If there is
such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is
something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by
raising the question: what is literature? There have been various attempts to
define literature. You can define it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in
the sense of fiction -writing which is not literally true. But even the
briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of
literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth- century English
literature includes Shakespeare, Webster , Marvell and Milton; but it also
stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's
spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might
even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History
of the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with
Comeille and Racine, La Rochefoucauld's maxims, Bossuet's funeral speeches,
Boileau's treatise on poetry, Madame de Sevigne's letters to her daughter and
the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature
usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but
not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction'; then, seems unlikely to get
us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable
one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between
'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic
sagas. l In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the
word 'novel' seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and
even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports
were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our o~ sharp
discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no
doubt thought that he was writing historical truth, and so perhaps did
the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as' fact' by some and 'fiction'
by others; Newman; certainly thought his theological meditations were true, but
they are now for many readers 'literature' .Moreover, if 'literature includes
much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic
and Mills and Boon novels are fiction but not generally regarded as literature,
and certainly not Literature. If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginative'
writing does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science a
uncreative and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps
literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or
'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory,
literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic
Roman Jacobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary
speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at bus stop
and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness' then I am instantly aware
that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture,
rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstract able meaning
-or as the linguists might more technically put it, there is disproportion
between the signifies and the signifies Your language draws attention to
itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know
the drivers are on strike?' do not.
This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the
Russian formalists, who included in their ranks Viktor Sh1ovsky, Roman
Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky. The
Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution,
and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by
Stalinism. A militant, polemical group of critics: they rejected the
quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines which had influenced literary
criticism before them, and in a practical, scientific spirit shifted attention
to the material reality of the literary text itself. Criticism should
dissociate art from mystery and concern itself with how literary texts actually
worked. Literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a
particular organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures
and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to
something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection
of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth. it was a
material fact, whose functioning could be analyzed rather as one could examine
a machine. It was made of words, not of objects or feelings, and it was a
mistake to see it as the expression of an author's mind. Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin
had not lived.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of
literature; and because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind,
concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might
actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content'
(where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study
of literary form. Far from seeing form as the expression of content, they stood
the relationship on its head: content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an
occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote
is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for
holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the
Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would
simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. It was
this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name
from their antagonists; and though they did not deny that art had a relation to
social reality -indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks
-they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business.
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less
arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as
interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 'Devices'
included sound, imagery , rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques,
in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these
elements had in common was their 'estrangement?;' or 'defamiliarizing' effect.
What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms
of discourse, was that it deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under
the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed,
twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language 'made
strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was also
suddenly made unfamiliar. In he routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of
and responses to reality become stale, blunted, or, as the Formalists would
say, 'automatized'. Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of
language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more
'perceptible'. By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous,
self-conscious way than usual, the world which that language contains is
vividly renewed. The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins might provide a
particularly graphic example of this. Literary discourse 'estranges or
alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a
fuller, more intimate possession of experience. Most of the time we breathe in
air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in
which we move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we are forced
to attend to our breathing with new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a
heightened experience of our bodily life, we read a scribbled note from a
friend without paying much attention to its narrative structure; but if a story
breaks off and begins again, switches constantly from one narrative level to
another and delays its climax to keep us in suspense, we become freshly
conscious of how it is constructed at the same time as our engagement with it
may be intensified. The story, as the Formalists would argue, uses impeding' or
'retarding' devices to hold our attention; and in literary language, these
devices are laid bare'. It was this which moved Viktor Shlovsky to remark
mischievously of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a novel which impedes its
own story-line so much that it hardly gets off he ground, that it was 'the most
typical novel in world literature' .
