The Protoliterary: Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture 9780804780889

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The Protoliterary

w EDITORS

Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

THE PROTOLITERARY STEPS TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CULTURE

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2002 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig The protoliterary : steps toward an anthropology of culture I K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. p. em.- (Writing science) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-3463-1 (cloth: alk. paper) r. Theory (Philosophy). 2. Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series. B842.P47 2002 III'.85-dc2I This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Original printing 2002 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: II IO 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Typeset at Stanford University Press in Io/12.5 Sabon

200200III4

For Fu-chan and Wolfgang Iser

Acknowledgments

This book was conceived and written in many different places. For help, hospitality, and encouragement I am indebted to friends and colleagues at Stanford University (in obvious, though very different, ways to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Helen Tartar), the University of California at Irvine and Santa Cruz, Colorado College, and Kansai University (Osaka, Japan)-persons whom I do not want to name for fear of forgetting others to whom thanks are due in equal measure. I owe a particular gratitude to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which granted me a fellowship during which important parts of the book gained their more or less final shape. In spite of its manifold origins, the book clearly seems to betray a heavily "German" prejudice. (That prejudice originally showed a more than heavy hand also stylistically. As we know, style is never just style. I am greatly indebted to Bud Bynack for intervening on stylistic and more than stylistic levels.) The book hopes to be interdisciplinary. With the term "anthropology," however, it presents a stumbling block, especially for American and perhaps generally English-speaking readers, right in its subtitle. In the fifth assumption of the preface I have tried to do something about that. Suffice it here to say that the diversity of human and cultural phenomena, brought into sharper focus by exactly those disciplines that conventionally either carry the term anthropology or in which it looms large (ethnography, cultural, structural, evolutionary anthropology-on the European side one might add historical in contrast to traditional philosophical anthropology), has not cancelled out but rather reinforced a search for more than just historical patterns of experiencepatterns shaped but not determined by local historical and cultural conditions. Present-day debates about the violence rampant in advanced cultures provide us with an ineluctable if not so welcome example. Likewise, while general definitions of culture are precarious, feed-

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ing, as they mostly do, attitudes of cultural pessimism or the optimism of progress, an analysis of culture(s) along the lines of typical media patterns does not run that risk so easily. On a more personal level, this book has been long in the making because of the imposing presence, for me both personal and theoretical, of Wolfgang Iser and his literary anthropology. I will frequently refer but by no means do justice to it. Given the rigor of lser's theorizing, my book could also be seen as a flight from the enchanter into the murkier realms of culture and media. Finally, two notes concerning technicalities. For various reasons, I have mostly left the spelling and the order of, for instance, Greek and Japanese names the way I found them in my sources. Also, since it is well-nigh impossible in Germany to get at English translations of works written in other languages, I have normally translated all quotations from such works myself. In some cases (Adorno, Luhmann, LeroiGourhan), standard English translations were accessible and used; ironically, though, the available volumes of the Stanford Nietzsche edition (work in progress) do not present those Nietzsche texts with which I have mostly worked. K.L.P.

Contents

Preface: Eight Assumptions Introduction: Speculative Sketches-Critical Theory, Exegesis, Interpretation

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I

Part I. Dimensions: Theoretical and Illustrative I

First Exemplifications: The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium

II

Wilhelm Meister: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality, r6 Joseph Andrews and Painting, 24 The Bride of Lammermoor, Opera, and Madame Bovary, 28 The Maltese Falcon: The Novel and the Film, 36 Provisional Consequences, 40 2

Theory: Trends, Past and Present

43

The Eighteenth Century: G. C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System, 43 The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience, 50 Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise, 53 Games and Play, 65 Experience and Play Again, 66 Nietzsche, 68 Images of Evolution, 72

3 The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: "Drama," "Audience," Representation, 85 Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities, 90 The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power, roo

So

Part II. Spectacular Dynamics: Paradigms of Anthropological Import 4 Appearances: Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows

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5 Between Sociology and Anthropology: Trends, Past and Present

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Ambivalences of Western Spectacles, 125 Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline, 129 Spectacular Theater, Sumo, and the Labors of "Literature, 143

