors that could go to make the Panchatantra a single work, but as to narration and event it is a series of works and not a Serial. 17. The Sherlock Holmes stories are one of our examples of literature just over the border into multiple works. What makes it so close to the border is that the protagonist of every one of the sixty stories is the protagonist of the collection. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, however, though also a borderline case, is a bit further removed. Although he provides a common title, Anderson has quite accurately subtitled Winesburg, Ohio "A Group of Tales of Ohio". There is no common protagonist linking the twenty-four tales. The collection is about life in and around Winesburg primarily at the turn of the century, and for the most part as it relates to George Willard as he grows up, via the local newspaper office, and moves away to find himself in a way neither possible in nor comprehensible by a small town. The tales could be unified around the adolescent years of George if it were not for the four tales about the Bentleys (which together occupy about a fourth of the collection). These take the event back fifty years and do not even mention George or the other characters associated with him. Most of the tales are narrated in the third-person, but a few contain first-person references. The collection is prefaced by a short first-person sketch (not quite moment-by-moment, however) about an old white-haired writer the narrator once knew who had a theory of what makes people grotesque. It may be a fictional

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sketch, but it is not inclusive editorial narration nor does it provide a frame event. It is simply appended. Similar to Winesburg, Ohio is Joyce Cary's untitled trilogy of Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse's Mouth. Neither Anderson nor Cary has provided any rationale for the different accounts being put together to reflect a common event. The stories in Winesburg, Ohio have a definite focus of setting, a less definite focus of time, only a partial focus of character, and no explanation of where the different accounts came from and how or why they are brought together in a single volume. Miscellaneous overlapping (of times, places, characters, actions) does not in itself constitute sufficient rationale for making a unity out of different stories. So it is with the Cary trilogy. Although the three main characters appear in each of the three novels, they do so only as minor characters in the accounts written by the other two. It is no criticism of a trilogy to say that the interest that derives from seeing how different characters appear in the eyes of other characters is not a sufficiently unifying factor as far as a space-time event is concerned. Herself Surprised is Sara Monday's independent, first-person account of her own life. To Be a Pilgrim is Thomas Wilcher's independent, first-person account of his own life. The Horse's Mouth is Gulley Jimson's independent, first-person account of his own life. At different times in their lives each character spent time with each of the other two, and thus the life story of each would necessarily say something about the other two. But beyond this conspicuous overlap, one could not delimit a common event any more precisely than by saying that it is the lives of three friends. A unified trilogy about some shared experience could be written by three friends; this would merit a common title and would qualify as a Serial. But the Cary trilogy is about much more than a shared experience, and, since the three individual accounts are not published in a single volume, they quite reasonably have no common title.

V THE ELEMENTS OF NARRATION

There is a variety of mediated, or narrative, elements that can be introduced into both mediated and unmediated works. All narration, all telling, whether of fact or fiction, is analyzable into two parts - person and time. Partly these are the same as grammatical person and time, but not entirely. The central importance of person and time for literary study is that all mediated works (and a few unmediated ones) are analyzable in these two terms, and thus they all can be systematically compared and contrasted in exactly the same way. Unlike the kinds of narrative structure (the subject of the next chapter), elements of narration are present in all mediated works. Such works will not always include features of structural complexity like internal narration and stories within stories, but they will always be told in some combination of person and time. Person is the source of the telling, the "person" whose words are the words that constitute the work. If there is sufficient evidence in the work to discern an individual person as the source (and of course he may be nameless even so), then the narration is firstperson. A first-person narrator may be either a participant in the event he recounts (that is, be speaking in whole or part from alleged personal experience), or he may be a non-participant (that is, either speaking from hearsay or inventing). Narration is third-person by default - in the absence of evidence for an individual person. Time is the relation of telling to alleged occurrence of the event. Most commonly the telling is afterward (past); least commonly the telling is before (future). The telling may also be contemporaneous with the event, a blow-by-blow account as it were (present),

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and the telling may begin after the event has begun but not before it has ended (durative). These are the elements of narration; they do not constitute taxonomic distinctions because they do not constitute mutually exclusive classes but combine in various ways. Ignoring for the present chapter complexities of internal narration, there are twelve basic narrative possibilities resulting from the possible combinations of person and time. Table 2 lists these; the representative examples and diagraming symbols will be discussed later. A second reason for not making these distinctions the basis of a literary taxonomy is that they are not confined to literature. Everything that is narrated - history, journalism, anthropology, geography, astronomy - is done so in one of these twelve combinations of person and time. This is a logically exhaustive list. And this leads us to a third reason for not making these to be taxonomic distinctions. These twelve are logical possibilities; they do not necessarily reflect actually occurring works. To eighteenth-century zoologists it seemed reasonable to use differences in teeth to distinguish different sub-groups within orders of the class mammalia. And it worked well enough for some orders, but eventually the distinction between hoofed mammals with large canine teeth and those without had to be abandoned because there simply were no horse-like creatures (Perissodactyla) with large canine teeth. So it is with literature. Whatever the future may disclose, research to date has failed to uncover works whose narration is either non-participant durative or third-person future. Perhaps an analogy with zoology and chemistry is in order here. Every animal belongs to one particular species of one particular genus and not to more than one. Every class on any given level is constituted by actually existing members whose membership is mutually exclusive as to the other classes. To have discovered (or created) such a nearly perfect taxonomy has been a great intellectual triumph and has allowed for a precision of study impossible with any system of cross-classifying. But animal taxonomy deals only with groups of individuals. When we seek to analyze individuals, we are looking for elements and the different ways they combine. The same chemical elements comprise the Paramecium

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TABLE 2

1st person, participant, past

K ^m * ^

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)

1st person, participant, present

u^ H

"An August Midnight" (Hardy)

1st person, participant, future

h —A "When in my pilgrimage * I reach"

1st person, participant, durative

f > < - > You Know Me Al (Lardner)

1st person, non-participant, past 1st person, non-participant, present

1st person, non-participant, future

Iliad

l^—^

1st person, non-participant, durative 3rd person, past 3rd person, present

The Twelve" (Blok)

KPt

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray) '

o ^

3 t

"Mr. Flood's Party" (Robinson) "The lady says: 'The cock has crowed' "

3rd person, future 3rd person, durative

"The Drover's Wife" (Lawson)

and the porpoise; it is the different ways of combining the same elements that makes the difference. Animal taxonomy and biochemistry are of necessity complementary, mutually dependent, but they are t w o different kinds of study. T o push the analogy a bit further, we could say that Chapter IV is the animal taxonomy of literary study; Chapter V is the biochemistry; Chapter VI is the anatomy \ End Chapter VII is the

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physiology. "The Forms of Literature" presents the taxonomy; "The Elements of Narration" analyzes the elements; "The Structure of Narration" explains the principles in terms of which the elements combine into individual works; and "The Interpretation of Literature" explains the way that the individual works function. Taken together, these chapters could be said to constitute an "organon of methods" for the study of literature. Before we examine the twelve basic narrative possibilities, a subject needs to be introduced that cannot, however, be fully explored yet. This is the diagraming of works in order to show the genus and species to which they belong and the narrative complexity, if any, that they manifest. There is undeniably a measure of the personal and the arbitrary in any system of diagraming, but any consistent system is better than no system at all. What has made it possible to collect, sort, store, and retrieve the data upon which The Phenomenon of Literature is based has been an iconic system of diagraming individual works. The Appendix at the end of this volume presents in greater detail than we have space for here a sample of the variety of works analyzed and the variety of diagrams that represent them. For the present let us simply lay out the basic conventions and apply them to the five different kinds of fox and cock stories presented in the previous chapter. Table 2 has already given the different representations of person and time for the narration. The second basic part of the diagram represents the event. Every work of literature has one and only one main event, and this is represented by one and only one box. For unmediated works there is no narration of this one main event, but there is always an event and thus always a box. The complexities arise when one begins to analyze the internal structure of narration, but the present chapter concerns only works as they reveal themselves externally, in their most unified, simplified form. Most Monologs, except for the few that contain within them internal narration or discrete internal events, are diagramed like "The Clever Cock" - a single box with no indication of person or time. The majority of Dialogs, with the same exceptions, are diagramed like "The Dialog of the Cock and the Fox" - with a single box divided into two triangles. A large minority of Scripts, by

