Literature

Literature

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LITERATURE
What was ‘Literature’ and what is ‘the literary’?
This introductory volume provides an accessible overview of
the history of ‘Literature’ as a cultural concept, and reflects on
the contemporary nature, place and function of what ‘the liter-
ary’ might mean for us today. This volume:
• offers a concise history of the canonic concept of ‘literature’
from its earliest origins
• illustrates the kinds of theoretical issues which are currently
invoked by the term ‘literary’
• promotes the potential ‘uses of the literary’ within a millen-
nial culture.
With Literature Peter Widdowson provides a thought-
provoking essay on the contemporary relevance of ‘the liter-
ary’ for students.
Peter Widdowson is Professor of Literature at Cheltenham and
Gloucester College of Higher Education. He edited Re-
Reading English, and is the author of books on Thomas
Hardy, E.M.Forster and contemporary literary theory.

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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF
STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory
guides to today’s critical terminology. Each book:
• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and
abuse) of the term
• offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading
literary and cultural critic
• relates the term to the larger field of cultural
representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest
possible breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an
indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies.
• See below for new books in this series.
Colonialism/Post colonialism by Ania Loomba
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton

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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM iii
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Metre, Rhythm and Verse by Philip Hobsbaum
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford

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LITERATURE
Peter Widdowson
LONDON AND NEW YORK

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First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1999 Peter Widdowson
The right of Peter Widdowson to be identified as the Author
of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Widdowson, Peter.
Literature/Peter Widdowson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature. I. Title.
PN45.W463 1999
809–dc21 98–35341
CIP
ISBN 0-203-16943-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26494-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-16914-3 (Print Edition) (Pbk)
ISBN 0-415-16913-5 (Print Edition) (Hbk)

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In memory of Brian Doyle

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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
x
1 What is‘Literature’?Some (non-)definitions
1
2 What has ‘Literature’ been? A history of the concept,
Part One: Origins to Orthodoxies
26
3 What has happened to ‘Literature’? A history of the
concept, Part Two: After the 1960s
64
4 What is ‘the literary’?
94
5 The uses of ‘the literary’ Newstories
131
6 Watch this space
209
NOTES
211
REFERENCES
217

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In a book like the present one, it would be surprising if there
were not some borrowing from other writings by the same
hand; and although it is more than faintly narcissistic to
acknowledge one’s own work, I hasten to reassure the reader
that I only do so here on behalf of those who elected to pub-
lish it in the first place. So: anyone who might remember an
essay entitled ‘History and Literary “Value”: Adam Bede and
Salem Chapel’, by myself, Paul Stigant and Peter Brooker in
Literature and History (5:1, Spring 1979; also reprinted in
Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson (eds) Popular
Fictions: Essays in Literature and History, London: Methuen,
1986) would find that part of Chapter 5 on Adam Bede here
mildly familiar. Equally, those who have read the first chapter
on ‘New Criticism, moral formalism and F.R.Leavis’, plus bits
of others, in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary The-
ory, 4/e (Selden/Widdowson/Brooker, Hemel Hempstead:
Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997) will hear echoes of
them in Chapters 2 and 3. Readers who have glanced at my
introductory essay to the ‘New Casebooks’ volume on Tess of
the d’Urbervilles (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993; also
reprinted in Charles C.Pettit (ed.) New Perspectives on

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), and in my
own collection, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)) will recognise the section on
‘moments of vision’ in Chapter 4. Otherwise, all will be
relieved to hear, there is barely a mention of Thomas Hardy
and none of my work on him. Sections on Raymond Williams
in Chapters 4 and 5 first saw the light of day, in rather differ-
ent form, as ‘The Creation of a Past’ in the Times Higher
Educational Supplement, (30/11/90, pp. 11, 18), and in the
essay ‘Newstories: Fiction, History and the Modern World’ in
Critical Survey (7:1, 1995:3–17), while the latter also contains
a more extended version of the passage on Graham Swift’s
novel, Out of this World, in Chapter 5. A version of Chapter 4
was given as the ‘Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture’ at the
University of Cambridge in February 1998. My intellectual
debt to Williams’s work, and to that of Terry Eagleton, is
everwhere apparent in the book that follows.
I have dedicated Literature to Brian Doyle, whose untimely
death in 1997 was keenly felt by all who knew him. From the
start, as a ‘mature’ undergraduate at Thames Polytechnic, Lon-
don, in the late 1970s, Brian retained a healthy disrespect for
‘Literature’, and I am sure he would have relished the irony of
having a book so entitled dedicated to his memory. I have indi-
cated my debt to his own work in the endnotes to this volume.
Another debt of gratitude goes to all my ‘English’ colleagues at
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education: for
putting up with me and it, for telling me what I should read,
and for their unfailing good humour and support. Two col-
leagues must be singled out for special thanks, however: Syed
Manzurul Islam, who read and made his usual penetrating
comments on an earlier draft of the whole book, and Simon
Dentith, who did the same, and without whose daily encour-
agement, stringent criticism and rollicking badinage the writ-
ing of it would have been a greyer task. Thanks, too, to a new

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xii LITERATURE
friend, Professor Regenia Gagnier of Exeter University, who
read and advised on the American elements, in particular, of
Chapters 2 and 3, and, of course, to John Drakakis, general
editor of the ‘New Critical Idiom’ series, for his endless
encouragement, light but sure touch as editor, and for curing
me—more or less—of my fixation with the parenthetical dash.
Finally, as always, thanks and love to Jane and Tom, for
whom, over many months, the repeated use of the phrase ‘my
little book on Literature’ must have sounded the knell of all
Sense and Sociability.

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1
WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’?
Some (non-)definitions
As I face the part-daunting, part-comical prospect of writing a
short book on the vast topic of ‘Literature’, I am reminded of
my favourite film-title: Mel Brookes’s A History of the World,
Part One. So much literature has been produced world-wide
over such a long period of time, and—all the more worrying—
so much has been written about it, that knowing where to
start, where to end, and what might go in between, could lead
to the book never progressing beyond these preliminary mus-
ings. A very short book, indeed, then! But a clue is provided
here: it is to be a short book, and so, in the nature of things, it
can only do certain things and only be of a certain kind. For
one thing, it cannot be a big book—with all the promise of
authority and definitiveness that big books tend to convey. I
would prefer to think of the present study as an essay: at once
a composition of limited length and all of a piece, and—as the
dictionary also glosses it—an ‘attempt’, a ‘try’, a ‘tentative
effort’—to define, not ‘what literature is’, but what it might
mean, provisionally and tentatively, for us on the cusp of the
millenium.
So, first of all and according to convention in Introductions,
let me say what this essay is not. It does not attempt to survey
1

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2 LITERATURE
or engage with the voluminous, aesthetics-driven ‘What is Lit-
erature?’ debate. The very formulation of the question suggests
a way of conceptualising literature which runs entirely counter
to my project here. Neither can it be a history of literature (not
even ‘Part One’) of the Homer to Heller variety, nor a literary-
critical/theoretical history of its protean definitions over the
centuries (Plato to Foucault)—although a succinct historical
account of the changing notion of the term ‘literature’ will be
offered as part of the overall argument. Rather, the essay is
principally conceived as a reflection on the contemporary
nature, place and function, within general cultural production,
of what, for now, I will go on calling literature, but will prefer
to designate the domain of ‘the literary’.
By the late-twentieth century, ‘literature’, as a concept and
as a term, has become so problematical—either through ideo-
logical contamination as the high cultural ‘Canon’, or, con-
versely, through demystification and deconstruction by radical
critical theory—that it approaches the unuseable, at least with-
out contorted apologetics. Perhaps the only way to represent
it, as passé presence or determinate absence, is ‘under erasure’,
thus:
. For what has gone on, and continues to go
on, in its sullied name, and under its tattered banner, appears
to remain such a crucial component of human activity and
experience that it suggests the need to be rescued from itself: to
be re-accredited—rather than shamefacedly subsumed, as has
recently been the case, within general concepts of ‘writing’,
‘rhetoric’, ‘discourse’ or ‘cultural production’. Hence, I agree
with Terry Eagleton when he writes: ‘Literature must indeed
be re-situated within the field of general cultural production;
but each mode of such production demands a semiology of its
own, which is not conflatable with some universal “cultural”
discourse’ (Eagleton [1976] 1978:166).
Let me begin by looking in some detail, in the contemporary
context, at the word ‘literature’ itself. If nothing else, this will

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 3
offer us what I have awkwardly called ‘Some (non-)definitions’
with which to problematise the heavily naturalised term as it
appears in current usage and common parlance. If I offer the
reader the following sentence, devoid of any explanatory con-
text, what might s/he understand by it: ‘At the moment, I am
reading some interesting literature on this very subject’?
• Would it be fair to assume that I am speaking as a student
who is currently reading novels, poems and plays as part of
my literature course: ‘I’m doing literature at college’?
• Would I be reading some ‘secondary’ critical literature on
those literary texts: ‘I need to cover a bit of the literature
on Dickens to write my essay’?
• As the author of this book, might I be speaking about the
diverse and gripping theoretical literature on the question,
precisely, of ‘What is Literature’?
• Might I be a budding creative writer, who is attempting to
enter the profession of literature by reading novels, for
example, which focus on how a young person becomes a
novelist (‘portraits of the artist as young wo/men’): ‘I’m
determined to go in for literature when I grow up’.
• Might I be a commuter (employed in the tourist catering
industry) talking about the sort of literature (novels,
diaries, autobiographies, say) which they buy at the book-
sellers on the station to wile away delays on the rail net-
work and which, through preference, tends always to be
about the Caribbean: ‘I’ll read any literature about the
Caribbean you’ve got’?
• Might I be the same commuter who is perusing the promo-
tional or technical literature on refrigeration: ‘I must famil-
iarise myself with the literature on commercial freezers
before we get to Macclesfield’?
Of course, out of context, I could be speaking about any of

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4 LITERATURE
these things, so it becomes apparent that the word ‘literature’
in itself can be used in a number of ways. However, in normal
usage, a distinction tends to be drawn and signalled by the fact
that when we are speaking of critical, theoretical or promo-
tional literature, for example, we tend to put the definite arti-
cle in front of the word: ‘I’m reading the literature on…’.
Whereas, when we are referring to ‘literary’ writings, we leave
it out, hence denoting that some (unexplained) generic distinc-
tion has already been made: ‘I love reading literature in my
spare time’/‘I’m studying Literature at the university’. But
notice that I have made a further generic distinction in passing
here: by using a lower-case ‘l’ in the first instance and an
upper-case ‘L’ in the second. The significance of that tiny typo-
graphical shift will constitute much of the content of this
book, but I am willing to wager that it is the sense with the
capital ‘L’ that is uppermost in the minds of the vast majority
of you in understanding what is now normally implied by the
word ‘literature’.
‘Literature’ with an upper-case ‘L’ and inverted commas
round it signifies here the conception of that global body of
literary writing which has been accredited with being—
pointedly to borrow Matthew Arnold’s famous utterance—‘the
best that has been known and said in the world’ (Arnold
[1869] 1971:6).1 It has been ascribed the highest achievement
of aesthetic and moral merit, and has acquired the status of a
kind of universal resource of formal and ethical models for
humankind: as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, it is ‘not of an
age, but for all time’; and as Ezra Pound defined it, it is ‘news
that STAYS news’.2 In the case of national literatures, writers
and works may be included that might not make it into the
‘World’ category, and there will be some marginal argument as
to who or what should be included, but, by and large, the
same received principles of evaluation will obtain. We will also
recognise collocations of such authors and texts as constituting

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 5
‘The Classics’, ‘The (Great) Tradition, ‘The Canon’, and the
standard ‘Set Authors/ Books’ on all secondary and tertiary
education syllabuses. On the other hand, ‘literature’ with a
small ‘l’ and no inverted commas is used either when I am
employing the word in a neutral discursive capacity, or to rep-
resent the undifferentiated corpus of writing which is ‘literary’
in the sense—more fully explained later—that it identifies itself
quite self-consciously as belonging to the artificial (i.e. pertain-
ing to ‘artifice’) discursive realm of ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’
writing as opposed to other, more quotidian forms of written
communication.
If we turn now to the dictionary and other reference works, we
will find that they confirm and expand the various definitions
identified by my glossing of the made-up sentence given ear-
lier. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a series of meanings
for the word literature, and I will have occasion to return to
them—and to their etymological implications—within their
historical location in Chapter 2. The first meaning given is:
1. Acquaintance with ‘letters’ or books; polite or humane
learning; literary culture. Now rare and obsolescent.
Because of the rider, this is not a usage we have encountered
above, but its longevity as the principal meaning of the word
will be of great significance when we come to see how—and
when—our principal understanding of it developed. (This
should be held in conjunction with the OED’s note on its 3a.
definition as adduced below.) The second sense is:
2. Literary work or production; the activity or profession of
a man of letters; the realm of letters.