The Formalists, then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from
a norm, a kind of linguistic violence: literature is a special' kind of
language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language ve commonly use. But to spot a
deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it swerves. Though
'ordinary language' is a concept beloved of some Oxford philosophers, the
ordinary language of Oxford philosophers has little in common with the ordinary
language of Glaswegian dockers. The language both social groups use to write
love letters usually differs from the way they talk to the local vicar. The
idea that there s a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally
)y all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a
highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region,
gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a
single, homogeneous linguistic community. One person's norm may be another's
deviation: 'ginnel' for 'alleyway' may be poetic in Brighton but ordinary
language in Barnsley. Even the most 'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may
sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were to stumble
across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we
could not tell whether it was 'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we
might have no access to that society's 'ordinary' discourses; and even if
further research were to reveal that it was 'deviatory', this would still not
prove that it was poetry as not all linguistic deviations are poetic. Slang,
for example. We would not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not
a piece of 'realist' literature, without much more information about the way it
actually functioned as a piece of writing within the society in question.
It is not that the Russian Formalists did not realize all this. They
recognized that norms and deviations shifted around from one social or
historical context to another -that 'poetry. in this sense depends on where you
happen to be standing at the time. The fact that a piece of language was
'estranging' did not guarantee that it was always and everywhere so: it was
estranging only against a certain normative linguistic background, and if this
altered then the writing might cease to be perceptible as literary. If everyone
used phrases like 'unravished bride of quietness' in ordinary pub conversation,
this kind of language might cease to be poetic. For the Formalists, in other
words, 'literariness' was a function of the differential relations between one
sort of discourse and another; it was not an eternally given property. They
were not out to define 'literature', but 'literariness' -special uses of
language, which could be found in 'literary' texts but also in many places
outside them. Anyone who believes that 'literature' can be defined by such
special uses of language has to face the fact that there is more metaphor in
Manchester than there is in Marvell. There is no 'literary' device -metonymy,
synecdoche, litotes, chiasmus and so on -which is not quite intensively used in
daily discourse.
Nevertheless, the Formalists still presumed that 'making strange' was
the essence of the literary. It was just that they relativized this use of
language, saw it as a matter of contrast between one type of speech and another.
But what if I were to hear someone at the next pub table remark 'This is
awfully squiggly handwriting!' Is this 'literary' or 'non-literary'
language? As a matter of fact, it is 'literary' language because it
comes from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger. But how do I know that it is literary?
It doesn't, after all, focus any particular attention on itself as a verbal
performance. One answer to the question of how I know that this is literary is
that it comes from Knit Hamsun's novel Hunger. It is part of a text which I
read as 'fictional', which announces itself as a 'novel', which may be put on
university literature syllabuses and so on. The context tells me that it is
literary; but the language itself has no inherent proper- ties or qualities
which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse, and someone might
well say this in a pub without being admired for their literary dexterity. To
think of literature as the Formalists do is really to think of all literature
as poetry. Significantly, when the Formalists came to consider prose writing,
they often simply extended to it the kinds of technique they had used
with poetry. But literature is usually judged o contain much besides poetry -to
include, for example, realist or naturalistic writing which is not linguistically
self-conscious or self-exhibiting in any striking way. People sometimes call
writing 'fine' precisely because it doesn't draw undue attention to itself:
they admire its laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety . And what about jokes,
football chants and slogans, newspaper headlines, advertisements, which are
often verbally flamboyant but not generally classified as literature?
Another problem with the 'estrangement' case is that there is no kind of
writing which cannot, given sufficient ingenuity, be read as estranging.
Consider a prosaic, quite unambiguous statement like the one sometimes seen in
the London underground system: 'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.' This is
not perhaps quite as unambiguous as it seems at first sight: does it mean that
you must carry a dog on the escalator? are you likely to be banned from the
escalator unless you can find some stray mongrel to clutch in your arms on the
way up? Many apparently straightforward notices contain such ambiguities:
'Refuse to be put in this basket,' for instance, or the British road-sign 'Way
Out' as read by a Californian. But even leaving such troubling ambiguities
aside, it is surely obvious that the underground notice could be read as
literature. One could let oneself be arrested by the abrupt, minatory staccato
of the first ponderous monosyllables; find one's mind drifting, by the time it
had reached the rich allusiveness of 'carried', to suggestive resonances of
helping lame dogs through life; and perhaps even detect in the very lilt and
inflection of the word 'escalator' a miming of the rolling, up-and-down motion
of the thing itself. This may well be a fruitless sort of pursuit, but it is
NOT significantly more fruitless than claiming to hear the cut and thrust of
the rapiers in some poetic description of a duel, and at least has the
advantage of suggesting that 'literature' may be at least as much a question of
what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.