6 Fragments of an Absent World Theater: "Baroque" and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture

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Other Histories, and Their Theory, 173 Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dryden: Alternative Episodes in Western Cultural History, 177 The "Rise" of Opera: A Logical Coincidence in Media Development, r82 The Operatic Principle Extended, or: From Dewey via Hegel to Adorno, 194

Part III. The Spectacular and the Vanishing Body: Sports and Literature 7 First Steps-Theoretical and Practical Outlines and Perspectives, 225 Novel and Soccer Poetry, 233

225

More Examples: A Tennis

8 Symptoms: Exposed Flanks in Older Cultural Theories

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A Brutal Prelude and Its Implications, 239 Schiller: Conceptual Frictions and Cultural Discontinuities, 244 Marcuse: Aesthetics, Politics, and Atavisms, 253 Systems Theory against Itself, 259 Dance in Literature: The Poetry of the Body?, 263

9 Ecstasy, Violence, "Literature": Early Western Cultures and Codes of Vitality

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Situations and Context Switches: Greek Models, 274 Rome: Culture Complex, the Imaginary, and Sports Reporting, 278 Sequels: More of the Same, but More Complicated, 286 10 The Persistence of the Obsolete

Byron and the Romantic Denial of Romantic Maximations, 297 Literary Skating; Or, Culture as Compromise, 300 Nietzsche (Once More) and the Fusion of Plausibility and Nonsense, 314

Notes

323

Index

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297

Preface Eight Assumptions

In the long history of poetics and aesthetics, these two domains in the vague division of cognitive labor within the realm of culture have been troubled by conflicting demands. Concerned with the seeming uniqueness of making and experiencing art, they have tended to accommodate themselves to the apparent resistance to concepts that the objects of art display. At the same time, exposed to the pressures of systematic thought, of which they are themselves prime instances, they have tended to sacrifice specificities such as genetic and receptive particularities to overriding general, but also therefore narrowed-down, interests. In accommodating themselves to the resistance of art's objects, they are in danger of becoming superfluous. In imposing categories imported from elsewhere, whether epistemology or sociology, they are liable to transform themselves into service enterprises for disciplines remote from the sphere of art. While they certainly cannot do justice to what Adorno called, in his Aesthetic Theory, 1 the full aesthetic content of art, that term itself, in invoking domains of the unsayable or inexpressible, may deteriorate into a myth. That situation has a long, somewhat uninspiring, and discouraging history. The question today is whether Max Bense's demand for a "sensibility of theory" remains an open option, or whether theory must continue to hide its discontents with the habitual authoritarian gestures characterizing even the opponents of authoritarianism. For Bense, any aesthetics is a theory {although it is difficult, according to him, to say what a theory consists of) in which a concrete state of affairs has to be wrested "logically" from affective experiences without being damaged in the process. Even if one holds that modern art touches the mind, and not the emotions in the trivial sense, the touch must be described in terms of "spiritual excitement. " 2 The dilemma of theoretical sensibility consists in the pressure to re-