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virtue of their being narrated in the third-person, present are diagramed like "The Play of the Cock and the Fox", with a dialog box underneath the sign of person and time, although other factors (e.g. inductions and plays within plays) can make the diagram more complex. Stories, because they can have a great variety of narrative complexity, are much less unequivocally represented by the diagram of "The Story of the Cock and the Fox" than are the previous species by their diagrams; only a small minority of Stories are diagramed this way. Serials can manifest even more variety because of the unlimited possibility of different narrations, and thus we see only a very simple Serial diagram when we turn to "Cock vs. Fox". The one additional feature that it manifests is the extra level of narration. This editorial narration, through which the main narratives pass in reaching the audience, is circled to indicate that it does not itself provide any of the momentby-moment accounts. 3Î

3

There is a rough progression from Monolog to Serial: almost all Monologs are diagramed the same way; almost all Serials are diagramed a different way from one another. There is more diversity in Dialogs than in Monologs, but not as much as in Scripts, and not nearly as much as in Stories. The fact that the Serial section in the Appendix is no larger than the Monolog and Dialog sections reflects not the uniformity of Serials but their relative scarcity; this, the most recent species, is also the smallest. Although the Story section manifests the greatest structural diversity, many Stories are diagramed exactly alike; but hardly any two Serials are diagramed exactly alike. With one kind of exception, the elements of narration have nothing to contribute to the analysis of unmediated works; the elements of narration are the elements of mediation. The one exception, exemplified by the works listed below, is the speaker whose words in an act of utterance constitute an event giving a moment-

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by-moment account of some other event. The main event of such a work is unmediated, thus without narrative elements; but within this event is a different, subordinate, event, and this event is narrated. The time of narration may be past, present, future, or durative; the person may be first-person, participant or non-participant. It is always first- rather than third-person, however, because an act of utterance always establishes a particular individual speaker. Something of a diagraming problem is created here with events that both do and do not have narrative elements. A distinction is thus established between the narrative sign of person and time with and without parentheses. The presence of the parentheses indicates that the work as a whole is unmediated and that the narrative sign applies only to the internal event. (1) The Fall (Camus) "The Golden Honeymoon" (Lardner) "Gullible's Travels" (Lardner) "Haircut" (Lardner) "Hezekiah Bedott" (Whitcher) "Spotted Horses" (1st ver.) (Faulkner)

c *>«-:>

IT

(2) "The Beach of Falesa" (Stevenson) "Blueberries" (Frost) "The Dream" (Lucian) "Terence, this is stupid stuff" (Housman) "Under the Waterfall" (Hardy) Those in the first list are all diagramed the same way. Those in the second list are more complicated and require different diagrams for each work. 1 For the moment, however, we shall ignore the possibilities of developing this narrative convention and concentrate on the irreducible minimum. This irreducible minimum comes in two parts: (1) an act of utterance, and (2) a narrated event. Take the following Monolog: j Listen, Pertelote, my sweet, To how Fox was fooled by his own deceit. 1

Some of these diagrams can be seen in the Appendix.

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2 Wily Reynard thinks I'm a fool, But I've learned a little in his school. 2 When he complained of a keen toothache, I knew it was hunger and no mistake. ^ He pleaded with me to pull his tooth, For he wanted to eat me - and that was the truth. j But I'd sooner turn robin and migrate south Than put my head in his gaping mouth. JJ My love, you haven't heard a word. Stop that pecking, you foolish bird! Add to it the following Story: 2 Wily Reynard thinks I'm a fool, But I've learned a little in his school. j When he complained of a keen toothache, I knew it was hunger and no mistake. ^ He pleaded with me to pull his tooth, For he wanted to eat me - and that was the truth. ^ But I'd sooner turn robin and migrate south Than put my head in his gaping mouth. g I said, "I will if you shut your eyes." And when he did I flew up to the skies, ^ Flew all the way up to the roof of the shed, And crowed above that carnivorous head: g "Ooh! Oooh! friend Fox, you've lost again; The rooster is safe and so is the hen." g His mouth wide open - it made me grin Naught coming out, and naught going in. JQ Old Fox slunk away with an empty gut, His eyes wide open, his mouth tight shut. And the result is an unmediated work that contains a discrete, internal event that is narrated as part of the act of utterance: Cock's Crow j Listen, Pertelote, my sweet, To how Fox was fooled by his own deceit. 2 Wily Reynard thinks I'm a fool, But I've learned a little in his school.

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2 When he complained of a keen toothache, I knew it was hunger and no mistake. ^ He pleaded with me to pull his tooth, For he wanted to eat me - and that was the truth. 2 But I'd sooner turn robin and migrate south Than put my head in his gaping mouth. g I said, "I will if you shut your eyes," And when he did I flew up to the skies, j Flew all the way up to the roof of the shed, And crowed above that carnivorous head: g "Ooh! Oooh! friend Fox, you've lost again; The rooster is safe and so is the hen." g His mouth wide open - it made me grin Naught coming out, and naught going in. JQ Old Fox slunk away with an empty gut, His eyes wide open, his mouth tight shut. j j My love, you haven't heard a word. Stop that pecking, you foolish bird!

A. P E R S O N

In a conception of literature that emphasizes the means by which the fictional event reaches the audience, the notion of person is fundamental. In mediated fiction there is frequently a question as to what one is to accept and what one is to doubt; and because the source for a fictional event can only be the narration, we need to be able to distinguish between different kinds of narration and the different conventions of verisimilitude. This applies not only to the distinction between third-person and first-person but also within first-person to the distinction between participant and non-participant. The analysis of a first-person work involves not only what is narrated but who narrates it and his relation to the

THE ELEMENTS OF NARRATION

event narrated. By way of contrasting the important differences between first-person participant, first-person non-participant, and third-person here are the opening lines of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Eugene Field's "The Duel", and E.A. Robinson's "Mr. Flood's Party": I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandize and, leaving off his trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, call ourselves, and write our name "Crusoe," and so my companions always called me. The gingham dog and the calico cat Side by side on the table sat; 'Twas half-past twelve, and (what do you think!) Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink! The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate Appeared to know as sure as fate There was going to be a terrible spat. (I wasn't there; I simply state What was told to me by the Chinese plate!) Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage That held as much as he should ever know On earth again of home, paused warily. The road was his with not a native near; And Eben, having leisure, said aloud; For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear: "Well Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon Again, and we may not have many more; The bird is on the wing, the poet says, And you and I have said it here before. Drink to the bird." We shall take up these in their turn, but let us begin with a closer look at the general nature of first-person narration and the characteristic kinds of problems that can result from its inconsistent use.

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1. First More is required to constitute a discernible, identifiable, first person than a single editorial "we". For example, "Gereint Son of Erin", one of the eleven stories that comprise The Mabinogion, concludes its opening paragraph by referring to something "we have mentioned above". This could just as well be written "that was mentioned above". There are no indications in the story that a discernible, identifiable, person is telling the story, and because grammatical convention allows for much overlap between thirdperson and editorial first-person usage, this need not even constitute an inconsistency. There are works, however, that with single, unequivocal firstperson exceptions are clearly narrated in the third-person. When this occurs, we must make a choice between two possible characterizations: the work must be termed first-person or it must be termed inconsistent third-person. Conrad's Nostromo is five hundred and sixty-five pages of unequivocal third-person omniscient narration; it is one page of unequivocal first-person narration. Chapter Eight unaccountably begins : "Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect of the San Tomé mine upon the life of that remote province. The outward appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am told. ..." Nothing of this "I" ever appears again to mar the flow of the third-person omniscient narrative. Yet a precise analysis of the nature of the narration can neither ignore nor explain away this inconsistency. We do far more precise justice to Nostromo to characterize its narration as inconsistent third-person than as first-person; for if we decide the narration as a whole is first-person, participant, we must face the more serious inconsistency of a character in the event having omniscient access to the private thoughts and actions of the other characters. The value judgment implied by the label "inconsistent" may be large or small. In this instance the inconsistency is so small and insignificant as to hardly merit mention, but for the sake of precision it is mentioned. Nostromo differs in degree but not in kind from