But even if someone were to read the notice in this way, it would still
be a matter of reading it as poetry, which is only part of what is usually
included in literature. Let us therefore consider another way of 'misreading'
the sign which might move us a little beyond this. Imagine a late-night drunk
doubled over the escalator handrail who reads the notice with laborious
attentiveness for several minutes and then mutters to himself 'How rude!' What
kind of mistake is occurring here? What the drunk is doing, in fact, is taking
the sign as some statement of general, even cosmic significance. By applying
certain conventions of reading to its words, he prises them loose from their
immediate context and generalizes them beyond their pragmatic purpose to
something of wider and probably deeper import. This would certainly seem to be
one operation involved in what people call literature. When the poet tells us
that his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that he puts
this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask whether he actually had
a lover, who for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is
telling us something about women and love in general. Literature, then, we
might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks and notes to
the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as
referring to , general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it ma'
employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious - to signal that
what is at stake is a way of talking about a woman rather than any particular
real-life woman. This focusing on tho way of talking, rather than on the
reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by
literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks
about itself.
There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too.
For one thing, it would probably have come as a surprise to George Orwell to
hear that his essays were to be read as though the topics he discussed were
less important than the way he discussed them. In much that is classified as
literature the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is
considered important to the overall effect But even if treating discourse
'non-pragmatically' is part of what is meant by literature', then it follows
from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be 'objectively' defined.
It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not
to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing -poems,
plays, novels -which are fairly obviously intended to be 'non- pragmatic' in
this sense, but this does not guarantee that they will actually be read in this
way. I might well read Gibbon's account of the Roman empire not because I am
misguided enough to believe that it will be reliably informative about ancient
Rome but because I enjoy Gibbon's prose style, or revel in images of human
corruption whatever their historical source. But I might read Robert Burns's
poem because it is not clear to me, as a Japanese horticulturalist,
whether or not the red rose flourished in eighteenth-century Britain. This, it
will be said, is not reading it 'as literature'; but am I reading Orwell's
essays as literature only if I generalize what he says about the Spanish civil
war to some cosmic utterance about human life? It is true that many of the
works studied as literature in academic institutions were 'constructed' to be
read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of
writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked
as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for
its archaeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve
literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in this
respect may count for a good deal more than birth. What matters may not be
where you came from but how people treat you. If they decide that you are
literature then it seems that you are, irrespective of what you thought you
were.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality
or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from
Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate
themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been
variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact
it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing
feature which all games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature
whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is what
reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read
'poetically'. If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train
connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and
complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as
literature. John M. Ellis has argued that the term 'literature' operates rather
like the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any
kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around.
3 Perhaps 'literature' means something like the opposite: any kind of writing
which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers
might say, 'literature' and "weed' are functional rather than ontological
terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They
tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its
relations with and differences from its surroundings, the ways it behaves, the
purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.
'Literature' is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition. Even
if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic treatment of language, we have still not
arrived at an 'essence' of literature because this is also so of other
linguistic practices such as jokes. In any case, it is far from clear that we
can discriminate neatly between 'practical' and 'non-practical' ways of relating
ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs from
reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook
to improve your mind? Is that a 'pragmatic' treatment of language or not? In
many societies, 'literature' has served highly practical functions such as
religious ones; distinguishing sharply between 'practical' and 'non- practical'
may only be possible in a society like ours, where literature has ceased to
have much practical function at all. We may be offering as a general definition
a sense of the 'literary' which is in fact historically specific.
We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and
Mill are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin.
Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine
writing', whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of
being largely untrue, at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of
suggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think
is good. An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there
would be no such thing as 'bad literature' .I may consider Lamb and Macaulay
overrated, but that does not necessarily mean that I stop regarding them as
literature. You may consider Raymond Chandler 'good of his kind', but not
exactly literature. On the other hand, if Macaulay were a really bad writer -if
he had no grasp at all of grammar and seemed interested in nothing but white
mice - then people might well not call his work literature at all, even bad
literature. Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what
is judged literature and what isn't -not necessarily in the sense that writing
has to be 'fine' to be literary , but that it has to be of the kind that is
judged fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode. Nobody
would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature,
but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term 'fine
writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of
writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily committing
you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.
With this reservation, 'the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly
valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly
devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the
illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being
eternally given and immutable. If anything can be literature, and anything
which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature -Shakespeare,
for example--can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of
literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is
the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction are
literature and some are not; some literature is fictional and some is not; some
literature is verbally self-regarding, while some highly-wrought rhetoric is
not literature. Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and
unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does
not exist. When I use the words 'literary' and literature' from here on in this
book, then, I place them under m invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that
these terms will not really do but that we have no better ones at the moment.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly
valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgements are
notoriously variable. 'Times change, values don't,' announces an advertisement
for a daily newspaper, as
though we still believed in killing off infirm infants or putting the mentally
ill on public show. Just as people may treat a work as philosophy in one
century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their
minds about what writing they consider valuable. They may even change
their minds about the sounds they use for judging what is valuable and what is
not. This, as I have suggested, does not necessarily mean that they will refuse
the title of literature to a work which they have come to deem inferior: they
may still call it literature, meaning roughly that it belongs to the type of
writing which they generally value. But it does mean that the so-called
'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the 'national
literature', has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular
people for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a
literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what
anyone might have said or come to say about it. 'Value' is a transitive term:
it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according
to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite
possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history , we may in
the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare.
His works might simply seem desperately alien, full of styles of thought and
feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a situation,
Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. And
though many people would consider such a social condition tragically
impoverished, it seems to me dogmatic not to entertain the possibility that it
might arise rather from a general human enrichment. Karl Marx was troubled -by
the question of why ancient Greek art retained an 'eternal charm', even though
the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know
that it will remain 'eternally' charming, since history has not yet ended? Let
us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a
great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original
audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and
began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One
result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had
enjoyed then previously because we were unwittingly reading them in thc light
of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible the drama might cease
to speak at all significantly to us.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the
light of our own concerns -indeed that in one sense o 'our own concerns' we are
incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of
literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of
course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but i may
also be that people have not actually been valuing the 'same' work at all, even
though they may think they have. 'Our Homer is not identical with the Homer of
the Middle Ages, no 'our' Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is
rather that different historical periods have constructed a 'different Homer
and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to
value or devalue, though, not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in
other words, are 'rewritten' if only unconsciously, by the societies which read
them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No
work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of
people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process;
and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable
affair .
I do not mean that it is unstable because value-judgement are
'subjective' .According to this view , the world is divided between solid facts
'out there' like Grand Central station, and arbitrary value-judgements 'in
here' such as liking bananas or feeling that the tone of a Yeats poem veers
from defensive hectoring to grimly resilient resignation. Facts are public and
impeachable, values are private and gratuitous. There is an obvious difference
between recounting a fact, such as 'This cathedral was built in 1612,' and registering
a value-judgement, 1 as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque
architecture.' But suppose I made the first kind of statement while Ning an
overseas visitor around England, and found that it puzzled her considerably.