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main close to the empirical destinies of media and media clusters without ignoring underlying, more general regularities, without sacrificing the distancing, systematizing, sense-making legitimacy of theory itself. Is it possible to plunge into the accumulated pitfalls of aesthetic theory, to be trapped in their constructed histories, without being completely engulfed by them? Here, at the beginning of just such an undertaking, it should come as no surprise that the answer is in the affirmative, even though such an enterprise can no longer share the optimism that characterized the scene of literary studies, for instance, before the advent of deconstruction. 3 Theoretical purity-provided it ever existed-has become, especially in assertions that it is still possible, more of a liability than an asset. I am pursuing the "spiritual excitement" of a theoretical sensibility by a more rough and ready approach, seeking inspiration from-or rather, manhandling-theories as diverse as those of Hegel, Dewey, and Adorno. What I call "manhandling theories" is not deconstruction. Labels like "deconstruction" or "poststructuralism" play a small role in the concerns of this book. Instead, however much or little they may be explicitly quoted, the disiecta membra of existing aesthetic theories are pushed into directions suggested but not determined by anthropology and media theory, which themselves are more diverse enterprises than might perhaps be desirable. Writing, in particular writing of the type called critical, ineluctably carries theoretical implications. To look at histories of theoretical efforts, however, is to become aware that theory can no longer claim selfevident discursive priorities. Above all, the conceptual or other purity of theory and methodological orientations has been lost. It is doubtful whether, apart from certain periods and authors, it ever existed. Theoretical and analytical writing, then, inevitably will be manhandled, pulled in various directions. The present enterprise, devoted as it is to notions and media of emphatic, if ideologically suspect, experience, will have to suffer that fate with a vengeance. We "all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in theories, and act fatally on the strength of them." In the sentence, from book I, chapter 10 of George Eliot's Middlemarch, I have replaced "metaphors" by "theories." The replacement does not, of course, indicate any preference "against theory." It merely suggests that the status, the reach and range of theories, like that of intended statements of facts, emerges in configurations of argument. Theories are symptoms. Something-something we cannot reliably grasp-is always lurking behind or below them. Writing, then, produces sympto-

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matologies. It is goaded on by senses (the term is intentionally kept ambiguous) and feelings for the pertinence of theories (definitely in the plural) and the persistence of facts. Something resembling conceptual purity may emerge in the course of argument. It cannot "really" be established in the wake or as the consequence of initial definitions. But the contemporary situation of theory, as I see it, is such that it has become extremely difficult to decide which kinds of arguments are (in)compatible with which kind of theory. In the present context, theoretical remarks, especially those called "anthropological," will appear as more or less explicit afterthoughts in the wake of analyses informed, but perhaps not completely controlled, by what is called theory. Rumor has it, and reports keep pouring in, that the personal computer is replacing, or already has replaced, articles like teddy bears, manual toys in the old sense, baseball bats, soccer balls, or older types of writing and drawing utensils as preferred and paradigmatic transitional objects. If that is the case, as it may well be, the present work will find itself in a decidedly awkward situation. My position would somewhat, if not dramatically, improve if it turned out, as I think it will, that computers will not really be multimedia-capable because their potential for involving the body or powerful body codes remains insufficient. This book presumes that the rumors are not yet true and that they may never fully come true unless some biotechnological revolution concerning humans occurs. In any case, the book may strike many readers as wildly speculative and sometimes almost transcendental on the one hand, yet haphazardly and unprofessionally empirical on the other. Such impressions may occur because theories and their history must follow their own standards, must claim a considerable if only partial validity of their own. They construe their objects and yet they must be measured against an idea of what these objects, as one would have said in former times, are in themselves. We do not say so anymore, but we are still in the grip of the paradox involved. We are constructivists and yet do not want to accept any theoretically legitimate construction. This is why theories must be respected, but not necessarily in the closed form in which they and their history have been conventionally transmitted. Above, I have described this as the manhandling of theories. In this book, therefore, the speculative, theoretical, quasi-transcendental orientations may at times even seem to oddly merge with the empirical. The book may also seem to treat many of the theoretically and popularly current distinctions in the domain of the "arts" in cavalier fashion. Distinctions concerned with authenticity and consumerism, with high and popular or mass art, with so-