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Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. Here the narration alternates between first-person, non-participant, and third-person, with the eventual conversion of the storytelling first-person into an actual member of the ship's crew. But whether participant or non-participant, the first-person narrator makes omniscient excursions into the minds of the characters and describes what they are doing when they are alone. For all the obvious merits of the work, it has a definite weakness in this narrative inconsistency, much more serious than the inconsistency in Nostromo because more pervasive. As we emphasized earlier, one does not gain the different advantages of third-person and first-person narration by unaccountably switching from one to the other when the need arises. To change narrators accountably is to create not a Story but a Serial. An important difference in first-person narration between participant and non-participant is the potential possessed by nonparticipant narration for omniscience. A character in an event can have the increased knowledge that comes from hindsight, but he cannot consistently be both a participant in the world and view the world from an Olympian perspective. The virtues of realistic verisimilitude that are possible with a participant narrator like Robinson Crusoe cannot be had at the same time that the advantages of unlimited knowledge are sought. "Epic" narration - whether in Homer, Virgil, or Fielding - has the non-participant storyteller's unlimited access, and thereby lacks the verisimilitude of a participant account. a. Participant The great attraction of first-person, participant, narration is the air of authority that eye-witness accounts usually have. This is not primarily a matter of "realism" versus "fantasy" because works of fantasy are often those most in need of the "evidence" that participant accounts claim to be providing. Science fiction stories are a good example of this combination of verisimilitude and fantasy. H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is narrated by a man who was a central observer of the Martian invasion of the earth. (And Orson Welles' famous panic-raising radio broadcast

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of The War of the Worlds is further proof that fantasy and verisimilitude are quite compatible.) When we speak of what first-person, participant, narration contributes to tales of adventure - like The Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels, and The War of the Worlds - we speak of authenticating the account, as if the works were history or the data of history. The fantasy of these works is treated in the same way as the realism of Robinson Crusoe and André Malraux's The Conquerors. But by no means all first-person, participant, narration presents tales of adventure, and thus not all such narration aims to provide authenticating evidence of the sort appropriate to history. Personal "lyrics" like "A bird came down the walk" are aiming for a different sort of authenticity. An important part of this poem is the response of the person to the encounter with the bird, and by allowing the person himself to record his own response we gain a more intimate awareness of the "real" self, an added dimension beyond that which could have been provided by someone else's non-participant account. What someone says about his experience is as much the data for character analysis as the experience itself, and we lose this kind of data when the narration is other than firstperson, participant. One of the important ways that we come to know the "real" someone is by noting the kinds of details that he concerns himself with. This is as true of people in fiction as of people in the world. We need not be told that Robinson Crusoe and the narrator of "A Bird came down the walk" are different sorts of persons. We readily note that the sort of person who would sit quietly enough to be unnoticed by nearby birds, and whose response on finally being seen is to offer a crumb, and who thinks such an experience worthy of communicating is not the sort of person preoccupied with emphasizing his family status, amassing worldly possessions, training a faithful native servant, and drawing bourgeois morals about his success. This is not to say that first-person, participant, narration is always to be taken at face value (far from it) but only that such narration is a further revelation of th« character. First-person, participant, narration has the virtue not just of telling (which all narration does) but of revealing the personality of the person who

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is doing the telling. Non-participant narration can also do this, but to less purpose, because from a literary point of view the event is the primary concern, and the non-participant narrator is not part of the event. When we say that a first-person, participant, narrator is not always to be taken at face value, we are referring to the possibility that he is an imperceptive interpreter of his own experience, not that his account of the event is to be doubted. Unlike accounts of real events, accounts of fictional events are accepted as given by the very act of perceiving them to be fiction. We cannot say both that the work is literature by virtue of the moment-by-moment account and that within the fictional context these moments are suspect. We have good reasons for thinking that naive, blow-hard Jack Keefe in You Know Me Al is an imperceptive interpreter of his own experience. Indeed, we are able to characterize him as "naive" and "blow-hard" for the very reason that what he thinks about himself is so at variance with what he reports about himself. But we have no reason for thinking that his moment-by-moment report is suspicious. The only way one can reasonably be suspicious of a fictional account is to have multiple accounts. Where it is possible for unreliable narration to exist is within complex narrative structure - a character within the larger account saying something that we can judge to be unreliable in relation to the larger account or in relation to what some other character says. Here there is something that can serve as evidence to the contrary. But this anticipates the subject of the next chapter. The point is sufficiently made for the present when we emphasize that the concept of unreliability depends, whether in fact or fiction, on some kind of comparison: account with the facts, account with account, account with interpretation. In fiction there are no facts, so unreliability can arise only out of different aspects of the work. When, in a detective story, one of the characters provides within the larger account his account of what happened on the night of the murder, his account may prove unreliable when all the evidence is in and points to him as the murderer. His alibi is unreliable as compared to the account of an eye-witness, or as compared to the circumstantial evidence

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as reconstructed by the narrator or another character, or as compared to his own later confession. Such is the case even in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the "fact" that the narrator of the work is the murderer is not revealed until the last pages. The narrator thus manages to present almost the entire account of the murder and its investigation without giving himself away to the reader. But he does finally have to give himself away to the reader, as well as to the detective, and does have to show wherein the earlier part of his account was unreliable by virtue of key omissions, because his narration is our only source of information as to both the murder and the murderer. The unreliability therefore even here arises only out of a discrepancy between different aspects of the one work. Although the narrator is deceptive as a character, ultimately he has to be reliable as a narrator. Similarly, in a Lardner story, when the first-person narrator repeatedly emphasizes his consideration for others as he relates his selfish activities, his interpretation of the event is unreliable as compared to his account of the event. Unreliability is a matter of inconsistency, and inconsistency is a matter of incompatible elements within the work - not between the work and something outside the work. "The problem of Moll Flanders", over which much ink has been spilled, is not whether Defoe was being ironic but whether Moll's interpretation of her life is consistent with her account of her life. The final point to make about first-person, participant, narration is that the degree of participation can vary widely. The story of Robinson Crusoe as told by himself shows the narrator participating to the maximum degree in the event. The event is his life (momentby-moment, day-by-day, year-by-year), with no digressions and no moment-by-moment accounts of episodes he did not witness and engage in. At the opposite extreme is Conrad's short story "The Black Mate", where the protagonist is the Black Mate but the narrator is an unnamed friend who makes only the briefest appearance at the beginning and end of a year-long sea voyage. The heart of the story is what happens on the voyage, and the narrator is not even present - relying for his detailed information on what he was told after the voyage was over. He is unquestionably a

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participant in the event as a whole, but only as a minor character. In "The Black Mate" the narrator is an eye-witness to very little of the event, but at least he has a small speaking part in it. In the anonymous ballad "The Twa Corbies" the narrator is an eye-witness to the entire event but says nothing and is unnoticed by the two main characters. Here (from Child 26A) is the first of the five stanzas - the other four consisting entirely of dialog between the two ravens: As I was walking all alane, I heard twa corbies making a mane; The tane unto the t'other say, 'Where sail we gang and dine to-day?' A first-person narrator is a participant not by virtue of being the protagonist but by virtue of recounting part or all of the event from first-hand experience. b.

Non-participant

The first distinction to be made among first-person, non-participant, narrators is between those who are anonymous storytellers (as in epic narration) and those who are fully realized persons but not characters in the event. The anonymous storyteller makes occasional references to himself and perhaps to his audience; he may begin with an invocation to the Muse, and he is likely to refer to his story as a story, though this may be as a true story (e.g. the Iliad) or as a fictional one (e.g. The Warden). The use of questions, though not an unequivocal indicator of a storytelling first-person, is usually associated with direct address and not with third-person narration. Here, in the opening lines of the Iliad, are all the signs of the storyteller except a reference to his "readers": My story is the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, and its devastation, which fulfilled the will of Zeus by bringing innumerable woes on the Achaians and sending down to Hades many strong souls of heroes, leaving their bodies to the dogs and birds. Let us begin, Muse, when Agamemnon, lord of men, and noble Achilles parted in anger. Who then among the gods drove the two together in bitter collision ?