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6 LITERATURE
We noted this meaning as still active in our everyday usages
above, but it is perhaps worth clarifying that ‘work’ here
means the business of producing a literary ‘work’ (not the
‘work’ itself, which belongs with a subsequent meaning: ‘a
work of literature’), and that this is again not the principal
meaning I assume most of you will have in mind at the
moment. The latter is, in fact, part 3a. of the third sense the
OED presents, but I want to leave this until after I have noted
parts 3b. and 3c., so that it will lead us more conveniently into
a fuller exposition of the nature of the problem which lies at
the heart of the matter in this book. Sub-sections 3b. and 3c.,
then, are respectively as follows: ‘The body of books and writ-
ing that treat of a particular subject’ (as in our critical, theoret-
ical, technical usage above: ‘the literature on…’); and ‘colloq.
Printed matter of any kind‘ (I did not give an instance of this
earlier, but it is clearly a colloquial variant of 3b.—as in: ‘a
great pile of advertising literature fell though my letter-box
this morning’).
Although both of the above definitions, but particularly 3b.,
are in wide current usage, it is the OED’s sense 3a.—without
the direct article—which is arguably the primary and priori-
tised sense in our culture:
3a. Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings
produced in a particular country or period, or in the world
in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to
writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of
beauty of form or emotional effect….
…This sense is of very recent emergence both in Eng.
and Fr.
Now, we may feel, we are getting to it, and indeed we are:
‘English Literature’, ‘French Literature’, ‘eighteenth-century
Literature’, ‘Contemporary Literature’, ‘World Literature’—

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 7
our familiar bearings are established: ‘Literature’, the great
generic category of written creativity which we can all recog-
nise. Much fuller analysis of this meaning will follow later;
but, for now, let us just register two points about the OED’s
definition. First, it becomes problematical as soon as it ceases
to be merely descriptive and shifts to being evaluative, i.e. in
its second sentence. ‘In a more restricted sense’ is ambiguous
anyway, since it is intended to mean here that the scope of the
word literature is restricted if it only applies to the kind
described by the dictionary entry’s following clauses, whereas
we might think literature so described is the least ‘restricted’
sense of the word and the one with the greatest currency. But
the problems really start to emerge in the designation of the
qualities such literature may be supposed to have: what does
‘on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’ mean?
What, for example, is ‘beauty’: how do we define it; how do
we recognise it; is it the same to all people; is a sense of it
innate or is it learnt? What, for that matter, is ‘form’? Given
the range of possible meanings any dictionary will give for that
word, it is difficult to be even remotely precise: but ‘mode of
being’, ‘mode of arrangement’, ‘structural unity in music, litera-
ture, etc.’, ‘that in which the essence of a thing consists’ may,
inter alia, be apposite, while still leaving us with imponderable
problems. Is form separable from content, then; if a piece of
writing lacks ‘unity’ can it not be literature; if a work of litera-
ture cannot exist without form, how do we discern some form
as beautiful and some as not—a short-circuit back to the prob-
lems we registered with the notion of ‘beauty’? Is the creation
of ‘emotional effect’ special only to the ‘restricted sense’ of lit-
erature (consider ‘tear-jerkers’, ‘thrillers’ and pornography); or
does the OED mean ‘beauty of…emotional effect’? In which
case, how do we discriminate between those effects that are
and those that aren’t? And so on.
What we see here are attributions to the notion of ‘Litera-

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8 LITERATURE
ture’ (with the capital letter) which are subliminally assump-
tive, partial and imprecise, but so heavily naturalised that they
are, indeed, an inescapable aspect of its definition—at least its
relatively recent definition. For the second point to notice in
the dictionary’s entry is the subscript note appended: ‘This
sense is of very recent emergence…’. It will be the business of
the following chapter to sketch in the moment of this emer-
gence, and the implications of it, but we may note in passing
here that it belongs roughly to the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. It is, therefore, a historically constructed—rather
than an ‘essential’ or ‘natural’—category, so, while a notion of
‘the literary’ (i.e. writings which in some way distinguish them-
selves from common communicative discourses) has been
around since ancient times, the concept of ‘Literature’ in that
‘restricted sense’ has not. In other words, while the thing is
recognisable in all cultural periods, the concept and term has
not been: Shakespeare, perhaps, had a sense of what I mean by
‘the literary’ (although, like other contemporaries, he might
have thought of it as ‘Poesie/Poetrie’—see Chapter 2, pp. 26–7,
33–4), but not of ‘Literature’. Richard Terry, in arguing that it
is a mistake to conflate ‘the history of the word [with] a his-
tory of the concept that has come to be associated with that
word’ (Terry 1997:84), goes on to propose that not only was
there a recognisable notion of literature in existence by the end
of the sixteenth century in England, but also a clear process of
constructing an English ‘canon’ of literary works—albeit one
which could not then have been graced by our term ‘Litera-
ture’ (ibid, 94–8).
To reinforce our sense of the dizzying problematics at the
heart of this naturalised word, we can turn briefly to other
standard modern reference works. The entry in The New Ency-
clopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, for example, reads: ‘a body
of written works. The name is often applied to those imagina-
tive works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 9
of their authors and the excellence of their execution’.3 This
seems to imply that drama is not literature (pace Shakespeare);
introduces the notion of ‘imagination’ as the defining character-
istic of literary writing (see pp. 17–18); and discriminates in
favour of those writings ‘distinguished by the intentions of
their authors’. Leaving aside its apparent dismissal of the unre-
solved ‘Intentional Fallacy’ debate which has been going on for
the last 50 years, it is unclear here how an author’s intention
‘distinguishes’ a work as literature (does having a clearly per-
ceptible one automatically qualify a work as literature—or is it
the quality of the intention which makes the work ‘distin-
guished’ and hence literature?). Finally, it falls back on ‘excel-
lence of their [the works themselves or the authors’
‘intentions’?] execution’, an evaluative judgement which has
all the definitional problems of the OED’s ‘beauty of form’
writ large. What we may register for later discussion, however,
is the way (usually vague and unexamined) criteria of judge-
ment and evaluation are structurally built in to the very defini-
tion of literature.
As its title suggests, the essay on ‘The Art of Literature’, in
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia, is an even
more partial and partisan affair. While fumbling for defini-
tions of ‘Literature’ which it can never deliver, the essay notes
that individual examples of ‘certain forms of writing [unspeci-
fied] are said to succeed if they possess something called artis-
tic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit
is less easy to define than to recognise’ (my emphases).4 The
self-fulfilling question-begging here is astonishing: ‘artistic
merit’ is passed off as ‘something’ which unequivocally exists
and happens to be ‘called artistic merit’, and which the essay-
writer cannot ‘define’ but—by implication, along with other
cognoscenti—can ‘recognise’ intuitively. Such a deeply exclu-
sive, and hence élitist, literary-critical stance lies al the heart of
the assumptive evaluative judgements which, as I noted above,

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10 LITERATURE
are structured into the conventional definition of ‘Literature’,
so that truly ‘literary’ works are then perceived to contain their
own innate ‘artistic merit’ which they secrete or emit and
which the person of taste ‘recognises’. The circularity of the
argument—around a definitional vacuum—is that ‘artistic
merit’ is self-evident to those who attribute its self-evidence in
the first place. As Terry Eagleton has observed: ‘Valuable text
and valuable reader are reversible…. The valuable reader is
constituted as valuable by the texts which he constitues as
such; ideological value is projected into the Tradition to re-
enter the present as meta-physical confirmation or critique.
The name of this tautology is Literature…’ (Eagleton [1976]
1978:164). Ironically, the only assistance for my project that I
can take from the whole Macropaedia essay is the author’s
touching admission that ‘it becomes more and more difficult to
categorise literature, for in modern civilisation words are
everywhere’ (like other pests), and that ‘a further complica-
tion’ in classifying the wretched stuff is that ‘literature as a
whole and in its parts means varying things to various writers,
critics, and historians’ (87, 86). And there we have the nub of
the problem.
No one by now—not even the most dyed-in-the-wool tradi-
tional literary critic—can easily accept either a notion of a
unitary ‘Literature’ or that there can be a meaningful essential-
ist definition of the concept: that there is an innate, self-
identifying ‘essence’ of literature. The above author’s oddly
insecure phrase ‘literature as a whole and in its parts’ points to
the heterodox nature of literature and to the fact that there are
indeed many literatures rather than one ‘Literature’. However,
the admission that literature means different things to different
people signals the contemporary recognition that the theoreti-
cal position—and we must also now accept that there always
is one, however tacit, subliminal or unacknowledged—
informing the stances ‘various writers, critics, and historians’

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 11
take to literature in effect both defines and constitutes the ‘lit-
erariness’ of the literature they then ‘objectively study. I might
also add that modern critical theories, as we shall see in
Chapter 3, propose that literary texts are, in a sense, ‘re-
written’ in every act of reading by every reader—not just by
the processes of professional analysis: that literature is reconsti-
tuted in the endlessly unstable dialectics of the author/ text/
reader nexus in history. Just as the author’s control and author-
ity over their text is relinquished as the text is written and
published, so the reading-positions from which readers read it
are different both throughout history and through their cul-
tural location at any given moment—and ‘the text’ becomes
the product of those differences. How these positions have
been arrived at—especially over the past 30 years or so—
together with a fuller account of the theoretical and critical
positions implied in what I have just written, will be the sub-
ject of Chapter 3. For now, I merely state the case, and point
to the fact that the untenable word ‘Literature’ must now
indeed be placed under erasure.
One final foray here into the reference books will throw up
other crucial terms in the (non-)definition of ‘Literature’—
albeit potentially helpful ones in progressing my argument.
The entry in the (generally excellent) The Oxford Companion
to the English Language identifies the two main current mean-
ings of the word that we have already encountered: ‘(1) Artis-
tic creation through language and its products: French Litera-
ture, literature in English…. (2) The texts of a group or sub-
ject: scientific and technical literature, the latest literature on
computers’—noting, as we have, that while the latter ‘is cur-
rently the minor sense, it is the historically prior meaning of
the term’.5 In the definition of the first sense, ‘artistic’ may
seem to beg the question, although I will later return to it as a
term of some force; equally so with ‘creation’—which here has
the active sense of ‘creating’, rather than being the substantive

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12 LITERATURE
noun—hence the subsequent phrase ‘and its products’ (i.e. the
‘creations’). But the fulcrum phrase—‘through language’—is
an important addition to the definitions we have seen so far,
and will become a focal matter as my exploration continues.
Under the heading “‘Literary” literature’, the Companion
interestingly confirms my assertions in the preceding para-
graph: ‘It is impossible to define the now primary sense of
literature precisely or to set rigid limits on its use.’ However, it
immediately slips into just such a problematical—if potentially
fruitful—definition:
Literary treatment of a subject requires creative use of the
imagination: something is constructed which is related to
‘real’ experience, but is not of the same order. What has
been created in language is known only through language,
and the text does not give access to a reality other than
itself.
(620)
Here again we have ‘creative’ and ‘the imagination’ appearing,
but now also the notion of a problematical relation to ‘reality’
occasioned by literatures construction in language. Literature
somehow alludes to the ‘real’ while being of a different order
of reality precisely because it is constituted by language. I want
to put these notions on hold for the time being, since they will
need to be addressed when I come to present my own working
definition of ‘the literary’.
But one final comment in the Oxford Companion entry
points us to a key term in the constitution of ‘Literature’:
The word literature tends to be used with approval of
works perceived as having artistic merit, the evaluation of
which may depend on social and linguistic as well as aes-
thetic factors. If the criteria of quality become exacting, a