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ciological explanation or the criticism of ideology, all will receive short shrift, even if their relative validities are not at all called in question. Instead, my concerns point elsewhere. There are eight central assumptions underlying the following text. (r) The term "media," in spite of its fulsome fashionableness, is better suited than the traditional term "the arts" to suggest the direction of an inquiry into aesthetics. In the course of its conceptual and cultural history, the notion of "arts," from techne via ars and artes, has been subjected to specific interests and to a narrowing of its range. That development frequently culminated in the privileging of "high" and "higher" arts, which, in its turn, necessitated dubious compensatory conceptual compromises ("arts and crafts," "industrial arts," "applied arts," etc.). This is not to say, though, that the analysis of the arts in the narrower or higher sense does not frequently yield interesting results. (2) Cultures need media in order to provide engrossing, fascinating experiences, without which social and private life would become drab and its burdens overwhelmingly oppressive. This is not a unified systematic claim but an assertion that draws on variegated but persistent evidence in many theories directly or indirectly concerned with culture and/or human consciousness. We could think of Schiller's notion of play-play being necessary for a fully human existence, that existence, in its turn, being a prerequisite of culture. We could think about Nietzsche's distinction between an ordinary culture demanding adjustment and a culture, or rather cultural experience, lifting humans out of ordinary culture and history for a short while. Or we could think, in contemporary terms, about Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow and optimal experience with its combination of engrossment (concentration) and ease as an escape from boredom (and anxiety). Anthony Storr (a psychiatrist and a musicologist) has perhaps summed this up best when he criticized Freud for a lack of concepts and notions taking care of "stimulus hunger." Even systems theory, which does not grant a systematic place to persons within the machinery of social systems, somewhat grudgingly admits that there may be a need for more attractive forms of an "irritation" of human consciousness than those demanded by the systems themselves. All of this will be elaborated later on. (3) Experience consists in interactions, constructive and indeed constructivist enactments, with all kinds of situations and things. Experience, when it is aesthetic experience, is heightened-that is, aesthetically crystallized and refined-vitality. Again, as with the preceding assumption, various strands of traditional and contemporary thought provide

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heterogeneous but persistent evidence. One would, almost automatically, think of Bergson and his definition of the comic where mechanical procedures take possession of "le vivant." One might think of the whole and diverse, but mostly problematic, school of a philosophy of life ("Lebensphilosophie")-problematic mainly because it sought to locate the intensity of life in its presumptive immediacy and not in its aesthetic (and also more harmless) media enactments. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, has developed the crucial notion that the arts, that is, media, are the prime realizations of a partly spiritualized human vitality, that human beings convey the impression of being fully, perhaps radiantly alive more in art than in life itself. In so-called life, some deficiency will always jump forward and mar that impression. More radically, Nietzsche declared that the world and existence could only be justified as aesthetic phenomena. In a more sober vein, the pragmatist Dewey saw the need for a transition from the ordinary to the fully human being. The assumption then is that heightened vitality comes into play when enactments take place in or are intimately connected with and shaped by media. Consequently, the media of aesthetic experience extend throughout the realm of everyday life. Only in pure, or only seemingly pure, form ("literature" or some forms of "absolute" music and painting are perhaps the most conspicuous examples) do media represent forms of an extremely specialized, "merely aesthetic" experience. In spite of its concern with the concept of media, this book makes little attempt at defining what a medium is or what the media are. As a kind of orientation, however, I would suggest that a medium, or mediality, or often intermediality, and with them some heightened mode of experience emerge when an ordinary process of life changes direction for some reason, when elements of some kind of "staging" come into play, and when that enactment gains some kind of formal or material-technical stability! All of this can happen very easily within everyday life; all of this can also be extended and rarefied into the most remote realms of art To put it another way, in the pages that follow, it is John Dewey's way of relating experience and art (and in the wider sense media) that functions as a background to be taken more or less for granted. In discussing Dewey's aesthetics, Richard Shusterman has emphasized the position that will be assumed as a given here: That aesthetic experience extends beyond the historically established practice of art should be obvious. It exists, first of all, in the appreciation of nature, not least that part of nature which is the animate human body. But we also find it in ritual and sports, in parades, fireworks, and the media of

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popular culture, in bodily and domestic ornamentation, from primitive tattoos and cave drawings to contemporary cosmetics and interior decorating, and indeed in the countless colorful scenes and moving events which fill our cities and enrich our ordinary lives. 5