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And here, to indicate that storytelling narration can be the very opposite of "epic" and to provide a reference to the "readers", are the opening sentences in the concluding chapter of Anthony Trollope's novel The Warden: Our tale is now done, and it only remains to us to collect the scattered threads of our little story and to tie them into a seemly knot. This will not be a work of labor, either to the author or to his readers. We have not to deal with many personages, or with stirring events, and were it not for the custom of the thing, we might leave it to the imagination of all concerned to conceive how affairs at Barchester arranged themselves. All we learn about the narrators of the Iliad and The Warden is the very little that can be inferred from the narration; no information is provided. In some first-person, non-participant, narration, however, the narrator does provide information about himself. In the opening remarks of Boccaccio's Decameron the narrator tells us about his long sufferings as an unrequited lover, how time finally removed the sting, how he wants to provide aid and comfort to women in love by means of stories about love, how he lived in Florence during the ravages of the plague and what he witnessed then, how he personally knew the seven beautiful ladies who with three handsome men left the city to escape the plague. None of these opening pages contain any moment-by-moment accounts, but they do contain much information about the narrator. He is not a participant in the story, but he is acquainted with the time, place, and characters of his story. How exactly he comes to know the precise details of the story is not clear, but at any rate there is no indication that he either participated in or witnessed the ten-day exchange of tales that constitutes the event of the Decameron. Slightly different from Boccaccio's non-participant narrator is Conrad's non-participant narrator in "The Inn of the Two Witches: A Find". The unnamed narrator tells of how he went browsing through a second-hand book store that was in the last stages of decay, bought some books for very little, and got the box they were in at no extra cost. "As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed." However, there was "a litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box". And this turns

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out to be the tattered remnants of a manuscript account that tells of an English naval lieutenant's adventure on the Spanish coast during the Napoleonic Wars. The adventure leads to the inn of the two witches, from which he barely escapes alive. The lieutenant's first-person, participant, account is too fragmentary to be offered as it was found in the box, so the narrator retells it in his own first-person, non-participant, words. Nothing moment-by-moment is provided about the find in the book shop, but nonetheless we learn enough about the narrator to characterize him: for instance, that he is in London, is old rather than young, has been a man of the sea, and is a browser in second-hand book shops. The second distinction to be made among first-person, nonparticipant, narrators is between those who are omniscient and those who are not. Partly this corresponds to the distinction made above between anonymous storytellers and those who are characterized. Epic narration, for example, is really closer to thirdperson narration than to first-person, participant, in that it pretends to no conventions of historical reporting. Whatever the element of realism in the Iliad this is not the realism of Robinson Crusoe, with its carefully authenticated pretense to providing an eyewitness report. The only unlimited access in Crusoe's narration is to his own private thoughts. What he did not experience or could not clearly infer from what he did experience, or was not told by others is not part of Crusoe's narration. But from the Iliad to the Kalevala, epic narrators have had an unexplained and unaccountable knowledge of everything relevant to the subject at hand. They may not tell everything that the reader might wish to know, but there is no principle of restriction, and many instances occur of telling what a character was thinking and what he was doing when alone. Trollope has been repeatedly singled out to represent the selfdefeating narration that undercuts the pretense to reality by admitting to the making up of a story. But one could just as well argue that the inexplicable omniscience of the Homeric narrator is equally disconcerting. We at least know how the Trollopean narrator gains his impossible knowledge: he makes it up. The Decameron and "The Inn of the Two Witches" are both nonomniscient. To be sure, the narrator of the Decameron does not

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explain how he came by the information that he did not witness, but granting this restricted knowledge we still note a pervasive limitation in the kind of thing we are told. We are not told what the characters are thinking except what is obviously inferable from their behavior; we are not given detailed accounts of what characters are doing when alone. The narrator of "The Inn of the Two Witches" is more obviously limited, by the manuscript account that he finds, than is Boccaccio's narrator; but even so, he is obliged to fill in the gaps in the manuscript. Nonetheless, even the inferences that fill in the gaps are presented externally, from the limited viewpoint of the young officer whose account is the basis of the story. And because the key scene in the story, the murder of the young officer's mentor, can only be inferred by the officer, so it comes down to us. In an omniscient narration, nothing of such consequence is pieced together by mere mortals; sooner or later we learn of it as it really is. Even more restricted than Conrad's narrator is Eugene Field's narrator of "The Duel". The narrator of "The Inn of the Two Witches" admits to a partial reconstruction and thus to the presenting of information from a partially Olympian perspective. But every stanza of "The Duel" concludes with a disclaimer; the non-participant narrator accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of his account: (I wasn't there; I simply state What was told to me by the Chinese plate!) (Now mind: I'm only telling you What the old Dutch clock declares is true!) (Don't fancy I exaggerate I got my news from the Chinese plate!) (The old Dutch clock it told me so, And that is how I came to know.) The problem with the concept of omniscience is that it is not always applicable to a work and that even when applicable it is sometimes a matter of degree rather than kind. But the best place to take this up is in the discussion of thiid-person narration.

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2. Third The most common indication of first-person narration is the presence of first-person pronoun references; the most common indication of third-person narration is the absence of them. Still, narrative person is not quite the same thing as grammatical person. If it were, then one would reasonably expect to find a basic narrative category of second-person. One does in fact not find such a category - partly because there are only a handful of works written consistently in the grammatical second-person, but most important because second-person, unlike first- and third-person, refers not to the narrating but to the person addressed. Firstperson is a positive concept: it says something about the source of the thing narrated. Third-person is a negative concept: it is the absence of those features that characterize first-person. When there is a clearly established person being addressed, whether specifically named or merely labeled "you", then we can speak of grammatical second-person. But this grammatical secondperson always adds up to a narrative first- or third-person because second-person has to do only with the person addressed and nothing to do with the source of the narration. You Know Me Al, as the title indicates, is consistently addressed to a second-person, in this case by a first-person. The narration is Jack Keefe writing to his friend Al, but the repeated occurrences of the second-person "you" do not affect the basic first-person narration. Joyce Cary's short story "The Tunnel" represents a much less common, and perhaps even gimmicky, device of a thirdperson narration consistently addressed to the protagonist himself. This is a much more thoroughgoing second-person narration than that of works such as "Wakefield", which contain an occasional rhetorical apostrophe to the protagonist: "Wakefield! whither are you going?" But neither is it an address to the reader, like the one in The Warden: "The reader must now be requested to visit the rectory of Plumstead Episcopi, and as it is still early morning, to ascend again with us into the bedroom of the Archdeacon." Nor is it like that to the Muses in works such as the Iliad: "Tell me now, you Muses, who have your homes on Olympos; for you,

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who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing." Unlike these occasional, unsustained second-person references, almost every sentence in "The Tunnel" contains at least one instance of the second-person pronoun. The "narrator" is a completely uncharacterized third-person, and we are given no rationale for the unusual appearance of second-person direct address without any first-person doing the addressing. Still, there is nothing basically inconsistent about it, and for the present purpose our point is simply that all narration that employs grammatical secondperson is always as narration either first- or third-person. Whether or not a work contains direct address, it either has a characterized narrator (first-person) or it does not (third-person). We could, if we liked, go on and establish another pair of narrative distinctions: works addressed to a characterized audience (second-person) and works not addressed to a characterized audience (?-person). The reason for not pursuing this distinction is that second-person references are often more rhetorical than significant, as indicated by the fact that they are often unsustained and even addressed to quite different sorts of people in the same account. Not only does "Wakefield" contain addresses to the protagonist, it also contains addresses to the reader. Not only does the Iliad contain addresses to the Muses, it also contains addresses to the characters (e.g. Menelaus). The same problem of indeterminacy that vitiates the concept of second-person vitiates omniscience as a basic narrative distinction. Omniscience is a useful negative concept when analyzing first-person, participant, narration. Here the narrator/character is bound to observe the limits on knowledge that he imposes on himself to gain the goal of verisimilitude. He lays himself open to the charge of inconsistency if he does not. (However, this inconsistency can apply to the narrator/character without necessarily applying to the real author.) Omniscience is less useful when analyzing first-person, non-participant, narration. Nonparticipant storytelling narration is usually reporting by hearsay or avowedly fabricating. The latter clearly results in theoretical omniscience, but in practice such narration sometimes provides