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 13
canon may emerge, limited in its inclusions and exclu-
sions, and the members of a society or group may be
required (with varying degrees of pressure and success) to
accept that canon and no other.
(ibid.)
You might register the reappearance of ‘artistic merit’; note the
imprecision of ‘social and linguistic as well as aesthetic
factors’; and puzzle over the proposition: ‘If the criteria of qual-
ity become exacting….’ But ultimately we arrive at the crucial
notion of an exclusive ‘canon’. Just as we have noticed along
the way that ‘Literature’ incorporates the evaluative judge-
ments made about it (from now on represented by the short-
hand phrase ‘literary value’) into the very definition itself, so it
takes in, too, the concept of ‘the canon’. Indeed, it is difficult
to see how it could do without it. ‘Literature’ requires the iden-
tification of ‘great works’, which, ipso facto, become the
benchmarks for judging all other literary production. In order
to designate these as such, they must be elevated above other
works, which are then, as a necessary reflex of this process,
excluded from the canon.
Fair enough, one might think: what is wrong with wanting
to say that some works may be better than others, and with
demarcating such by extrapolating them from the ruck? The
problem is, however, that the above canonising process is cog-
nate with the discourse of evaluation I have considered earlier:
the criteria are imprecise, unexplained, tacitly assumed, and
thoroughly naturalised. The reasons given for the received
canon rely, in other words, on notions of ‘beauty of form’,
‘emotional effect’, ‘artistic merit’, and on the judgement of
those who can ‘recognise’ these qualities when they see them.
Once again, the bottom line is that the canon is self-selecting,
given, crystallising out of the history of literature as a whole—
whereas, as we shall see in Chapter 2, it is historically con-

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14 LITERATURE
structed on behalf of some very powerful and insistent ideolog-
ical imperatives and vested interests. If we start asking the
questions: who constructed the canon, when and for whom,
on what criteria and to what ends—as the critics and theorists
surveyed in Chapter 3 have done from the late-1960s onwards
—then the notions of ‘Literature’, ‘canon’ and ‘literary value’
are simultaneously demythologised and destabilised. If mean-
ing is to be returned to them in some way and for some rea-
son, they have to be re-thought and reconstituted to an extent
that makes them unrecognisable in their previous guise.
Some will immediately say: ‘Well, in that case, why bother?
Why not invent something quite new and radical to fill the
space they have left?’. The answer this book attempts to give—
and while much of the book is necessarily concerned with the
processes which have gone to constructing and now decon-
structing the dominant sense of ‘Literature’, it is the answer
which is its real purpose and drive—is that literature (‘the liter-
ary’) remains too pervasive, too consuming and consumed, too
open a space in our culture not to be reclaimed and recuper-
ated from the ruins of its past incarnation.Chapters 2 and 3
offer, respectively, a historical-etymological account of the
arrival and dominance of ‘Literature’, and then of the pro-
cesses and initiatives which, more recently, deconstruct and
replace it. But it is in Chapters 4 and 5 that the attempt is
made to redefine and re-accredit ‘the literary’, and to show
what uses such a ‘free space’ may have in a present culture
whose principal discourses, forms of cultural production and
modes of communication do not appear to be primarily liter-
ary. In particular, I will offer there a range of examples to
illustrate the uses of literature; to indicate what literature from
the past may continue to give us as a form of ‘special knowl-
edge’; and especially to suggest what ‘news’ about our own
culture is broadcast by contemporary literature—news which

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 15
would otherwise be imperceptible until released by the specific
textuality of its literary formulation.
A final word first, however, about some of the fundamental
and undoubtedly contentious premises on which my argument
here is based. I have, so far, drawn out from the materials of
definition three central and interrelated—indeed, necessarily
self-sustaining—concepts/terms: ‘Literature’, ‘literary value’
and ‘canon’. As a preliminary, I should state here my stance to
each of these in respect of the reflections which follow,
although the more substantive, and I hope persuasive, exposi-
tion will have to wait until Chapter 4 on ‘the literary’.
LITERATURE
Literature, in this book, will refer to written works: by which I
mean works whose originating form and final point of refer-
ence is their existence as written textuality—however much
individual texts may be performed, produced or reproduced in
non-written form (hence plays but not film-scripts, perfor-
mance poetry and poetry set to music but not song lyrics). I
make the assumption that there is an area of human activity
and production in which people choose deliberately to use writ-
ten language in ways distinguishable from other forms of writ-
ten communication: most obviously the genres of poetry, prose-
fiction and drama. Their readers, therefore, are sensible of
being in the presence of something which is self-consciously
‘literary’—be it eighteenth-century elegy or performance
poetry, Victorian novel or contemporary romance, Renais-
sance tragedy or street theatre. I am not concerned, therefore,
with pamphlets, histories, journalism, diaries, car manuals,
menus, promotional literature on fridge-freezers, biographies
or beer-mats, while recognising that some or all of these may
display ‘literary’ characteristics (for example, in style or in

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16 LITERATURE
their use of rhetorical devices), and that they may be indistin-
guishable from literary texts in terms of their linguistic compo-
sition. In this regard, I accept and retain the last two centuries’
‘aestheticisation’ of the concept, regarding literature as operat-
ing within the domain of artifice (and hence ‘artificial’): i.e. as
‘fictive’ in the broadest sense.
I am aware of the difficulties which various inflexions of
linguistic theory and criticism (succinctly outlined by Roger
Fowler in his helpful introductory essay, ‘Literature’, in the
Roudedge Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism) pose for
the definition of a discrete ‘fictive’ literary realm: of distinguish-
ing between ‘fictional’ and ‘non-fictional’, ‘literary’ and ‘non-
literary’, texts. Linguistically, they all share similar textual
characteristics and deploy similar stylistic tropes, so that a ‘fac-
tual’ text, in terms of its ‘textual semantics’, is just as much a
construction of discourse as is a ‘literary’ one (Fowler
1990:16). Nevertheless, I would claim that my discrimination
of the term and concept is cultural (or ‘functional’) rather than
linguistic (or ‘ontological’), and so, while accepting Fowler’s
admonition that it is ‘futile’ to seek a ‘single linguistic crite-
rion, or set of criteria’ for distinguishing ‘literary’ from ‘non-
literary’ genres and texts (22), I would argue that ‘literature’ as
a concept retains a meaningful cultural sense, and that is the
functional one I work with here. In this regard, then, while
agreeing with Fowler that the pursuit of literary-theoretical
and aesthetic definitions of “‘Literature” into innumerable
dead ends is a waste of intellectual energy’ (23), I would dis-
agree with him when he says: ‘progress in understanding these
matters [i.e. establishing that ‘texts not normally…included in
“Literature”’ have similar characteristics to those that are]
would be facilitated if we removed the complication of “liter-
ary” status’ (5).
Peter Murphy has written of poetry (but it holds good for
my notion of ‘the literary’ in general) that if one of its distin-

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 17
guishing characteristics is that it is ‘something that people…
choose to write’ (Murphy 1993:3) in contradistinction to other
forms of writing, then ‘we must find a way to talk about what
makes poetry different from other forms of writing’ (7). I do
not wish to proceed too readily, however, down the track of
the kind of retooled humanistic formalism which Murphy
seems to be proposing. Equally, if what I appear to be saying
smacks of the so-called ‘new aesthetics’ or ‘new formalism’
emerging principally in the United States (see Chapter 3), then
I would immediately want to say that the present project does
not favour a return to belles-lettrism, and that it is firmly cul-
tural-materialist in grounding—insofar as it is abjures any
notion of an ‘essential’ literariness, and is predicated on the
assumption that literature, its uses and definitions, are invari-
ably historically specific. Indeed, even Tony Bennett, one of
the most indomitable contemporary critics of the aesthetic con-
ception of ‘Literature’ (be it idealist or Marxist), should be
able to find it cognate with his own project to get ‘Outside
“Literature”’—a project which ‘imbue[s literature] with a far
more concrete existence’ than can aesthetic theorisations, by
‘more appropriately regard [ing it] as a historically specific,
institutionally organised field of textual uses and effects’ (Ben-
nett 1990:10). Nevertheless, I can still follow Peter Murphy
when he says ‘there is a high critical value for us in encounter-
ing the need for distinctions between writers’, and calls for
evaluative judgements to be made (Murphy 1993:2), because
otherwise we lose all the advantages of deploying and perceiv-
ing difference, and can function only with the ungainly mono-
lith of an undifferentiated ‘writing’. I will pick up Murphy’s
point again when I discuss ‘literary value’ on pp. 20–1.
I assume, too, then—and here I appropriate some of the
terms I registered in passing from the entry in the Oxford
Companion as potentially still necessary for defining ‘literary’
activity—that these productions are ‘creative’ and ‘imaginative’

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18 LITERATURE
in that they are ‘made-up’ (which the OED defines as ‘to con-
coct, invent, fabricate [in the sense of “put together by art and
labour”]’, ‘to compose’—thus, ‘an invention or fiction), and
are therefore ‘original’ insofar as they are a unique invention.
Their specificity, in other words, constitutes their originality.
Further, I assume them to be constructions of written language
whose ‘reality’ is comprised by that linguistic construction
(their reality, in other words, is that encoded in their ‘fabrica-
tion’—however much they may allude to a reality beyond their
own). Similarly, they are ‘imaginary’ (products of the imagina-
tion) whose relationship to experiential reality in the material
world exists only by way of their formal contrivance. The orig-
inal derivation of the words ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’—the generic
terms for literary writer and writing until relatively recently
(see pp. 26–7)—from the Greek poiein, ‘to make, create’, is of
central importance to my understanding of what ‘the literary’
might mean. An age-old (but false) opposition—that between
poiesis (‘creative production’, i.e. the artistic ‘making’ of ‘con-
trived’ realities) and mimesis (‘imitation’, i.e. the artistic ‘repre-
sentation of ‘real’ realities), where the written art of mimesis
must logically still be subsumed within poiesis—focuses the
trajectory of my argument. It draws attention to the fact that
all literature is always an original process of making ‘realities’,
and that its formal articulation is precisely what enables read-
ers to perceive those (newly fabricated) ‘poietic realities’ for
the first time. I will employ the term ‘poietic whenever I wish
to signal this throughout the book which follows.
One further restriction in range and focus must be
announced here: although my subject is literature—which
implies its global totality—my treatment of it will perforce be
limited in both historical definition and textual example. For
while I will attempt to make reference to a wide spectrum of
periods of literary production, my knowledge of other litera-
tures beyond the Western tradition and its colonial/

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 19
postcolonial diaspora—in terms both of their definitional con-
ception and of their textual representation—is minimal.
Equally, while the word literature has ‘cognates in other Euro-
pean languages’, as Roger Fowler points out, ‘for France, or
Germany, or Russia, the history and the possible theoretical
positions would be different…“Literature” exists universally
but is regarded, or realized, differently in different cultures’
(Fowler 1990:10). Again, my detailed knowledge of these dif-
ferent cultural inflexions is too inadequate to make my range
of reference comprehensive, and so I must acknowledge at
once that the present study of this topic is primarily anglo-
centric in focus. My attention will be mainly directed, there-
fore, to what I will call ‘literatures in English’—in order to
indicate the diverse range of literature drawing on a basic
common language—and as a consequence, I shall only use the
term ‘English Literature’ when I mean something specific by it
(for example, the ‘English Canon or ‘The National
Literature’). Nevertheless, it is perhaps not too presumptuous
to acknowledge that ‘Eng. Lit.’—in its indicatively familiar
diminutive—has itself been, and remains, a global cultural
presence (especially in Commonwealth and former Common-
wealth countries, and in the United States); that ‘great’ English
writers have figured prominently both in the conspectus of
‘World Literature’ and in the international ‘exchange’ of liter-
ary influence, reaction and interaction; and that, as Marilyn
Butler has suggested, ‘the literature in the language the world
uses [“thanks to the world dominance of America”] is…a
world literature’ (Butler [1989] 1990:10).
LITERARY VALUE
A wide-ranging, complex and unresolved debate surrounds the
notion of ‘literary value’, and it will implicitly inform much of