Clearly, in thus extending the range of aesthetic phenomena, the concept of media may easily get out of control. To regain control, the present book will try to limit the range by looking at culturally attractive media to which neither the status of art nor some kind of remarkable empirical success has normally been denied. In the third part, this will take the form of an investigation into the concerns that a culturally canonized, often elitist and spiritual or intellectual form of art (literature) has entertained with respect to a commercialized (and also in other respects very problematic) mass phenomenon of physical culture (sport). In all of these cases, Dewey remains helpful because he seized the duality of involvement, in the more active performative enactment and the more passive experience, in a paradigmatic fashion. Human beings, then, come most fully alive when there is a coalescence between a biologically grounded but heightened vitality and a spiritualized "detachment" or "disinterestedness." 6 This merger in the layers of involvement translates into a crucial distinction between a "work" and a (mere) "product" of art and into a privileging of the former over the latter: When we say that tennis-playing, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way of saying that there is art in the conduct of these activities, and that this art so qualifies what is done and made as to induce activities in those who perceive them in which there is also art. The product of art-temple, painting, statue, poem-is not the work of art. 7

If, like Dewey, we insist on the continuities between everyday and aesthetic experiences, even if the cultures and discourses that appear to have held sway for a while seem to argue in the opposite direction, rankings of higher and lower, "ethereal" and technological arts or media are "ultimately, out of place and stupid," as he puts it. Distinctions must be made, but they cannot be made in the manner of Kant and his implicit or explicit disciples: Kant was "a pastmaster in first drawing distinctions and then erecting them into compartmental divisions." 8 This is one pitfall of theory we will endeavor to avoid here. The question looming and lingering in Dewey's aesthetics, but not really coming to the foreground, however, is one of culturally and therefore also personally significant and attractive media configurations. A

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product of art may consist in the single text or other isolated aesthetic object we encounter. If it is to turn into a work of art, demanding and procuring a broader range of personal involvement, it must embody, contain, or suggest a broader range of appeals. These may be provided by artistic techniques, by topics treated or subjects symbolized. But they will also reside in what the term "media" also and prominently refers to: the material and performative aspects of works that facilitate and often initiate involvement. I am thus extracting a position from Dewey that he himself did not openly embrace: that histories of the single arts are not or are no longer possible. If that is so, certain notions of culture will also crumble. They will be destabilized especially in those cases (frequent in the West) in which culturally relevant levels of aesthetic organization are mainly derived, implicitly or explicitly, from "literature" in the sense normally taken for granted, but not at all firmly established before the nineteenth century. It is the nineteenth century that came to elevate "imaginative" literature in the shape of the printed book into the paradigmatically precious vessel of (mostly national) cultures. 9 If literature is relativized, it is also restabilized in a shrunken but wellnigh ineluctable cultural-aesthetic niche. This means that a central theoretical problem of media theory must remain open: the question how media may balance the easily conflicting demands of challenging complexity (tending often, but not necessarily, toward elitism or "monomedia" specialization) and simplistic ("popular," mass) appeal in which, behind the facile excitement, boredom looms large. If one looks at the broader range of cultural phenomena, one will normally see that the purification and "spiritualization" of media configurations into single media is paid for culturally by grosser developments on other fronts. Thus, the highly differentiated segmentary Western cultures have to grapple with forms of violence that one would have liked to think banished into the museum of evolutionary archaisms. (4) Media tend to show up most often in the form of at least implicit or hidden combinations: in "intermediality," hybridization, in McLuhan's sense. 10 In saying this, I am restating in somewhat fashionable European terms what I tried to extract from Dewey above. I am also revitalizing what an older European tradition tried to analyze as the mutual illumination of the arts. McLuhan, though, has put this in a forceful way that has not at all received the attention it deserves, more than ever, in this so-called "multimedia" age. "The crossings or hybridizations of the media," he says, "release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion .... The