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far less intimate information than the event seems to demand. "Wakefield", for all its paucity of detail and insight, would have to be considered an omniscient narration. When the non-participant storytelling narrator is reporting by hearsay, there is an even more obvious ambiguity in applying the notion of omniscience. We will have to take into account both the source of the original narrative and also the amount of modification introduced by the narrator neither of which is usually given with half so much specificity as in "The Inn of the Two Witches". In the last analysis, the concept of omniscience is something of a relative notion. No matter how small the event and how great the detail (e.g. Joyce's Ulysses), there is always more that could be said. And if a work is to be comprehensible, there is always some kind of principle of selection, of limitation. Our knowledge of Leopold Bloom is more omniscient than our knowledge of Molly Bloom, though both are major characters in the novel. In Henry James' novel The Ambassadors there is omniscient insight into one character (Strether) but not into the other characters. And, as compared to the kind of intimate insight into Leopold and Molly Bloom, there is more that we are not told than we are told about Strether. We usually think that third-person narration is by its very nature omniscient. For example, in "Mr. Flood's Party" not only are we shown a man at night all alone, we hear him speaking, and even are told what he perceives through his alcohol-clouded senses ("Secure, with only two moons listening"). However, such unequivocal examples are by no means the only sort. An equally common kind of third-person narration can be seen in many detective stories, where the very nature of the genre demands that the narration be less than omniscient. When we finally discover "who did it", it is through the efforts of the detective, who ferrets out the clues and pieces them together in a very painstaking, nonomniscient fashion. This restricted third-person omniscience is not, of course, the narration of Watson's chronicles of Sherlock Holmes' cases, but it is the narration of Erie Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason stories (e.g. The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Counterfeit Eye).

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Third-person narration is always omniscient in the sense that there is no explanation of how a whole series of interrelated details can be known by the anonymous "narrator". But the degree of omniscience can vary widely - from the necessarily restricted detective story, like The Case of the Velvet Claws, to the theoretically unrestricted "stream-of-consciousness" work, like Ulysses. One is not more unequivocally third-person than the other, for both are defined by the absence of any characterizable narrator, not by the degree of omniscience.

B. TIME

Roughly speaking, the three kinds of narrative person are equally common. If it seems to the modern reader that first-person, non-participant, is less common than the other two, this is probably because of his scanty acquaintance with oral literature. However, the four kinds of narrative time are very unequally represented, with past-time accounts being by far the most common. Present is less common; durative is relatively uncommon; and future is quite rare. 1. Past What makes a narration past has nothing to do with one's own position in history. A work is past if the event depicted is over when the account of it is given. Thus Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and George Orwell's novel 1984 have past-time narration because, although the years 2000 and 1984 are still in the future from our point of view, they are in the past from the point of view that narrates them. The basic literary features of a work do not change with the changing world. 1984 was past in 1948 (when it was published); it will be past in 1984; and it will be past in 2048. The only aspect of a work that is at all subject to revision is unverifiability. And even here, one would be hard-put to provide examples of works reclassified when new facts came to light - so unlikely is it that a corroborating moment-bymoment account would ever turn up.

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The primary evidence for past-time narration is the consistent use of the grammatical past-tense, but in addition there is the usual assumption that detailed knowledge of an event presupposes that it has already occurred. Indeed, one might go so far as to maintain that unless there is evidence to the contrary, the claim to moment-by-moment knowledge is by its very nature a claim about the past: our thinking and understanding is primarily about the past. Thus it is that Utopian stories, though most frequently set in the future, are almost always narrated as if past. So it is with science fiction: Wells' The Time Machine goes into the future but not via the future-tense. The protagonist does not foresee the future but actually travels into it and reports what he did there after having done it. What makes a narration past is solely a matter of the time of the purported event in relation to the time of the telling, and in this there is no question of degree. An event that purportedly occurred thousands of years before the account of it is no more past than an event that purportedly occurred the very day it was narrated. On the one hand, Milton's Paradise Lost purports to tell of the very beginning of time. On the other hand, the traditional blues convention of "this morning" introduces accounts of events purporting to have just occurred: I woke up this mornin' 'bout four o'clock. Early this mornin', the blues came walking in my room. I woke up this mornin' with the blues all round my bed. Literary pastness is usually the same as historical pastness; that is, those events the historian speaks of as past are spoken of by the writer of literature as past. Thus Gibbon in his history of the Roman Empire writes of something over and done with. And Henryk Sienkiewicz in his novel of the Roman Empire in the time of Nero (Quo Vadis?) writes of events over and done with. But Shakespeare, also writing of the Roman Empire (Julius Caesar) writes as if the event is contemporaneous, that is, happening at the very moments that the reader or audience comes to know of it. One difficult problem associated with past-time narration is wftat grammarians refer to as the historical present. Because the

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presumption in narrative (fact or fiction) is that events narrated occurred in the past, it is possible to employ the present-tense under some circumstances and still make clear that the events referred to are not happening contemporaneously with the account of them. This use of the present-tense is relatively uncommon, but it does occur - presumably to enhance the sense of immediacy and vividness of scenes that the author wishes to highlight. And it may be that this is more likely to occur in situations of oral storytelling, where the narrating sometimes verges on dramatization. In the Hungarian marchen "Pretty Maid Ibronka" the narration is primarily in the past-tense and clearly reflects what the narrator considers to be an account of past events. However, at half-a-dozen key points the tense shifts to the present: Before long, a beautiful rose grew out of Ibronka's grave. The grave was not far from the road, and a prince, driving past in his coach, saw it. So much was he taken by its beauty that he stopped the coachman at once. "Hey! Rein in the horses and get me that rose from the grave. Be quick about it!" At once the coachman comes to a halt. He jumps from the coach and goes to fetch the rose. But when he wants to break it off, the rose would not yield. He is pulling harder now, but still it does not yield. He is pulling the rose with all his might, but all in vain.2

One does not need unusual imagination to see the storyteller here tugging vigorously on the imaginary rose. A more thoroughgoing use of the historical present is found in Joyce Cary's novel Charley is My Darling, which, although it begins in the past-tense and returns regularly to it, is written as much in the present-tense as in the past. And it is not as easy to provide a rationale for the alternating tense here as it was in "Pretty Maid Ibronka". But as long as there is no confusion as to the pastness or presentness of the event, the different tenses do not constitute an inconsistency. Cary, however, had a life-long addiction to the present-tense, and some of his stories leave the reader in the dark about the fundamental question of time. In "The Tunnel" the tense, and thus the time, are consistently in the 2

In Linda Degh, ed. Folktales of Hungary, tr. by Judit Halasz (Chicago, 1955), 51; told by Mihdly Fedics.

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present. It is not clear what is gained by this unusual grammatical mixture of present-tense and second-person, but at least there is no basic inconsistency. However, in Mr. Johnson we are forced to resign ourselves to accepting an unresolved inconsistency. The novel opens with a quarter of a page of past-tense account - part of which is moment-by-moment. But this is abruptly dropped in favor of present-tense and never resumed. To be sure there is a presumption of pastness in narration, but if this is not reinforced in some sort of sustained fashion then there is a basic ambiguity. In André Malraux's novel The Conquerors is to be found a similar uncertainty - although perhaps not so serious as to result in a basic ambiguity. One reason for hedging here is the conspicuous use of dates in laying out this fictional account of a real-life struggle. The event runs from 1918 to 1925, from Marseilles to Canton, China. But except for one brief flashback, the event is focused on a few weeks in the summer of the last year, during the Canton general strike. The account is broken up into chapters that initially resemble journal entries, but this is never claimed to be a journal, and the prefatory journal dating is eventually dropped. The unnamed narrator is a minor participant in the event as a confidant of Garine, the ringleader. With only a few lapses into past, his narration is present-tense - even in action scenes, where his participation makes it impossible for him to be speaking or writing. Because the work is about a well-known recent event, and because the account emphasizes chronological precision, and because the first-person, participant, narrator cannot explicably be narrating contemporaneously with his participation, and because the few past-tense statements would be otherwise inconsistent, the event is probably best thought of as having passed when the account of it begins, as making use of the present-tense merely to accentuate the fast-moving, tension-filled plot. But like the narration in "The Tunnel", this can strike the reader as a bit gimmicky. Perhaps the final point to make about this kind of uneasy marriage of past and present narration is a negative one: a work can be past even though it contains some present-tense, but not even a single occurrence of past-tense can be explained away. There is grammatical precedent for dropping into the present-tense

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when speaking of a past occurrence, for speaking of it as if from an eye-witness perspective. Such a perspective could very well have existed, and this can be recreated. But of something in the process of happening, or of something that has not yet happened, there is neither precedent nor rationale for speaking of it as having already happened. One must get into a time machine to accomplish this. 2. Present Present-time narration has already been discussed at some length in connection with the analysis of Script, a species partly defined by its presentness. But Scripts are also defined by their thirdpersonness, and thus we have yet to examine present-time works narrated in the first-person. Also, there are third-person, present works that are not Scripts. Unlike past-time narration, which allows some leeway in the use of grammatical tense, present narration necessarily uses the present-tense; and as a result, those few plays that sometimes lapse into the past-tense do not qualify as Scripts. For example, Shaw's Pygmalion, a rival of Man and Superman for the distinction of being his most unequivocal Story, gives up all pretense of contemporaneousness at the end and becomes straight past-tense narration for a dozen pages: The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories. ... And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from the indications she has herself given them. ... Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, it she marries either of them, marry Freddy.... And that is just what Eliza did.