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20 LITERATURE
the rest of this book. I have used it hitherto to identify those
discriminative judgements of evaluation made about literary
works within conventional critical discourse—usually impre-
cise and naturalised—in order to ‘define’ the ‘artistic merit’ of
a work and so position it in relation to ‘the Canon’. As a
reflex of this, I have suggested, the notion of ‘literary value’ is
ascribed to the work itself, so that it is perceived as containing
and revealing ‘literary value’ rather than merely being judged
as possessing it. The circular argument can then proceed with
the critic/judge ‘recognising’ the ‘literary value’ inherent in the
work, and having their judgement of its artistic merit con-
firmed (for more on this ‘tautology’, see p. 10), whereas it is
precisely the ascription of value which constructs the nature of
criticism’s object as the object it then perceives.
I shall use the term ‘literary value’ by and large to signal the
process just described. But I should not be misunderstood to
be recommending that we throw the baby out with the bathwa-
ter. Certainly, I would wish to reject the notion of innate value
which is ‘recognised’ by the ‘disinterested’ critic and used to
construct a naturalised hierarchy of texts which are self-
evidently ‘Literature’, while excluding others which are self-
evidently not. But, equally, I would not want to relinquish the
possibility of judgement and evaluation. The point is that ‘liter-
ary value’, and its product ‘the Canon, pre-empt judgement by
closing down evaluative analysis of works within the canon,
and by closing out the vast body of ‘literature’ which falls out-
side it. As Marilyn Butler tellingly observes, in her plea for a
more ‘Open Literary History’ in the contemporary world-
context, the canon reduces the number of texts available for
reading and study—and the questions one can ask about those
texts—to the point where ‘evaluation itself is threatened: how
can you operate the techniques for telling who a major writer
is, if you don’t know what a minor one looks like?’ (Butler
[1989] 1990:15).

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 21
If we do away with this pre-emptive and restrictive process,
however, judgement can become variable and the range of
material available for this variable judgement hugely increased.
For stated and explicit reasons—and explicitness is crucial—
we can say that text A is more interesting, more effective, ‘bet-
ter’, than text B—but it will be in relation to our purpose far
evaluating it so. And this purpose can be diverse and multiplex:
• the preferred text gives more pleasure as holiday reading;
• is a better exemplificaion of realism in fiction;
• is a canonic text and therefore has available for analysis a
wider variety of critical readings about it;
• is so much a part of the national cultural heritage that we
cannot understand the latter without it;
• is an inter-text necessary for an understanding of another
text which alludes to it as a primary referent;
• repeats and reworks matters dealt with in an earlier poem
by the same poet;
• gives us more insight into eighteenth-century attitudes to
sexuality;
• is a formative instance of the development of Modernist
drama;
• was a crucial component of the living literary culture on
which the now dead but great writer originally drew; and
so on.
We are freed, therefore, from the static position of simply say-
ing that Madame Bovary is unarguably ‘better’ than a popular
romance, and that we should only give serious attention to the
former, to a position where we can say that—but also the
opposite—in the context of the explicitly articulated purpose
for which we are reading/studying either text. Nor does this
lead to an undifferentiating relativism, since a purpose-driven
criticism determines and controls the hierarchy of evaluation

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22 LITERATURE
in particular circumstances: rather than substituting a ‘do-as-
you-like’ free market of judgement for the fixed and absolute
criterion of canonic status, the ‘purpose’ proposes a rationale
for evaluation in any individual case. Just as we acknowledge
that there are now many literatures in place of ‘Literature’—
and that the critical attention paid to them self-determiningly
constitutes their definition as literature—so here we encounter
many extrinsic definitions of ‘literary value’ to replace the uni-
tary and unverifiable notion of ‘literary value’ as intrinsic to
any given text. Even so redoubtable a defender of ‘Literature’
as Frank Kermode, in his wryly rear-guard essay, ‘Value in Lit-
erature’, in Blackwell’s A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical
Theory, seems grudgingly to accept that there is a kind of ‘radi-
cal freedom’ in the recognition that ‘value’ is ’dynamic, transac-
tional, contingent’—if only because such contingency allows
him to reassert expert knowledge as the basis of true judge-
ment (Kermode 1996:551, 552, 555).
THE CANON
Similarly, ‘Firing the Canon’, as the neat phrase has it, is not
to destroy or do away with the Canon tout court, but rather to
deconstruct it as a naturalised hierarchy. Nevertheless, in say-
ing this, I would, of course, be cast as a member of what
Harold Bloom, in his book The Western Canon, calls ‘the
School of Resentment’: one of those who has rejected ‘the
autonomy of the aesthetic’ (Bloom [1994] 1995:10), refuses to
‘confront greatness’ (524), and will not accept ‘the [or rather
Bloom’s] Western Canon’ on trust. The main reason why I am
perversely happy to be in the ‘School of Resentment’ is that the
only way to accept Bloom’s ‘Canon is indeed ‘on trust’, since
no arguments are made for it which address any of the ques-
tions that have problematised it in the first place. On the

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 23
contrary, the main intellectual mode of his writing is a testy,
tendentious and blustering assertion which smacks of little
more than shouting to keep your courage up—a mode seen at
its most naturalised and essentialist best when Bloom wonders
about the fate of the other arts, now that literature seems to
have fallen to the barbarians of the left:
When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant
among art historians and critics as it is among literary aca-
demics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to
view the daubings of the Guerrilla Girls? The lunacy of
these questions is plain enough when it comes to the emi-
nence of Matisse, while Stravinsky is clearly in no danger
of being replaced by politically correct music for the ballet
companies of the world.
(527)
Note especially the give-away phrases in the final sentence:
‘plain enough’, ‘eminence’, ‘clearly’—phrases which encode the
same unthinking assumptions as those equally unexamined
criteria of ‘artistic merit’ and critical ‘recognition’ which we
saw earlier as sustaining conventional notions of ‘literary
value’ and ‘canonisation’. Does the Canon need enemies with
friends like this in the 1990s?
As it happens, however, it is quite possible to accept the con-
tinued presence of the Canon—so long as it is recognised to be
an artificially manufactured product within cultural history.
Indeed, I would argue strongly that because it is there, and has
been/is such a central component of our cultural history, we
can only understand the latter and what it signifies if we retain
a concept of the Canon and what it comprises. To put it
another way, ‘The Canon’ needs to be studied as the cultural
formation it inescapably is. (Incidentally, this also helps us to
perceive how canons are formed more generally, for while the

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24 LITERATURE
Canon is what I have particularly in view, as Frank Kermode
points out, ‘every reading list is a canon of sorts’ (Kermode
1996:552), and the erstwhile radical displacement of the ‘great
works’ by hitherto disregarded ones may well substitute one
canon for another.) Furthermore, we can argue that the works
which are in the Canon—rather than being there because they
are, in some anterior sense, self-evidently ‘great’—have their
‘greatness’ conferred on them, or at least continually recon-
firmed, precisely by being in it: they become ‘canonic texts’,
and therefore remain reference-points for other literary produc-
tion. However, they do so no longer as benchmarks of ‘artistic
merit’, but as symptomatic instances at once of formal and ide-
ological productions of past cultural conjunctures, and of the
values descried in, and inscribed on, them in their reproduc-
tion in subsequent cultural history.
In addition, perceived as ‘canonic’ in the denaturalised man-
ner suggested above, such works can also be ‘re-read’ in ways
which release them from the limitations of their canonic status:
• Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, for exam-
ple, can be defamiliarised as a poem encoding his complex
political dilemma at the turn of the eighteenth century;
• Adam Bede (see pp. 141–8), for the way its narrative struc-
ture reveals a fraught engagement with female sexuality
and the ‘Woman Question’ in nineteenth-century England;
• The Tempest, Mansfield Park or Jane Eyre for the way they
sub-textually articulate a colonialist mentality;
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles as heteroglossic, stylistically riven,
anti-realist textuality.
As an analogy, we may consider how little bits of ‘great’ liter-
ary works become familiar quotations—so familiar, indeed,
that we cease to think of what they might mean inside or out-
side their original textual location, and that we see them as

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WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’? 25
‘self-evidently’ self-selecting and self-defining examples of (to
borrow an apposite example) ‘what oft was thought but n’er
so well expressed’.6 But if we rediscover them in their context,
and can set aside their status as ‘quotations’, it is possible to
read them quite newly—either as saying something other than
their common usage allows, or as sufficiently unremarkable to
make one wonder why they were extrapolated as ‘canonic’
quotations in the first place. So, too, with the works in the
canon. But without the existence of the canon (to reinflect Mar-
ilyn Butler’s argument in relation to evaluation noted on p. 20)
there would be no perceptible coordinates of literary culture,
and it is salutary to remember how often contemporary writers
—especially those from national, social and sexual groups
whose forebears were, de facto, excluded from the canon—still
‘write back’ to canonic texts, both as a point of reference and
to revise and ‘re-vision’ those texts themselves.
In my abbreviated account of the holy trinity of terms
above, one procedural strategy in their emancipatory decon-
struction has been common to all. In the process of denaturalis-
ing and defamiliarising such categories—so that they may, if
required, be reconstituted and recuperated—it is the business
of giving them back their history which is of primary and fun-
damental importance. Dehistoricised, the marks and meanings
of their manufacture are erased, so that they do indeed appear
‘natural’, ‘given’ and impervious to challenge; rehistoricised,
their partiality—in both senses—is restored to view, and their
invulnerability as mythic monoliths is countered. It is to the
historical construction of the notion of ‘Literature’, therefore—
and to a lesser extent of ‘English’ or ‘Eng. Lit.’ as the academic
site on which that process was underpinned, in the first half of
the twentieth century, for the English-speaking world at least—
that I now turn as the subject of my next chapter.

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2
WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’
BEEN?
A History of the Concept, Part One:
Origins to Orthodoxies
In setting out to chart the history of the concept literature, I
return to my proposition in Chapter 1 that while the phe-
nomenon of literature has existed since deepest antiquity, the
notion of ‘Literature’ has not. Hence, the term ‘literature’ will
only be used in what is an anachronistic sense in the early
parts of the present chapter. Better, perhaps, to think in terms
of ‘poetry’ (see Chapter 1, p. 8), since, at least throughout the
classical era and down to the Romantic period at the turn of
the eighteenth century, this was the generic term for what we
know as literature. Poets, in other words, were simply
‘makers’, and poetry (including poetic drama and prose
romances, fables and sagas) was what they created by ‘the arte
of making’ (1586).l As Sir Philip Sidney commented in c.1581:
‘wee Englishmen haue mette with the Greekes, in calling him
[the poet] a maker’, noting also that ‘One may bee a Poet with-
out versing’ and ‘there have been many most excellent Poets,
that never versified’;2 whilst James Beattie in 1776 could still
nominate Shakespeare’s play, The Merry Wives of Windsor,
and Fielding’s novel, Tom Jones, ‘the two finest Comic
poems…in the world’.3
Forms of poetry, together with other recognisably literary
26