Why, she might ask, do you keep telling me the dates of the foundation of all
these buildings? Why obsession with origins? In the society I live in, she
might go we keep no record at all of such events: we classify our buildings
instead according to whether they face north-west or :h-east. What this might
do would be to demonstrate part of the unconscious system of value-judgements
which underlies my own descriptive statements. Such value-judgements are
not necessarily of the same kind as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen
of baroque architecture,' but they are value- judgements nonetheless, and no
factual pronouncement I make can escape them. Statements of fact are after all
statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those
statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others,
that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to
guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to,
that something useful will be accomplished by making them, and so on. A pub
conversation may well transmit information, but what also bulks large in such
dialogue is a strong element of what linguists would call the 'phatic', a
concern with the act of communication itself. In chatting to you about the
weather I am also signaling that I regard conversation with you as valuable,
that I consider you a worthwhile person to talk to, that I am not myself
anti-social or about to embark on a detailed critique of your personal
appearance.
In this sense, there is no possibility of a wholly disinterested
statement. Of course stating when a cathedral was built is reckoned to be more
disinterested in our own culture than passing an opinion about its
architecture, but one could also imagine situations in which the former
statement would be more 'value-laden' than the latter. Perhaps 'baroque' and
'magnificent' have come to be more or less synonymous, whereas only a stubborn
rump of us cling to the belief that the date when a building was founded is
significant, and my statement is taken as a coded way of signaling this
partisanship. All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible
network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have
nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something
called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests
and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without
particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not
see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive
of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that
knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.
It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter,
though this is in fact questionable. A thorough analysis of my tastes in food
would probably reveal how deeply relevant they are to certain formative
experiences in early childhood, to my relations with my parents and siblings
and to a good many other cultural factors which are quite as social and 'non-
subjective' as railway stations. This is even more true of that fundamental
structure of beliefs and interests which I am born into as a member of a
particular society, such as the belief that I should try to keep in good
health, that differences of sexual role are rooted in human biology or that
human beings are more important than crocodiles. We may disagree on this or
that, but we can only do so because we share certain 'deep' ways of
seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life, and which
could not be changed without transforming that life. Nobody will penalize me
heavily if I dislike a particular Donne poem, but if I argue that Donne is not
literature at all then in certain circumstances I might risk losing my job. I
am free to vote Labour or Conservative, but if I try to act on the belief that
this choice itself merely masks a deeper prejudice -the prejudice that the
meaning of democracy is confined to putting a cross on a ballot paper every few
years -then in certain unusual circumstances I might end up in prison.
The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies
our factual statements is part of what is meant by 'ideology'. By 'ideology' I
mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the
power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in. It follows from
such a rough definition of ideology that not all of our underlying judgements
and categories can usefully be said to be ideological. It is deeply ingrained
in us to imagine ourselves moving forwards into the future ( at least one other
society sees itself as moving backwards into it), but though this way of seeing
may connect significantly with the power-structure of our society, it need not
always and everywhere do so. I do not mean. by 'ideology' simply the deeply
entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more
particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which
have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.
The fact that such beliefs are by no means merely private quirks may be
illustrated by a literary example.
In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I.
A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary
value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a set of poems,
withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking them to
evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable:
time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated. To my
mind, however, the most interesting aspect of this project, and one
apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how tight a consensus
of unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of opinion.
Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works one is struck by
the habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share -what
they expect literature to be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what
fulfillments they anticipate they will derive from it. None of this is really
surprising: for all the participants in this experiment were, presumably,
young, white, upper- or upper middle- class, privately educated English people
of the 1920s, and how they responded to a poem depended on a good deal more
than purely 'literary' factors. Their critical responses were deeply entwined
with their broader prejudices and beliefs. This is not a matter of blame: there
is no critical response which is not so entwined, and thus no such thing as a
'pure' literary critical judgement or interpretation. If anybody is to be
blamed it is I. A. Richards himself, who as a young, white, upper-middle-class
male Cambridge don was unable to objectify a context of interests which he
himself largely shared, and was thus unable to recognize fully that local,
'subjective' differences of evaluation work within a particular, socially
structured way of perceiving the world.
If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive
category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people
whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical
about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures
of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building.
What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist
in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is
constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements
themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end
not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups
exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion,
a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of
'literature' in England.