In addition to this, Pygmalion's extensive "stage directions" contain rhetorical questions, pronoun references to the narrator, transitions from scene to scene that begin "meanwhile", bracketed

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translations of cockney dialect, commentary on what the protagonists are thinking, evaluations of their characters, direct addresses to the reader to "imagine" and "picture" different scenes. We could label the work narratively inconsistent - a flawed Script. But perhaps more accurately, we could simply term its narration not third-person, present at all but first-person, non-participant, past. The closest thing to a mediated Monolog is works narrated in the first-person, participant, present. In this category can be found, for example, Wyatt's "My galley charged with forgetfulness", Whitman's "Once I passed through a populous city", Frost's "Stopping by Woods", MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell", and such "stream-of-consciousness" prose works as Schnitzler's "Lieutenant Gustl" and "Fraulein Else". Here, short enough to quote in its entirety, is Hardy's "An August Midnight": A shaded lamp and a waving blind, A n d the beat of a clock from a distant floor: O n this scene enter - winged, horned, and spined A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; While mid my page there idly stands A sleepy fly, that rubs his hands ... Thus meet we five, in this still place, A t this point of time, at this point in space. - M y guests parade my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp, and sink Supine. " G o d ' s humblest, they!" I muse. Y e t w h y ? They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

This is an especially good example of present-time narration because of the explicit reference to "this point of time". Less common are examples of non-participant, present-time narration. Alexander Blok's famous ironic ballad of the Russian Revolution, "The Twelve", exemplifies such narration. Occurrences of first- and second-person pronouns in the narration and of apostrophes to the characters reveal the presence of a narrator. Because the narration is in the present-tense, the narrator seems to be narrating from observation as the incidents are taking place. Yet because he sees all and hears all, his point of observation must

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be Olympian. Like the narrator of the Iliad, he addresses the characters, but they do not answer. And, like the Homeric narrator, he does not analyze these characters but presents them f r o m the outside only, in the midst, however, of very vivid and implicating actions. Non-participant narration of this kind is common to oral literature, where the living presence of the narrator has to be taken into account but where he in no way interferes with the given-ness of the story narrated. This is usually what is meant by the term "epic narration", though it is by no means confined to epics. Thus one is not surprised to learn that Blok's wife had great success with public recitations of his poem. What no doubt made her recitations more vivid, especially to Post-Revolution Russian audiences, was this epic perspective combined with presenttime, which brings it close to drama. With third-person, present-time works we may get even closer to drama. For often these works are in semi-dialog form in which the narrative consists of little more than introduction to the speeches. Hardy's "Over the Coffin" has four lines of present-tense narrative scene setting to introduce a dialog with narrative tags. Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" has only two lines of such narrative to introduce its dialog. The Child B version of the anonymous English ballad, "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" has only narrative tags to introduce the speeches (the Child A version is pure dialog). And the anonymous Chinese ballad, "The lady says: 'The cock has c r o w e d ' " , has only two such narrative tags. The first two lines r u n : The lady says: 'The cock has crowed'; The knight says: 'Day has not dawned. ' 3 The poem continues, however, with only quotation marks as the dialog shifts back and forth from lady to knight. But even if the original narrative tags had been maintained, the work would be mediated rather than unmediated because "The lady says" is not a detachable speaker tag but a narrative assertion. A similar Chinese ballad is just over the line into Dialog. The speeches are introduced with only detachable speaker tags. There are no quotation marks, 3

The Book of Songs, tr. Arthur Waley (New York, 1937, I960), No. 25.

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and the speaker tags are used throughout the poem as the dialog shifts back and forth from Lady to Lover. Since detachable speaker tags do not affect the basic unmediated nature of a Dialog, whether we use the original Chinese version of this work (which Waley implies had no tags) or the translated version, the point is the same. Here, in Waley's translation (No. 26) is the first exchange: THE LADY: THE LOVER :

The cock has crowed; It is full daylight. It was not the cock that crowed, It was the buzzing of those green flies. 3. Future

Examples of future narration, of whatever person, are few and far between. Indeed, it is not a very viable form but more on the order of a tour-de-force. Or, if this is a bit overstated, at least we can say that its subject is restricted to death and the afterlife. Here are the sorts of titles one encounters: "Afterwards" (Hardy), "Death" (Maxwell Bodenheim), "When in my pilgrimage I reach", "Moriturus" (Edna St. Vincent Millay), "When Earth's last picture is painted" (Kipling). And so difficult is it to construct a future event moment-by-moment that the last two poems here do not really qualify as literature because of their lack of moment-by-momentness. Even the example below is rather marginal in this respect, lacking as it does any dialog: 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.

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A longer and more sustained example, and, because of its use of dialog, a less marginal one, is Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". Like the other works narrated in the future, this one is about death, and also like them it shows the difficulties of establishing a context in which future narration is appropriate. The poem quoted above consists of two stanzas devoted to establishing a context, and only in the last stanza is the point about "earthly loss repair" particularized moment-bymoment. Gray's "Elegy" is similar. In the first twenty-three stanzas the narrator describes himself musing in a country churchyard that he frequents. He is not speaking, however, but writing an elegy. These stanzas describe the setting and establish the point of the elegy - the way that everyone, regardless of how thwarted by life and the living he may have been, is reluctant to leave them and desires in however small a way to be remembered by them after his death. Only in the last nine stanzas is there a moment-by-moment account. To be sure, the account is about the narrator himself as a frequenter of solitary retreats and about his final "retreat" to this very churchyard, and thus the introductory stanzas are an important contribution. But without the concluding stanzas there would be only a still-life, a scene with a man writing. The concluding stanzas tell of a future possibility, of someone inquiring about the narrator after he has died. A "hoary-headed Swain" replies, giving a brief history of this obscure local poet and then, leading the nameless inquirer to the grave, points out the epitaph and urges him to read it. Here are three of the concluding nine stanzas: Haply some hoary-headed Swain may say, 'Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn. 'There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by. 'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or crazed with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.'

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At least as important as these few examples of external future narration are the occurrences of internal future narration - a character in a story telling another character moment-by-moment what he is supposed to do. But this is better taken up in the next chapter, and for all that, it too is of limited occurrence. 4. Durative Durative narration, although related to future narration, is by no means so rare as future. It is a cross between past and future, and, like most extant hybrids, is of recent rather than ancient origin. Like that most recent species, the Serial, to which it is closely related, durative narration is dependent on the printed page. The standard form of durative is letters and/or journal entries. Each individual letter or journal entry tells of something already past, but the writing of each letter or entry takes place before the episode that constitutes the subject of the next account. However, the epistolary form is not always durative, nor is durative narration necessarily epistolary. On the one hand, Cleland's Fanny Hill, as noted earlier, is epistolary by virtue of being written by the protagonist in the form of two letters; yet the narration is not durative but past because the entire event depicted in the two letters is over when the first letter is begun. On the other hand, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is durative by virtue of being a manuscript written by the protagonist in two parts - the episode recounted in the second part not having occurred when the first part was written. The second part is a short postscript which provides the concluding episode that functions as the capstone to the more detailed but less comprehending main account. Still, durative narration would be of very minor importance if it were not for the epistolary or journal form; thus, this form of narration is almost always first-person. The only third-person durative work discovered so far is Henry Lawson's short story "The Drover's Wife". This work is unusual because of the past-time flashback technique within the context of a present-time narration. What would be a consistent present-time narration switches from an account of the present to an account of what the main character is