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 27
genres, in the oral traditions of—note the word—preliterate
cultures disappear into the mists of time (some would argue
they were the primal and primary form of languages them-
selves). Magical fertility spells and incantations, hymns, rid-
dles, proverbs, myths, ballads, folktales, lyrics, epics, satires,
were as organic an aspect of life as food, clothing, shelter and
religion. In ‘literate’ cultures—i.e. in those where such modes
of expression were written down—the earliest examples would
include Sumerian poetry from the third millenium BC (like the
Epic of Gilgamesh) and Egyptian poems and myths going back
to 2,000 BC, whilst Indian, Chinese and Greek written poetry
can be dated back many centuries before Christ. In the move
from preliterate to literate cultures, we may also perceive the
way in which a division occurs between folk and élite (or
‘polite’) literatures. The written forms start to take on an eval-
uative precedence over the oral ones, and begin to establish the
notion of a canon of ‘classic’ texts (the primary meaning of
‘classic/ classical’ is ‘of the first class, of acknowledged excel-
lence’—OED). In this context, and to signal the later symbi-
otic relationship between ‘Literature’ and criticism (see p.
37ff.), it is also worth registering that it is precisely ancient
literary scholarship—the self-conscious preservation of ‘classi-
cal’ works—which begins to sustain a recorded literature for
future generations. One of the most significant early epochs of
such is focussed on the library and university of Alexandria
from its foundation in 324 BC to its destruction in AD 640,
and so it is to the Hellenistic Greek scholars there that we owe
the survival of most of the classical Greek texts.
In the Western tradition, Homer’s epic poems are regarded
as dating from before 700 BC, and literary writing is signifi-
cantly present in sixth and fifth century BC Greece (Aesop’s
fables, for example, date from the sixth; Aeschylus’s, Sopho-
cles’s and Euripides’s plays from the fifth), and it is in 4th
century BC Greece, too, that we find the first, and lastingly

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28 LITERATURE
influential, philosophical disquisition on the nature of the
poet, and thus of poetry, in the works of Plato. It is worth
pausing here for a moment to register some of the earliest
(often conflicting and seemingly contradictory) characteristics
of poetry identified by Plato and his followers, since they have
informed—even constituted—the way in which ‘Literature’ has
been conceived of since.
Paradoxically, Plato did not regard poetry favourably, and
banned most of its types from his ideal Republic. Two main
reasons lie behind this. First, while poetry could educate peo-
ple in individual and social morality, it could also, by its per-
suasive power, corrupt them by inducing meretricious illu-
sions, since it is also a mimetic art which ‘imitates’ objects and
actions in the created world. As the latter, for Plato, were
themselves imitations of their ‘Ideal’ form, poetic imitation
was an imitation of an imitation, and hence more false than
the objects and actions themselves. So that whilst poetry might
be an entertaining pastime, it led dangerously away from the
truth. On the other hand, Plato speaks of the ‘divine madness’
of the poet—i.e. his ‘inspiration’—in which transcendent state
of mind a divine power speaks through the poet and puts him
in touch with the ‘Ideas’ (ultimate realities/archetypes) behind
the material world. Similarly, and despite his deprecation of
poetry as meretriciously mimetic, Plato elsewhere and impor-
tantly sees all art as being poetry and all poetry as being cre-
ation (in the sense of poiesis that we noted in Chapter 1, p.
18): ‘All that causes the passage of something from non-being
into being is a “poesy” or creation’.4 It is these latter thoughts
which are crucial to the establishing of ‘poetry’ as a supreme
human achievement in later periods: now enshrined in our con-
cept ‘Literature’. Plato’s disciple, Aristotle, in his Poetics, fos-
ters this process by accepting the notion of mimesis (‘art imi-
tates life’), but proposes that this is, in fact, its high moral
dimension, because in its synthetic and generalising tendency it

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 29
is truer to reality than are the particularities of history. Aristo-
tle was also the first to be systematically interested in the for-
mal construction of literary texts, and thus initiates the aes-
thetic discourse in the definition of ‘Literature’.
Conversely perhaps, the first-century AD Greek treatise, On
the Sublime, attributed to the ‘pseudo-Longinus’, focusses prin-
cipally on the expressive quality of literature. In seeking to
establish what makes ‘great literature’ great, ‘Longinus’ relates
poetic excellence to the author’s emotional and intellectual pro-
fundity and seriousness. ‘Sublimity’, in other words, is above
all things an effect of the spirit, an emotional charge that
bonds the soul of the writer to the soul of the reader: ‘Sublim-
ity is the echo of greatness of spirit’.5 Significantly,
‘Longinus’s’ treatise made no great mark on literary thinking
until the late-seventeenth century, when it became deeply influ-
ential in identifying the loftiness of feelings which, by that
point, were beginning to be seen as an essential attribute of
‘Literature’. This resulted at once in the subjectivising and psy-
chologising of literature and the reader’s experiencing of it; in
notions of the free spirit of ‘original genius’; and hence, in the
concurrent development of Romanticism and of aesthetics as a
newly discrete branch of philosophy (see below, pp. 35–6).
Finally, in this brief survey of the originating classical dis-
courses of ‘Literature’, the Neoplatonist tradition, beginning
with Plotinus (third century AD), took the Aristotelean posi-
tion on ‘imitation’ much further. For Plotinus, poets had a
truly noble role—almost God-like in their ability to create—
since their art touched the realm of Platonic ‘Ideas’ on which,
as we have heard, the created world was modelled. Ironically,
then, Plato’s own ideas about the unsatisfactoriness of the poet
and poetry in the pursuit of truth were turned back against
him by the Neoplatonists: poetic imitation was regarded as the
highest of all imitations because it offered access to the divine
archetypes rather than merely copying existing materialities. In

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30 LITERATURE
the context of accounting for the conventional post-Romantic,
‘aestheticised’ notion of ‘Literature’ which follows, it is worth
bearing in mind that such Neoplatonic views were profoundly
influential throughout the Renaissance and down to the
Romantic period, where, once again, their consonance with
the new aesthetics is clearly apparent.
In the centuries after Plato, examples of developed ‘literary’
art abound throughout the Greek and Roman periods, as they
do also in the so-called ‘Dark Ages’; and they include, of
course, works in vernacular languages as well as in the classi-
cal ones. My following synoptic selection of some of the
received ‘classics’ of the Western literary tradition is simply
and strategically to establish the fact that literature in a wide
range of languages and genres predates even the first appear-
ance of the word literature in European languages, let alone its
discriminative modern usage as ‘Literature’. Obvious instances
would be:
• Virgil’s Eclogues and his epic poem the Aeniad (first cen-
tury BC);
• Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses (first century BC/
first century AD);
• the early prose fictions (the novel as a defined genre, we
should remember, belongs to the post-Renaissance period)
of the Roman writers, Petronius (the Satyricon, first cen-
tury AD) and Apuleius (The Golden Ass, second century
AD);
• the prose epic sagas of Iceland and Norway (dating from a
c.ninth-century oral tradition but written down in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries);
• the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf;
• the Middle High German epic, the Nibelungenlied (proba-
bly twelfth century);

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 31
• Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose and the French
courtly-love poems of Chrétian de Troyes (twelfth century);
• the Irish stories of Cú Chulainn (dating from c.eigth cen-
tury, although not written down until the twelfth);
• the thirteenth/fourteenth-century Italian poems of Dante
(the Commedia and La Vita Nuova) and the fourteenth-
century stories of Boccaccio (the Decameron);
• the lyric poetry of Medieval Latin, Provençal and Middle
French;
• the Middle English alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight (and the shorter poems in the same
manuscript, Pearl, Patience and Purity);
• and the works of the fourteenth-century English poet, Geof-
frey Chaucer—most famously, Troilus and Criseyde (c.
1382–85) and The Canterbury Tales (c. 1388–1400).
All this writing is, of course, recognisably ‘literary’, but the
point is that it could not have conceived of itself as comprising
‘Literature’. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that the word ‘lit-
erature’ itself enters the English language at about that point in
the late-fourteenth century (the OED’s first example is from
1375) when Chaucer was composing what was to become the
foundation-stone of the English ‘National Literature’.
The English word literature derives, either directly or by way
of the cognate French littérature, from the Latin litteratura, the
root-word for which is littera meaning ‘a letter’ (of the alpha-
bet). Hence the Latin word and its European derivatives (Span-
ish, Italian and German, for example, also have direct cog-
nates) all carry a similar general sense: ‘letters’ means what we
would now call ‘book learning’, acquaintance/familiarity with
books. A ‘man of letters’ (or ‘literature’) was someone who
was widely read; would have had, as in the OED’s first defini-

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32 LITERATURE
tion (see p. 5), ‘polite or humane learning’; would have been
someone who possessed ‘literary culture’: that is, a culture
acquired through reading books. An inverse example from
Bradshaw in 1513 pin-points this,6 and also indicates, as
Roger Fowler suggests (1990:8), the element of social judge-
ment implicit in having (or not having) such learning—which
itself points forward to the discriminations inscribed in the
much later notion of ‘Literature’: ‘The comyn people…
Whiche without lytterature and good informacyon Ben lyke to
Brute beestes’. The necessarily élitist nature of possessing ‘lyt-
terature’ (to be ‘literate’ in this sense was a rare accomplish-
ment and access to printed books—themselves new, costly and
uncommon—was limited) is also signalled in Skelton’s com-
ment of 1529: ‘I know your vertu and your lytterature’, as it is
too in Burne’s remark of 1581: ‘hes nocht sufficient literatur to
vndirstand the scripture’. And Francis Bacon’s compliment to
King James I in 1605—‘There hath not beene…any King…so
learned in all literature and erudition, diuine and humane’—
establishes this meaning, whilst also implying a value judge-
ment, not just on the fact of possessing ‘literature’, but about
the books which provide it. This sense of the word continues
down to the mid-to-late-eighteenth century. The OED notes
that this is the ‘only sense’ given in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary
(1755); and in his Life of Milton (1780), Johnson uses it twice
in that way: ‘He had probably more than common literature,
as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin
poems’ (quoted in Williams 1976:151); ‘His literature was
unquestionably great. He read all the languages which are con-
sidered either as learned or polite’.
At this point, then, as Raymond Williams suggests, ‘litera-
ture’ corresponds to the modern ‘literacy’ (1976:151), albeit
with an evaluative dimension well beyond our descriptive
sense of simply being able to read and write. By the later eigh-
teenth century, however, the word was acquiring the second of

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 33
the OED’s meanings: the profession or realm of letters. In
Johnson’s Life of Cowley (1779), Cowley’s previous biogra-
pher, Bishop Sprat, is described as: ‘An author whose preg-
nancy of imagination and elegance of language have
deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature’. Here, John-
son is referring not to the place of Sprat’s work in a hierarchy
of literary texts but to his status in the newly-emerging profes-
sion of writing (nevertheless, Johnson’s complimentary judge-
ments on the quality of Sprat’s writing point to the discrimina-
tion of such typically ‘literary’ virtues later found to be the
hallmarks of ‘Literature’). Around the turn of the eighteenth
century, then, Isaac D’lsraeli is quoted by the OED as saving:
‘Literature, with us, exists independent of patronage or associa-
tion, where ‘literature’ again implies the business of producing
any kind of writing. By 1830, Sir Walter Scott notes: ‘I deter-
mined that literature should be my staff, but not my crutch,
and that the profits of my literary labour…should not…
become necessary to my ordinary expenses’. This self-
conscious pride in the paid professional status of the individual
‘author’ or ‘writer’—words which themselves become more
frequent in the later part of the eighteenth century—reveals the
shift from aristocratic patronage as the matrix for the produc-
tion of literary writing to a commercial environment in which
individual authors sell different kinds of written wares in dif-
ferent kinds of market. What we can perceive in this process is
the emergence of the socio-cultural conditions in which the
discrimination of a selective category of ‘high’ literature—as
opposed to the ‘hack’ writing of ‘Grub Street’—will conse-
quently take place.
Symptomatically, too, although ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ remain
preferred terms for the whole spectrum of literary writing
amongst the Romantic poets, those words, since the middle of
the seventeenth century, had been gradually specialising out to
mean, not creative writing (‘making’) in general, but metrical

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34 LITERATURE
composition or verse—a process highlighted by Wordsworth’s
well-known grouse in the ‘Preface’ to the 1802 edition of Lyri-
cal Ballads: ‘I here use the word “Poetry” (though against my
own judgement) as opposed to the word “Prose”, and synony-
mous with metrical composition’. As Raymond Williams
suggests: ‘It is probable that this specialisation of poetry to
verse, together with the increasing importance of prose forms
such as the novel, made literature the most available general
word’ (1976:153).
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, and impor-
tantly fuelled by the status within Romanticism assigned to the
role of the poet, the previous sense of ‘literature’ also gave way
to the OED’s third definition of the word, some of the prob-
lems with which were considered on p. 7:
Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings pro-
duced in a particular country or period, or in the world in
general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to
writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of
beauty of form or emotional effect….
…This sense is of very recent emergence both in Eng.
and Fr.
What we can now further deduce from this ‘very recent’ usage
is that the concept-word ‘Literature’ is fundamentally inscribed
with notions of period, and, more importantly, of nation (the
conception of it as a world species will resurface later in the
status that Matthew Arnold and his disciples award it). It is, of
course, important to avoid a slippage between a merely lexical
and a conceptual history: George Puttenham, for example, in
1589, was already thinking in terms of a ‘national’ literature
when he proposed that ‘there may be an art of our English Poe-
sie, as well as there is of the Latine and Greeke’.7 Nevertheless,
my italicising of ‘Poesie’ there allows us to note that the