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fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages. " 11 While the etymology of the term "aesthetic" cannot be preserved in any seemingly pure form across the centuries, its central component-the arousal of the senses-remains a central issue for an anthropology of media. In emphasizing intermedia enactments, the notion of "experience" thus is decoupled from older concerns about its authenticity, artificiality, and the like, and instead it is the dynamics and the range of its "aesthetic" dimensions that come to the forefront. For example, if we drop Hegel's notions of Absolute Spirit, infinity, and freedom, we see that his criticism of terms like "arousal" as philosophically insufficient breaks down. 12 When it does, questions about "dramatic liveliness" (in painting, for instance), an "idealism of life" and its media, the "ideality" of the "animation" of the parts of an organism, or the animation of universal ideality, the appearance and display of the "living soul" in motion, all these assert themselves powerfully. Walter Schulz appropriately denies, therefore, that Hegel presents what he is usually thought to offer: an aesthetics of contents (Gehaltsasthetik). The "contents" are instead so multifarious that only "regional" distinctions, for instance between crafts, techn( olog)ical, and fine arts, are possible. 13 (5) Although modes of strong experience and fascination occur in what could be said to be "cultural" forms, an inquiry into aesthetics can best be pursued from a point of view that could be characterized as "anthropological." Using this highly and variably charged term, I have to say immediately what it does not mean. Anthropology does not mean ethnography practiced, especially in the United States, in the wake of Franz Boas, A. L. Kroeber et al. Although forms of cultural comparison will occur in this book, they are supposed to steer clear of the imperialistexoticist mixtures that have all too often beset or supposedly been exorcized from ethnography. While the present book will betray a certain Eurocentric bias, that bias is strictly intended as operational, not ideological. To a far greater extent than the movement called deconstruction was aware of, the deconstruction of European ideologies is built into these ideologies themselves. Furthermore, anthropology here is not to be identified with the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the evolutionary anthropology of, say, William H. Durham. 14 They, as well as much of what is commonly called cultural anthropology, are concerned with formal structures of social exchange and interaction or systems of information inheritance, with secondary values that do not stem from individual experience, but rather from social conventions and social history, like marriage rules or rules by which the reproductive inter-

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ests of a household are governed or even the cultural evolution of basic color terms-not with the ways and especially the media in which persons, through cultural mediation, organize their most gripping experiences. The descent, the dilemma, and the distinction of the anthropological mode of thought I would like to practice can be traced to Kant and, from there, down to the "pragmatic" forms of anthropology of people like Helmuth Plessner or Arnold Gehlen. Kant felt obliged to write an anthropology "in pragmatic respect" because a lot of important human matters could not be squeezed into the transcendentalist systems of the three critiques. (Incidentally, Kant's effect as an academic teacher and his public reputation were based on his anthropological lectures, which he gave for thirty years, not on the critiques.' 5 ) These matters were mainly concerned with how persons, as free agents and through civilizing, moralizing procedures plus various modes of mental and other cultivation, could transform themselves into reasonable human-that is fully humane-beings. Even if such approaches, from Kant in 1798 to Gernot Bohme in 198 5, do not really presuppose a substantial or constant human nature, they remain tied to speculations about substantial aspects (like childhood, birth and death, sexuality, body, work, etc.-see Bohme's chapter titles). When focusing on such issues, isolating them as topics, one tends to invest them, in spite of the serenity of Bohme's "oblique" anthropology (cf. Chapter 19), with a kind of existential(ist) tinge. On the other hand, the impulses to be derived, for instance, from Bohme's work (and the book written with his brother Hartmut on Kant) are too manifold and too strong to be neglected. In the present work, then, the existential tinge is transformed into questions of human selfenactment in and through culturally significant media. At this point, though, some approaches in (what I would like to count amongst) American anthropology come in very strongly. One must mention, I suppose, Victor Turner and the work of those who, like Richard Schechner, have used Turner's mode of thought for the analysis of theatrical enactments in both the ordinary and broader senses. In such a way, the anthropological approach will also connect to older forms of media theory, that is, aesthetics. Experiences take place on predominantly biological-physiological, emotional, and cognitive levels of awareness. They are less concerned with the highly variable codes ruling consciousness. Thus, the human body is indeed an anthropological referent. But it has no meaning or significance in itself. Rather, the continuous presence of changing and culturally variable body constructs is an anthropological symptom steadily

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transformed into problematic sense or, more germane to my purposes, into attractive scenes. Historically, this means that there are very different shifts in media development that are hidden by the usual histories and theories of the "arts." This is why, for instance, relations between sports and literature, far apart as they appear, will play a major role in this book. The relative interchangeability and equivalence of what seem to be highly heterogeneous media tend to become clearer when one looks, interculturally, as it were, at the relative position of similar media in different cultures or at identical functions of different media in different cultures. This does not mean that "plus