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thinking - the early years of her marriage. This problem of ruptured chronology in general, and of "The Drover's Wife" in particular, will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Here, it would unduly complicate the examination of simpler forms of narration. With this unusual exception, durative narration is of two general kinds: single narrator and multiple narrators. The first kind results in Stories; the second kind results in Serials. Ring Lardner provides examples of single-narrator durative - both in letter and in journal form. Jack Keefe's collected letters to his friend A1 (You Know Me Al) has already been discussed. "A Caddy's Diary" is exactly what the title indicates. An unnamed country-club caddy, with aspirations to become a professional golfer and to write a lucrative how-to-do-it column for the local newspaper, has been advised that the way to learn to write is to keep a diary. As a result, we have a month of humorous, semi-literate entries giving candid comments on the cheats and blowhards that frequent the country-club links. The event is a month in the caddy's life, but this event is not yet over when the account begins. Each entry is past narration: it tells of what the caddy has already done that day. But what he does the next day has not yet occurred and will thus be the subject of tomorrow's past-time narration. What when looked at one-by-one are past-time accounts, when viewed as a whole is a single durative account. Whether two past-time accounts or two hundred, whether in journal or letter form, makes no difference in diagraming as long as the accounts are by the same narrator. Thus You Know Me Al and "A Caddy's Diary" are diagramed the same.4 Not all Serials employ durative narration (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but most of them do. Even in The Moonstone, with its series of commissioned accounts, one of the narrators dies before the accounts are commissioned, and his contribution is a journal he leaves behind. (However, Ezra Jennings' durative journal account is inserted into Franklin Blake's past-time manuscript account rather than standing independently as one of the main Serial narratives.)5 When the goal is to provide multiple incomplete 4 5

See the Appendix. See diagram in the Appendix.

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perspectives, then not only are multiple narrators in order (Serial) but also multiple accounts by the same narrator (durative). Durative narration has the advantage not only of portraying the event as it unfolds but also of showing the narrator/character's reaction to each stage of it unaffected by a knowledge of how it all will turn out in the end. The corresponding disadvantage, of course, is that it tends to be rather rambling - better at portraying the character of the narrator than at developing a plot. And what is merely rambling in the letters or journal of a single narrator can become downright tedious when it must be passed back and forth among several correspondents in a full-blown epistolary novel. To maintain the verisimilitude, which is one of the great attractions of durative epistolary narration, the writer must not only keep his characters scribbling away but see to it that the same information gets repeated to all who need to know it. You Know Me Al is short on plot, and thus the durative narration is not so labored as the multiple narration in many Serials that attempt to develop quite elaborate plots by means of correspondence between a dozen characters. What often happens, as we saw in the case of Pamela, is that the consistent epistolaiy form breaks down because of the author's inability to get all the essential information to the characters at the right time or in the right order for them to write about it. As a result, what begins as a mere editor of a collection of letters arranged chronologically often ends as one of the narrators and narrating in the past rather than in the durative. A surprisingly forthright admission of this fundamental narrative problem appears in Walter Scott's novel Redgauntlet. After 150 pages of correspondence, a non-participant narrator breaks in with the admission that here, as in most epistolary accounts, the letters are not sufficient to narrate the entire event. The narrator begins his own account with a Chapter I introduced by these words: The advantage of laying before the reader, in the words of the actors themselves, the adventures which we must otherwise have narrated in our own has given great popularity to the publication of epistolary correspondence, as practiced by various great authors, and by ourselves in the preceding chapters. Nevertheless, a genuine correspondence of

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this kind (and Heaven forbid it should be in any respect sophisticated by interpolations of our own!) can seldom be found to contain all in which it is necessary to instruct the reader for his full comprehension of the story. Also it must often happen that various prolixities and redundancies occur in the course of an inter-change of letters which must hang as a dead weight on the progress of the narrative. To avoid this dilemma, some biographers have used the letters of personages concerned, or liberal extracts from them, to describe particular incidents, or express the sentiments which they entertained; while they connect them occasionally with such portions of narrative as may serve to carry on the thread of the story.

"The story", or plot, of Redgauntlet proved to be too complex for the narrative form with which it began. An example of a durative epistolary Serial that is both complex in plot and consistent in its pretense to being nothing but a collection of letters is Choderlos de Laclos' eighteenth-century novel Dangerous Liaisons.6 In it there are twelve correspondents; but the Marechale de—, Azolan, Comte de Gercourt, and Father Anselme write only one letter each and give no account of the event, and Chevalier Danceny writes numerous letters but provides no moment-by-moment narrative. This leaves seven correspondents to provide moment-bymoment narrative, and three of these do so in only one letter. Thus, there are four durative accounts (two or more moment-by-moment letters by the same writer) and three past accounts. The event as a whole is the planned seductions of various persons (especially the fifteen-year-old convent girl, Cecile) in and around Paris. It covers five months in the lives of the two seducers, Madame de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, focusing on their plots, their eventual successes, and what happens to both the seducers and the seduced as a consequence of this success. Here, in the order of first appearance, are the seven writers whose letters contain moment-bymoment accounts of the event - although the letters appear in the novel chronologically rather than being grouped according to writer: 1. The work begins with Cecile's letter - which contains the first moment-by-moment account - to Sophie, her confidante (Aug. 3rd). This is one of more than a dozen letters that she writes to various people. 6

Diagramed in the Appendix.

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2. The dozens of letters by the female villain, Marquise de Merteuil, and the dozens of letters by her male accomplice, 3. Vicomte de Valmont, provide the bulk of the narrative. 4. Madame de Tourvel writes many letters, but only one of them contains a moment-by-moment account. Thus her account is past rather than durative. 5. Madame de Volanges, though not the last writer to appear, provides, among others, the last moment-by-moment account in the work (Dec. 18th) - describing the humiliation of Madame de Merteuil at the opera two days earlier. She also writes the last letter in the work (Jan. 14th). 6. Madame de Rosemonde, like Madame de Tourvel, writes several letters but provides only a single narrative. 7. M. Bertrand, evidently a solicitor, writes two short letters near the end - one of which gives a very brief moment-by-moment account of Valmont's death.

And, tying the entire collection together, is an anonymous editor's foreword and footnotes. As in Humphry Clinker, the editor is fictional but provides no moment-by-moment accounts. Like Dracula, Dangerous Liaisons is the work of various narrators, some providing durative accounts and some providing simple past accounts. But unlike Stoker's novel, Laclos' novel is composed only of letters. There are no journals, no newspaper accounts, no medical reports. Nor do the letters in Dangerous Liaisons contain any internal narration, as do some of the accounts in Dracula. The one small narrative complexity occurs in one of Valmont's letters, where he provides an anecdote of an escapade that occurred before this event began. These are questions of narrative complexity that go beyond the simple elements that have been the subject of this chapter, and instead of continuing to postpone these, as we have repeatedly done, let us now advance to "The Structure of Narration".

VI THE STRUCTURE OF NARRATION

The elements of narration having been laid out, the next order of business is to examine the different ways that works can be expanded and elaborated by means of additional sets of narrations. The word "elaborated" is used advisedly because, short of complexity being considered as an end in itself, differences of structure are often the most difficult ones to provide explanations for. And, while the possibilities of structural complexity are almost endless, the works actually exhibiting structural complexity are probably in the minority. There is no ignoring the structure of a complexly narrated work; a work is what it is and not reducible to a simpler, more explicable might-have-been. The Eiffel Tower is not simply a proto-television tower, for all that its complexities and even its very existence may seem gratuitous. On the other hand, to explain the arches and flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals in terms of their elegance would be to miss completely the crucial structural principles involved. To return to our original comparison with the different areas of zoological study and specifically the analogy of narrative structure with anatomy, we can make this same point in terms of vestigial structures such as the human appendix and tail bone. These are no less part of the human phenomenon and no less the subject of important anatomical study for being without obvious function. To establish their existence is the primary consideration. It is not possible to determine beforehand where the effort to establish objective criteria of analysis will lead. One will not be led anywhere unless he takes the initiative to seek out a path and follow it. As a bare minimum, a work of mediated fiction has both a