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 35
OED’s first example of the word literature, in its ‘more
restricted sense’ (i.e. as ‘Literature’), implicitly identifies it as
having a national character: ‘Their literature, their works of
art offer models that have never ben excelled’ (Davy 1812; my
emphases). But it is Buckle, in 1857, who makes this fully
explicit: ‘Literature, when it is in a healthy and unforced state,
is simply the form in which the knowledge of a country is regis-
tered’; and Green, by 1874, is using the word in the recognis-
ably modern sense: ‘The full glory of the new literature broke
on England with Edmund Spenser’. However, René Wellek has
offered quotations which show the usage to be appearing in
Italian, French, German, and then English, from the mid-
eighteenth century: George Colman in 1761 seeks to rescue
Shakespeare and Milton from ‘the general wreck of old
English Literature’; Dr Johnson in 1774 speaks of the possibil-
ity of reviving ‘our antiquated literature’; and James Beattie in
1783 wants to explore ‘the history and politics, the manners
and the literature of these latter ages’ (Wellek 1970:5–8). Such
critics are now talking of a kind of literary writing which is
distinguished from other kinds of writing (e.g. history, philoso-
phy, politics, theology) that had hitherto been subsumed under
the category ‘literature’, and which is precisely so distinguished
by its aesthetic character (as suggested in the second sentence
of the OED’s definition above). Wellek, indeed, claims that
‘the word’ underwent both a ‘process of “nationalization”
and…“aestheticization”’ from the 1760s onwards (ibid.).
But whatever the precise moment at which this process
begins to develop, it remains a crucial one in the cultural his-
tory of our term, since ‘aestheticization’ defines a particular
kind of writing (‘creative’, ‘imaginative’), but also, in effect,
begins to ascribe a new and higher value to this discriminated
sub-set. As Terry Eagleton makes clear:
It is no accident that the period we are discussing [the sec-

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36 LITERATURE
ond half of the eighteenth century, leading into the Roman-
tic period] sees the rise of modern ‘aesthetics’…. It is
mainly from this era, in the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller,
Coleridge and others, that we inherit our contemporary
ideas of…‘aesthetic experience’, of ’aesthetic harmony‘
and the unique nature of the artefact. Previously men and
women had written poems, staged plays or painted pic-
tures for a variety of purposes, while others had read,
watched or viewed them in a variety of ways. Now these
concrete, historically variable practices were being sub-
sumed into some special, mysterious faculty known as the
‘aesthetic’…. The assumption that there was an unchang-
ing object known as ‘art’, or an isolatable experience
called ‘beauty’ or the ‘aesthetic’, was largely a product of
the…alienation of art from social life…. The whole point of
‘creative’ writing was that it was gloriously useless, an ‘end
in itself loftily removed from any sordid social purpose….
Art was extricated from the material practices, social rela-
tions and ideological meanings in which it is always caught
up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.
(Eagleton [1983] 1996:18–19)8
Paradoxically, however, this ‘fetishisation’ of the aesthetic
offers itself, in the course of the nineteenth century, as a substi-
tute for the rapidly waning spiritual force of religion, as we
shall see later in respect of Matthew Arnold, and as a forma-
tive element in the urgently needed construction of a cohesive
national consciousness and identity in the context of the emer-
gence of a new and heterogeneous industrial, urban, class
society. So that René Wellek’s other term, ‘nationalisation, sig-
nals the nation’s appropriation of a valued selection of tran-
scendent ‘creative’ texts in the national language as somehow
articulating its ‘best self’ (Arnold’s phrase for an essential
humane culture: Arnold [1869] 1971:108), which it then

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 37
canonises as ‘The National Literature’. As the process settles
and matures, this construction will come to seem ‘natural’, but
a national Canon is nevertheless deeply ideologically inscribed.
For the valued literature will be seen to represent, not merely
‘aesthetic value’, but rather, in Buckle’s sharply perceptive
phrase given earlier, ‘the form in which the knowledge of a
country is registered’. That is: the expression of what it per-
ceives, or desires to be perceived, as its most admired spiritual
and humane values, and thus of its ‘true character’. Signifi-
cantly, at around the same time, Charles Kingsley, one of the
founding-fathers of ‘English’ as an academic subject, described
literature as ‘the autobiography of a nation’;9 while in 1835, in
the context of establishing the civilising need to teach the peo-
ple of India English, Lord Macaulay had based his case on the
premise that ‘the literature of England is now more valuable
than that of classical antiquity’ (Macaulay [1835] 1995:429).
This reciprocity between the aesthetic and the national, despite
notions of a ‘world literature’ which transcends national
boundaries, is what makes it so difficult to discuss ‘Literature’
abstracted from its determining national conditions of being,
and drives the focus of my argument here constantly back to
the particular case of ‘English Literature’.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, then, a fully
aestheticised notion of ‘Literature’ was becoming current. But
a further factor in its constitution is its symbiotic relationship
with criticism. Indeed, we may say that while literature exists
independently of criticism, ‘Literature’ is only created by criti-
cism: it is criticism which selects, evaluates and elevates those
texts which are designated as such, and which identifies—more
or less explicitly—those features of them that comprise their
high ‘literary value’. ‘Literature’, in other words, is made in the
image of the criticism that regards it. Certainly, as Chris
Baldick neatly points out, ‘the real content of the school and
college subject which goes under the name “English Litera-

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38 LITERATURE
ture” is not literature in the primary sense, but criticism’
(Baldick 1983:4). In the English-speaking tradition at least, it
is the Victorian poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, who is most
influential in this respect, and who fundamentally establishes
the dominant conception of an aestheticised ‘Literature’ of
high cultural value for the modern period. Throughout his writ-
ings, his use of such phrases as ‘current English literature’,
‘good literature’, ‘the literature of France and Germany', ‘great
works of literature’, ‘the creation of a masterwork of
literature’, show that the OED’s third sense has definitely
arrived. So, too, does the status he ascribes to ‘great literature’,
and thence to the literary critic.
However, although Arnold uses the word with its main mod-
ern meaning, he also, on the one hand, retains ‘poetry’ both in
the older generic sense and as indicating the highest realms of
literary art, and, on the other, transposes ‘literature’ into the
broader term ‘culture’. Both of these usages, in different ways,
have had an equally profound impact on later conceptions of
the value and function of ‘Literature’. In his essay, ‘The Study
of Poetry’ (Essays in Criticism: Second Series, 1888), he makes
an immense claim on behalf of ‘poetry’:
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn
to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain
us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete;
and most of what now passes with us for religion and phi-
losophy will be replaced by poetry.
(Arnold 1970:340)
We can see here how Eagleton’s ‘special, mysterious faculty
[of] the aesthetic’ (‘poetry’) is being substituted as the realm of
the spiritual in modern ‘scientific’ society. And in ‘The Func-
tion of Criticism at the Present Time’ (Essays in Criticism,
1865), Arnold famously defines what the object of attention

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 39
for the person of culture (or ‘critic’) should be: ‘the best that is
known and thought in the world’ (Arnold 1970:141); in Cul-
ture and Anarchy, this becomes ‘the best that has been thought
and said in the world’ (Arnold [1869] 1971:6; my emphasis).
It is here, for modern Anglo-American literary culture, that the
notions of ‘the tradition’ and ‘the canon’ are established,
although Arnold is not responsible for the concept-words
themselves, nor, indeed, for the parochially ‘nationalising’ ten-
dency that, as we have seen, goes hand-in-hand with the aes-
theticisation of ‘Literature’. His own ‘Hellenistic’ view of the
canon was, in fact, uncompromisingly cosmopolitan, and his
life-work aimed at countering the ‘philistine’ provincialism of
nineteenth-century English social culture. It is somewhat
ironic, then, that he should have become the éminence grise
behind the twentieth-century institutionalisation of ‘The
National Literature’ as the ‘form’ of our national identity, and
of ‘English’ as the academic processing-plant in which it is cel-
ebrated, nurtured and recycled on behalf of the nation’s spiri-
tual health.
But it is also in Arnold’s views on the ‘function of criticism’
that further determinants of the modern conception of ‘Litera-
ture’ may be found. Indeed, his most important collections of
essays, aside from Culture and Anarchy, are the two series enti-
tled Essays in Criticism. Criticism, he says, must seek ‘to know
the best that is known and thought in the world’ with disinter-
estedness—‘the free play of the mind on all subjects’ (Arnold
1970:141–2)—and to make ‘the best ideas prevail’ (134). In
this way, ‘a current of true and fresh ideas’ (141) is created,
and out of ‘this stir and growth come the creative epochs of
literature’ (134). It is important to note that, for Arnold, it is
‘criticism first’—‘when criticism has done its work’ (142)—
which creates the conditions for true creativity. And criticism,
as the later ‘The Study of Poetry’ makes clear, involves ‘a high
standard and…a strict judgement’ (Arnold 1970:341): for ‘the

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40 LITERATURE
best poetry is what we want’ (342)—‘poetry of a high order of
excellence’ (341)—since in poetry ‘our race, as time goes on,
will find an ever surer and surer stay’ (340). In order to obtain
this great cultural good, we must be able to ‘appreciate the
wide difference between it and all work which has not the
same high character’ (344); and to do this, we should have in
mind the works of ‘the great masters, and to apply them as a
touchstone to other poetry’ (347). This should not be an
abstract process of ascertaining greatness, Arnold adds, but
should be achieved by taking ‘concrete examples…specimens
of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and [saying]:
The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is
expressed there’ (349). In other words, what Arnold is propos-
ing is the evaluative selection, by practical (not theoretical)
discrimination and judgement, of the best ‘Literature’ as the
spiritual/cultural prop in
an era…in which we are to see multitudes of a common
sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature
…readers [who] do not want and could not relish anything
better than such literature…[the provision of which] is
becoming a vast and profitable industry.
(366)
Represented as an elevated aesthetic domain to be defended
for the race’s benefit against the assault of commercialised
mediocrity, it would be difficult to announce more clearly the
ideological investment carried by the high-cultural concept ‘Lit-
erature’. Equally, in Culture and Anarchy, whilst Arnold
appropriates the wider term ‘culture’ to designate ‘sweetness
and light’ (Arnold [1869] 1971:69), the ‘pursuit of perfection’,
‘a man’s total spiritual growth’ (30), our ‘best self’ (108), and
the need to ensure that such ideas ‘prevail’ (69), it is clearly
literary culture (‘the best which has been thought and said in

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 41
the world’ [6]) that he has in mind as the bulwark against the
contemporary cultural ‘anarchy’ incident on the rise of a mod-
ern, mass, class society. Furthermore, his ‘aliens’—individuals
who are ‘led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane
spirit, by the love of human perfection’ (109)—sound remark-
ably like those (literary) critics who can distinguish the ‘best
poetry’ from the ‘masses of a common sort of literature’, and
who therefore become the guardians of the cultural health of
the modern world.
To register the strength of Arnold’s influence in the construc-
tion of the concept of ‘Literature’—especially in respect of
such equally influential Anglo-American twentieth-century crit-
ics as T.S.Eliot and F.R.Leavis—and in the institutionalisation
of ‘Literature’ in the education syllabus, let me sum up the key
ideas in his work:
• there is the elevation of ‘Literature’ (‘poetry’, ‘culture’) as a
crucial humanising force;
• the importance of recognising a tradition of great works
from the past;
• the central place of a discriminating criticism in selecting
‘the best’ from the rest, in order to create a healthy culture
in which creativity can thrive. This is a criticism based not
on ‘abstract’ theory, but on an empirical intuition which
can discern innate quality in ‘concrete’ examples of the
poetry itself;
• the notion of an intellectual élite (‘critics’/’aliens’) who are
the agents of this process, and who will help to make high
(literary/minority) culture ‘prevail’ in the face of a moder-
nity characterised by loss of faith and values, by fragmenta-
tion and alienation, and by an urban mass civilization.
However, before we see Arnold’s ideas alchemised into the
fully-blown Modernist institutionalisation of ‘Literature’, we

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42 LITERATURE
should notice a parallel and contiguous process in the second
half of the nineteenth century: the construction of ‘Literature’
as an academic subject.
It will be difficult in what follows to avoid slipping between
offering a potted history of the rise of ‘English’ as an academic
subject and keeping in focus our concern with the construction
of the modern concept of ‘Literature’. But in either case, it
should be clearly recognised that I am constrained to a limited
national perspective (albeit with some attempt to include an
American dimension).10 What I will do, then, is pinpoint what
seem to be significant features in the long and complex process
by which ‘Literature’, in the context of this national cultural
history, became more or less synonymous with ‘English’.
In England,11 the earliest instruction in the English language
and literature was offered by University College, London in
the 1820s (the first Professor being appointed in 1828), with
some emphasis on the moral and ‘liberalising’ study of litera-
ture. This was followed by other London and provincial uni-
versity colleges in the following decades (not, however, by the
‘old’ Oxbridge universities until much later in the century).
Even so, the syllabus was very variable, and the ‘English sub-
jects’ could include language and philology, history, geography
and economics, as well as literature.12 Much of the curriculum
was comprised of a ‘mapping’ of the historical components of
the national language and literature (the first book with the
title A History of English Language and Literature, by Robert
Chambers, was published in 1836), this process being at once
symptomatised and underpinned by such later large-scale Vic-
torian and Edwardian scholarly projects as the compilation of
the Oxford English Dictionary (initiated 1878) and of the
Cambridge History of English Literature (15 vols., 1907–27).
But it was in the Mechanics Institutes, working-men’s col-

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 43
leges and the university extension lecture circuits, rather than
in the universities proper, that ‘English’ was developed most
dynamically by such Victorian evangelists as F.D.Maurice and
Charles Kingsley. This was explicitly to foster a sense of
national belonging and ‘larger sympathies’ amongst working
men, and to create ‘fellow-feeling’ between them and other
classes. While many working men did indeed feel enfranchised
by the acquisition of ‘Literature’, it nevertheless remained an
ideologically-driven initiative to ‘humanise’ and ‘civilise’ poten-
tially disruptive social elements in a developing class-stratified
society by providing them with a ‘liberal’ or ‘humane’ educa-
tion. In this context, ‘English Literature’ became at once a
vehicle of moral education and a cheap and accessible ‘poor
man’s Classics’, although how successful such a social mission
was, and how far it remained ‘the distinctive hallmark of liter-
ary studies’, are matters open to debate.13
Equally formative in the development of ‘English’ was its
early association with women. Around the middle of the cen-
tury, the recognition of a ‘surplus’ of unmarried women,
together with a perceived need to educate the nation’s chil-
dren, led to the training of women as school-teachers, a train-
ing in which the ‘personal’ and ‘intuitive’ properties of
‘English’, and especially literature, played a crucial and suit-
able role. Charles Kingsley, in his introductory lecture on
becoming Professor of English at Queen’s College for Women,
London around the mid-century, stated that the reading of
English Literature, so suited as it was to ‘women’s inborn per-
sonal interest’, would contribute an understanding of the
‘English spirit’ amongst women,14 essential in a group who
were, in effect, to become the ‘teacher-mothers’ of the nation’s
young. The huge demand for school-teachers following the
1870 Education Act, especially for those with higher educa-
tion, led to the entry into the universities of increasing num-
bers of women studying ‘English’. It is significant in this con-

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44 LITERATURE
text that, whilst Oxford had fought off a proposal, supported
by a Royal Commission, to include in its syllabus the study of
English in the 1850s, by 1873 the subject was included in the
examinations for a Pass degree, and by 1893 the university
had established an Honours School of English Language and
Literature. Up until the First World War, then, ‘English’ at
Oxford was largely a ‘women’s subject’, a ‘soft’ option
unsuited to the intellectual powers of men, who took mathe-
matics or ‘Greats’ (Classics), but one which was regarded, in
its designation as ‘pink sunsets’ and ‘mere chatter about Shel-
ley’,15 as admirably tailored to the ‘feminine mind’. Not sur-
prisingly perhaps, the first Professor of English Literature at
Oxford (1904) was Sir Walter Raleigh, while the first at Cam-
bridge (1912) was Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, both ‘men of
letters’ who saw their ‘feminine’ subject as essentially one of
belles-lettrist ‘appreciation’. Nevertheless, despite these unpro-
pitious beginnings, but in the context of a co-existent decline
in the popularity of a general classical education, ‘English Lan-
guage and Literature’ began to supercede it as the new
‘humane studies’.
In America, English departments in colleges and universities
began to be founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, although they, too, were departments of ‘Language and
Literature’. The drive towards the professionalisation of
‘English’, indeed, came from the philologists, who were the
first to develop home-grown graduate schools in the new disci-
pline and who tended to use examples from literary texts for
their linguistic explications. But with a growing recognition
that studying the examples might have a greater popularity
than the grammatical theory, and with a concurrent scholarly
and systematic processing of literary texts (editing new edi-
tions, for example), a kind of literary-critical study began to
emerge. This coincided with a concern among the wider non-
academic community to see the development of a more human-

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 45
istic and cultural general education as in the national interest.
As Gerald Graff and Michael Warner put it in the introduction
to The Origins of Literary Studies in America:
After the Civil War, educators and custodians of culture
began to feel that the study of English literature had much
to offer to a society whose sense of national unity seemed
increasingly threatened by such divisive forces as indus-
trial capitalism, European immigration, labor agitation and
other forms of class conflict, and the increasing concentra-
tion of Americans in cities at the same time as they
became dispersed across the continent. The teaching of
English literature in schools and colleges promised to
serve as a binding principle for Americans who had less in
common than they had had in the small-town America
before the Civil War.
(Graff and Warner 1989:5)
As in the English context, then, a mixture of motives fuelled
the development of the study of literature as a significant ele-
ment in the education process: from perceptions that it might
assist in political and social control, to more liberal views of its
democratising, civilising and humanising potential.
Alongside the professionalisation fostered by the philolo-
gists, however, and often in open warfare with them, were
belles-lettrist critics who looked to Matthew Arnold and John
Ruskin for guidance, and who saw literature as the repository
of moral and spiritual values which could be mobilised on
behalf of an all-round ‘humane’ education and of the enhance-
ment of the national culture. As Graff makes clear, in the essay
quoted above and in his Professing Literature: An Institutional
History, the tensions and contradictions between the various
constituent elements of ‘Literary Studies’ in America show ‘a
tale not of triumphant humanism, nationalism, or any single

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46 LITERATURE
professional model, but a series of conflicts’ which mark all of
its future history (Graff: 1987, 14). So that ‘teaching the con-
flicts’, Graff (1992) claims, should now be the principal
project for a ‘literary studies’ which can only be explained and
made sense of by understanding its own determinate history,
as indeed is also the case for the literature that is its object of
attention. I will return to this issue in Chapter 3 (pp. 79–80).
Nevertheless, the origins of ‘Literary Studies’ in the US suggest
an ideological matrix for the creation of the conception of ‘Lit-
erature’ which is cognate with that we have observed develop-
ing in England: a growing regard for ‘Literature’s’ value in
engendering a humane national culture, and an increasing pro-
fessionalisation in the critical study of the literary texts them-
selves. We will see the acme of these tendencies when we
consider American ‘New Criticism’ on pp. 56–9.
In England, following the Education Act of 1902, and the
foundation of the English Association in 1907 with its
Arnoldian principles and its brief to promote English literary
culture in education, ‘English’ began more broadly to take its
place at the heart of the school curriculum as the one subject
essential for every child’s education in a fully ‘national’ educa-
tion system. As a further refinement of this process, in the
course of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
there had been a tendency to separate out the study of the
English Language and Literature, with the latter taking on a
methodological character of its own and becoming regarded as
central to the full personal development of the properly bal-
anced citizen. This kind of mass social engineering may not
have been quite what Matthew Arnold had in mind when he
urged making the pursuit of culture ‘prevail’, but its ideologi-
cal premises were not dissimilar.
Pre-First World War imperialism was a further factor in
engendering the need to celebrate the national heritage of
‘English Literature’ in order to forge a sense of national iden-

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 47
tity (see Baldick 1983: chapter 3), but it was the War itself
which at once intensified patriotic fervour for an ‘Englishness’
enshrined in its literature, and ensured the victory at Oxford
and Cambridge of ‘English’ over its erstwhile enemy: the ‘Teu-
tonic’ or ‘Germanic’ philology (ibid: 89). In this context, we
need only think of the thousands of ‘heroic’ and/or Georgian
early war poems, and of the huge popularity of Rupert
Brooke’s sonnet ‘The Soldier’ in particular. Conversely, the
enormous cultural disruption of the war and its aftermath—all
faiths and values undermined, class and gender patterns in
turmoil, the post-war world unrecognisable to many—created
a further need to reinforce the national consciousness, the
sense of belonging to a shared national organism. Once again,
‘Literature’ was seen to provide, in Arnold’s phrase, ‘an ever
surer and surer stay’. The 1921 Board of Education ‘Newbolt
Report’ on The Teaching of English in England is the most
explicit expression of this. Time and again, its Arnoldian
premises weave into the ‘anarchy’ of the post-war social fabric:
a liberal education based on ‘English’ ‘would form a new ele-
ment of national unity, linking together the mental life of all
classes…. Even more certainly should pride and joy in the
national literature serve as such a bond’. Literature was a ‘spiri-
tual influence’ which might ameliorate the ‘morbid condition
of the body politic’; so that to avoid ‘lamentable
consequences’, education should promote ‘fellowship’ by way
of literature as ‘an embodiment of the best thoughts of the best
minds, the most direct and lasting communication of experi-
ence by man to men'. But, whilst it directs people to ‘higher’
things than ‘the social problem’, and the teaching of it ‘involv
[es] grave national issues’, literature in itself is presented as
entirely apolitical, merely being a civilising influence which
teaches ‘young men and women the use of leisure’ and pre-
pares them for ‘life’.
Newbolt, of course, was primarily concerned with fostering

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48 LITERATURE
the educational centrality of the ‘National Literature’. In this,
Shakespeare, ‘our greatest English writer’, is ‘an inevitable and
necessary part of school activity’, and the creative ‘fellowship’
of a stable, homogenous and organic Elizabethan culture is its
(pointedly) exemplary moment: ‘It was no inglorious time of
our history that Englishmen delighted altogether in dance and
song and drama, nor were these pleasures the privilege of a
few or a class’. But the Report also indicates more generally
some of the by now conventionally received characteristics of
the notion of ‘Literature’:
All great literature has in it two elements, the contempo-
rary and the eternal…. To concentrate the study of litera-
ture mainly on the first aspect…is to ignore its nobler,
more… universal element. There is a sense—the most
important of all—in which Homer and Dante and Milton,
Aeschylus and Shakespeare, are all of the same age or of
none. Great literature is only partly the reflection of a par-
ticular year or generation: it is also a timeless thing, which
can never become old fashioned or out of date….
With the nation once again in desperate need of a new genera-
tion of English teachers, and with the Newbolt Report lurking
behind their training, it is not hard to see how the dominant
mid-twentieth-century definition of ‘Literature’ became widely
broadcast and received.
Straddling the publication of the Newbolt Report was a fur-
ther development in the evolution of ‘Literature’ as a modern
cultural discourse, which, while much more intellectually
sophisticated and influential, has some features in common
with the Report’s position. Cambridge University’s ‘Literature,
Life and Thought’ tripos was introduced in 1917, although it
was not until 1926 that a degree in English alone could be
taken. It included papers on Tragedy, Literary Criticism, Spe-