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person and a time of narration. But beyond this, a work may exhibit dozens, even hundreds of different instances of narration, each with its own combination of person and time. As we have seen, there are twelve kinds of basic narration. Works with a single event and one of these twelve narrative possibilities will be characterized here as simple in structure; this is the elements of narration combined into a minimum viable narrative. Many variations are still possible within simple narration, but as long as these can be diagramed as a single event with a single person/time narration, they are best analyzed as simple narration. The picaresque structure of Lazarillo de Tormes, the "stream-of-consciousness" structure of Arthur Schnitzler's "Lieutenant Gustl", the ruptured chronology structure of Conrad's Almayer's Folly are thus structurally simple. By this standard, some works especially noted for their complexity (e.g. the later novels of Henry James) will be seen as essentially simple in structure - complex though they may be in other respects. Simplicity of narrative structure bears no necessary relation to size or scope. Michener's giant panoramic novel Hawaii traces the fate of hundreds of characters over thousands of miles and dozens of generations but has no narrative complexity. Conrad's short story "The Shadowline" differs from his full-length novel Almayer's Folly in being structurally complex. There are thousands of possibilities of complex narration - of multiplying the instances of subordinate narrations and events. And while there are no known principles for explaining in general why works are structured one way rather than another, it is possiblei n individual instances to discern what has been gained with a specific structural feature that could not have been gained without it. There are four general types of narrative structure: (1) Works may have various instances of internal narration and yet have only a single event being narrated: this is the principle of unification. Narration is unified when the multiplicity of different internal accounts contributes, along with the main, inclusive narration, to the creation of a single unified event. (2) Works that have multiple subordinate events (with or without multiple subordinate narration) will be said to exemplify

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integration. Here stories within stoiies are integrated like Chinese boxes. (3) The third structural principle is primarily, but not exclusively, associated with oral literature; this is repetition. Here the same or similar incidents not only recur but often are repeatedly narrated as part of the main event. (4) The fourth kind of narrative structure is significantly different from the others by virtue of involving multiple events without clearly subordinating one to another and thus actually constituting multiple works rather than one. This is juxtaposition, the convention of a short introductory (and, less frequently, concluding) event that provides some kind of context or explanation for the larger event but does not quite constitute a sustained frame event. Thus, strictly speaking, juxtaposition is not structural because it is not the means of developing a single work but of creating an adjunct work. This detachable adjunct work is dependent on, but not an integral part of, the main work. Unlike Serial narration, juxtaposition involves no common event; but unlike multiple independent works, juxtaposition involves a commentary of one fictional event on another. Because individual works may exhibit any combination of these four kinds of narrative complexity - or none at all - we shall refrain from characterizing a work as a whole as being structurally unified, integrated, repetitious, or juxtaposed but say only that features of the work are such. In human anatomy the thigh bone is structurally connected to the hip bone with a ball-and-socket joint; the thigh bone is connected to the shin bone with a hinge joint. Thus we cannot say that a human skeleton is as a whole either hinged or ball-and-socketed. As with the elements of narration, we are confronted here with important literary distinctions that, because of their overlapping character, cannot provide the basis of a literary taxonomy. The notion of narrative structure stands midway between the most general distinctions of taxonomic kinds and the particular distinctions arising out of the characteristics of individual events. One such kind of particular distinction arising out of the characteristics of individual events is plot structure. Attempts have been made

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to make this admittedly useful concept of criticism a fundamental structural principle, but with two sorts of unfortunate results: either the complexities of diverse events are ruthlessly flattened out, so that all works appear the same; or the complexities of individual events are analyzed in detail but only in terms of the individual works, so that the analyses bear little relation to the theoretical distinctions they are supposed to support. An example of the first result is V. I. Propp's much admired but rarely employed morphological theory of the fairy tale. Surveying the entire field of international folklore, Propp contended that the number of functions recurring in migratory fairy tale plots was "exceedingly small", moreover, that the "sequence of these functions is always the same", so that all fairy tales are ultimately "structurally homogeneous". 1 As one of the few Russian Formalists known and praised by contemporary Western literary scholars, Propp needs to be noted regardless of his actual success in developing a workable theory of plot structure. The attempt, admirable enough, runs up against the basic dilemma of either accepting more or less the traditional conception of plot, which emphasizes the specific conflicts and resolutions of specific situations, or applying the traditional term to a new conception that can never be any more precise than conflict-and-resolution - a notion so vague that little is gained by discovering that all plots are "structurally homogeneous". An example of the second sort of unfortunate result, which attempts both to discover a few basic principles of plot and also to analyze the actual complexities of individual events, is R.S. Crane's oft-cited and reprinted "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones". Working from Aristotle's Poetics, Crane postulates three basic kinds of plot: "plots of action, plots of character, and plots of thought". 2 But the definition of these is, like that of Propp's single kind, rather vague. But where Propp overcomes the difficulty by forcing his examples into his Procrustean formula, Crane overcomes the difficulty by analyzing Tom Jones in all 1

Morfologija skazki (Leningrad, 1928), 29-33; tr. by Laurence Scott (Bloomington, Ind., 1958) as Morphology of the Folktale. 2 Critics and Criticism, 620.

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its unique diversity and then claiming that it has really all been systematically done in terms of action, character, and thought. But if this is so, then there is nothing really plot-like about the analysis; it is simply a close reading of an individual work of literature. And indeed, Crane admits as much in a revealing footnote: "I should add that several of my friends, while willing to accept the foregoing analysis, would prefer that I should use some other word than 'plot' to designate the formal principle I have been attempting to define. I am inclined to agree with them, and only wish that they or I could think of a better term" (p. 632). Despite the work of scholars like Propp and Crane, we are still waiting for a convincing demonstration that the concept of plot can yield workable general principles of narrative structure. The same is true of the obvious and important literary factor of time. If every work of literature portrays a space-time event, then every work of literature can be analyzed in terms of its handling of chronology. There are, for example, works whose moment-by-momentness is continuous through a short time span. As we have seen, almost all Monologs and Dialogs and a few Scripts adhere to this strict unity of time. On the other hand, all Serials, almost all Stories, and most Scripts are interrupted or discontinuous. But when the characteris tic features of the different species have been distinguished, there is little more that can be said in general about continuous and discontinuous chronology. In particular there is a great deal that can be said, however, in reference to the problems arising out of individual works, because most kinds of events cannot be developed while adhering to strict unity of time. The creation of continuous dialog may in one sense be considered a legitimate literary goal, but in another sense it is a way of avoiding most of the fundamental problems of literary creation. It precludes the need to pick and choose among possible scenes, to work up representative characters and incidents, to edit out the interesting but insignificant materials that obscure the plot development, to choose where to summarize and where to depict moment-by-moment. These considerations are crucial to the art of fiction, but they are so tied to individual events and themes that it is almost impossible to generalize about them. It is all

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we can do here to note that a continuous event can hardly be sustained for more than two or three hours and that even this ideal of French neo-classical drama was usually realized only as a tour-de-force. Thus the distinction between continuous and discontinuous handling of time is not of major importance except as we use it to characterize a conspicuous, but not quite defining, feature (cf. The Fall) of unmediated works. An aspect of literary chronology that does lend itself to more systematic analysis does so in close connection with internal narration, with unified narrative structure. This is ruptured chronology - the forsaking of first-things-first narration in favor of beginning in medias res. At its simplest, as in Almayer's Folly, there is no internal narration. The "narrator" (third-person) of the part that begins in medias res is also the "narrator" of the flashback. This shows up diagramatically as a hanging box, with dotted lines to indicate that the beginning of the work is not the beginning ot the event. But the diagram shows nothing else. The flashback may be long or short, may constitute a very minor recollection or the major part of the work. There may be one flashback or a dozen. But the diagram shows only (1) the beginning of the work and (2) the beginning of the event, i.e. only the accounts that tell of the parts of the event that occur prior to the part told of in the opening account. And, of course, what is meant by the beginning of the work is the first moment-by-moment account that appears; and what is meant by the beginning of the event is the chronologically first moment-by-moment account wherever it may appear. Before going on to examine unified narration (the use of internal narratives to help present a single event), let us look briefly at the simplest manifestations of ruptured chronology - those which do not rely on internal narration. The diagrams below represent Almayer's Folly, G.B. Harrison's The Fires of Arcadia, Henry Lawson's "The Drover's Wife", and the John Coryell/ Frederick Dey syndicate's Nick Carter's Mysterious Case:

nn 3

"The Bascombe Valley Mystery" (Doyle)

^

i

APPENDIX

574 A Few Crusted (Hardy)

Kp