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 49
cial Subjects, the English Moralists and—most importantly in
our context here—‘Practical Criticism’. With this last critical
initiative, energised by the Cambridge academics most signifi-
cantly associated with its practice (see Richards, Empson and
Leavis, pp. 51–6), we might say that the recognisably modern
conception of ‘Literature’, and of its professional critical study,
had come into being. It is to the distinctive contribution of its
immediate and influential precursor, T.S.Eliot, and then to the
impact of this new ‘Modernist’ criticism in England and Amer-
ica, that I now turn.
To state it succinctly, if over-simply: what is central and com-
mon to the diverse inflections of the twentieth-century Anglo-
American critical traditon is a profound, indeed reverential,
regard for literary works themselves. This is manifest, first, in
an obsessive concern with ‘the text itself’, nothing more nor
less; second, in the deployment of literary texts as icons of
human value against twentieth-century cultural barbarism; and
third, in a ‘scientific’, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’ (Arnold’s
word) critical close-reading of ‘the words on the page’. All
together, these tendencies represent the ultimate humanist aes-
theticisation of ‘Literature’, and, as the components of a natu-
ralised critical orthodoxy, they were to dominate literary cul-
ture throughout the middle decades of the century. Such an
orthodoxy came to require—and received from the late 1960s
onwards (the subject of Chapter 3)—urgent demystification
and dismantling, if literature and criticism were to be re-
enfranchised for the contemporary world.
The principal mediator of Matthew Arnold’s thinking into
the new critical movements, and himself the most influential
common figure behind them, was the American (and then natu-
ralised English) poet, dramatist and critic, T.S.Eliot. In his
early essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)—

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50 LITERATURE
perhaps the single most formative work in twentieth-century
Anglo-American criticism—Eliot emphasises that writers must
have ‘the historical sense’: a sense, that is, of the tradition of
literature in which they must situate themselves, and which
will help them to achieve the essential quality of ‘impersonal-
ity’ in their art (Eliot, T.S. [1919] 1969a: 16–17). Eliot’s
notion of ‘the Tradition, while being highly selective, idiosyn-
cratic, and arguably designed to sustain and legitimate his own
kind of ‘difficult’, ‘witty’ modern poetry, nevertheless harks
back to Arnold’s dictum of ‘the best that has been thought and
said in the world’. It is central in constructing the received mid-
twentieth-century conception of ‘Literature’: a canon of great
works which most successfully hold an essence of human expe-
rience in their poetic ‘medium’. For the true poet (and we may
note Eliot’s privileging of poetry as the supreme genre, since
this was to become the primary focus of much ‘Practical’ and
‘New’ criticism) is a kind of ‘impersonal’ vehicle, not of per-
sonal experience, but for the residual essence which constitutes
the ‘medium’: the poem itself. This last should then be the
reader/critic’s sole object of interest. In a famous phrase from
another essay (‘Hamlet’), Eliot describes the work of art as an
‘objective correlative’ (an idea closely related to the notion of
‘the image’ in Modernist poetics) for the ‘real’ experience
which may have engendered it, and from which the poem, as
‘impersonal’ re-creation, now stands autonomous (Eliot, T.S.
[1919] 1969b: 145). The emphasis in Eliot’s theory on the
autonomous art-object is fundamental both to what we have
seen to be the fetishisation of ‘the text itself in Modernist criti-
cism’s conception of ‘Literature’ (see p. 49), and to the new/
practical criticism’s ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ focus on a ‘close
reading’ of ‘the words on the page’.
But Eliot’s most potent contribution is his implicitly
Arnoldian promotion of ‘Literature’ and ‘the Tradition’
(Arnold’s ‘Culture’) as a spiritual-aesthetic ‘stay’ against the

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 51
destructive mass civilisation of the post-war ‘wasteland’. In his
cultural despair, he sees ‘Literature’—itself vulnerable and
threatened—as enshrining humane values in a world inimical
to them. In this respect, the ending of his own poem The
Waste Land may be regarded as articulating both a post-First-
World-War confirmation of Arnold’s worst cultural premoni-
tions and the ideological core of Modernist criticism. When
Eliot writes: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’,
and lists brief quotations from the literary works of earlier
dynamically creative cultures (Eliot, T.S. [1922] 1958:77), we
can read ‘Culture’/’Literature’ for ‘fragments’, and ‘Anarchy’
for ‘ruins’.
In the same period that Eliot was developing these ideas,
‘English’, as we have noticed, was being established as the cen-
tral subject in the education curriculum, and was seeking, in
the Cambridge tripos most particularly, to shed the older
belleslettrist character which had dominated it hitherto. Under
Eliot’s influence, a new generation of professional critics
emerged who had a thoroughly symbiotic relationship with
contemporary Modernism, finding their own premises borne
out both in its theory and in its literary practice. Key figures in
generating the new kinds of ‘practical-critical’ analysis in the
1920s and 1930s were the Cambridge academics,
I.A.Richards, William Empson and F.R.Leavis.
Richards produced his widely-influential and innovative
books, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Science
and Poetry (1926), in which he attempted to lay down an
explicit theoretical base for literary study. Arguing that criti-
cism should emulate the precision of science in its pursuit of a
newly professional methodological identity, he sought to articu-
late the special character of literary language, differentiating
the ‘emotive’ language of poetry from the ‘referential’ language
of non-literary discourse. But for all his science and psychol-
ogy, Richards retains a fundamentally aestheticist—indeed

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52 LITERATURE
recognisably Arnoldian—conception of the role of poetry in
the fraught ‘anarchy of the post-war environment. Since reli-
gion can no longer supply the spiritual dimension which peo-
ple need in their lives, and science is emotionally neutral, it is
poetry, Richards says, which ‘is capable of saving us’
(Richards 1926:82–3), poetry which offers order in its own
harmonious ‘reconciliation’ of the disorganised impulses of
lived experience. Even more influential—certainly in terms of
the praxis its title enunciates—was Practical Criticism (1929),
in which Richards provided examples of his students’ woefully
inadequate attempts at the critical analysis of short unidenti-
fied poems, and sought, therefore, to establish basic tenets for
the ‘close reading’ of poetry. ‘Practical Criticism’, which was
itself a feature of the new Cambridge tripos, became, in both
England and America, the central compulsory critical and ped-
agogic tool of tertiary (and then secondary) ‘English’, and was
rapidly naturalised there as the fundamental and objectively
‘scientific’ critical practice. Its virtues were that it encouraged
attentive close reading of texts and, in its intellectual and his-
torical abstraction, a kind of democratisation of literary study
in the classroom, in which everyone was placed on an equal
footing in the face of an ‘unseen’ text. This point will be re-
emphasised in the context of American New Criticism later on
pp. 56–7.
But ‘Practical Criticism’s effect was also to fetishise and reify
the literary text (‘poem’) as a valued/valuable aesthetic object
in itself, and to dehistoricise and abstract the study of litera-
ture by focussing obsessively on ‘the text itself’ in isolation
from its informing contexts. It would be inaccurate to charac-
terise William Empson, Richards’s pupil, as being simply a
‘Practical’ or ‘New’ critic, but in our context here, his first,
famously precocious book (written while still a student), Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930), may be seen as an exemplification
of the principles of ‘Practical Criticism’ in action. Its virtuoso

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 53
feats of creative close-reading, its emphasis on ‘ambiguity’ as
the defining characteristic of poetic language, and its detaching
of literary texts from their social, historical and intellectual
contexts in the process of mining their ambiguities, were all
deeply influential in establishing both ‘Practical’ and ‘New’
criticism in this country and abroad throughout the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s.
Of all the new Cambridge critics, however, it is F.R.Leavis
who most potently determines the notion of ‘Literature’ for the
middle decades of this century. Even as late as 1983, Terry
Eagleton was writing:
Whatever the ‘failure’ or ‘success’ of Scrutiny [the
immensely influential journal launched by Leavis in 1932
and edited by him until 1953]…the fact remains that
English students in England today are ‘Leavisites’ whether
they know it or not, irremediably altered by that historic
intervention.
(Eagleton [1983] 1996:27)
Profoundly influenced by Arnold and T.S.Eliot, Leavis’s whole
project was to establish ‘English’ (for which understand ‘Litera-
ture’) at the very centre of the education syllabus. His Educa-
tion and the University (1943) was in part made up of such
earlier essays as the widely-influential ‘A Sketch for an
“English School”’ and the significantly-titled ‘Mass Civilisa-
tion and Minority Culture’, and it bears witness to the fact
that Leavis was as much an educator as he was a critic. In addi-
tion to producing many volumes of literary and cultural criti-
cism, he edited Scrutiny, which was widely read by thousands
of members of the ‘English’ profession inside and outside the
universities throughout its 20-year existence. He taught genera-
tions of students, who themselves became ‘Leavisites’ out in
the field of secondary and tertiary education and who still

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54 LITERATURE
command a fair degree of influence even today; and he was the
informing presence behind hundreds of critical works pro-
duced by others—not least, for example, the hugely successful,
markedly ‘Leavisite’ but ostensibly neutral, The Pelican Guide
to English Literature, edited by Boris Ford in seven volumes
(1954–61).
In many respects, Leavis has much in common with ‘Practi-
cal Criticism’, not least in his equal concern with the formal
specificity of ‘the text itself’, with ‘the words on the page’. In
‘Henry James and the Function of Criticism’, in his book The
Common Pursuit, where the references to Arnold and T.S.
Eliot in the two titles are pointedly emphatic, he wrote: ‘[the
critic] is concerned with the work in front of him as something
that should contain within itself the reason why it is so and
not otherwise’ (Leavis: [1952] 1978:224). And in a famous
exchange with the American critic, René Wellek, he both con-
firms this and reveals the strategically untheorised, ‘practical’
nature of his work: the business of the critic, he says, is to
‘attain a peculiar completeness of response…[in order] to enter
into possession of the given poem…in its concrete fulness’
(‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy, ibid.: 213). Indeed, Leavis
is the most resolutely anti-theoretical of all influential critics,
and it is Arnold once more whom we hear behind the refusal
of ‘abstract’ theorising and the direct response to ‘concrete’
examples of poetic art.
But simply to regard Leavis as an ahistorical and formalistic
‘Practical Critic’ would be a mistake, for his close attention to
the text is only ever to establish the vitality of its ‘felt life’, its
authenticity of ‘experience’, to prove its moral force, to demon-
strate its excellence, and hence to be able to ‘discriminate’ its
value in relation to lesser works. The full quotation about ‘the
critic’s task’ from Eliot’s essay, ‘The Function of Criticism’,
which gave Leavis his title for The Common Pursuit is: ‘the
common pursuit of true judgement’ (Eliot, T.S. [1923]

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 55
1969:25); and ‘judgement’ and ‘discrimination’, by way of
close ‘scrutiny’, are at the very heart of the Leavisian project.
Hence, the other indicatively-titled books: Revaluation, which
comprises a T.S.Eliot-like extrapolation of the ‘true’ tradition
of English poetry, and The Great Tradition, which opens with
the characteristically tendentious ‘judgement’: ‘The great
English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James
and Joseph Conrad’ (Leavis [1948] 1962:9). Central to
Leavis’s work, then, is the need to identify the ‘true’ great
works of ‘Literature’, to sift them out from the dross (espe-
cially, for example, ‘popular fiction’ produced for the mass
market), and to further establish the Arnoldian and Eliotian
‘Tradition’. Such works, in their concrete experiential speci-
ficity, will embody ‘Life’, that crucial, but always undefined,
Leavisian term: in The Great Tradition, for example, he writes
that ‘the great English novelists…are all distinguished by a
vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness
before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (ibid.: 17). As Terry
Eagleton says of the invincible circularity of Leavis’s position:
‘either you felt Life or you did not. Great literature was a litera-
ture reverently open to Life, and what Life was could be
demonstrated by great literature’ (Eagleton: [1983] 1996:36).
‘True’ literary works will mobilise their dynamic life-values
against the forces of urban-industrial materialism and cultural
barbarism produced by a ‘Technologico-Benthamite’ age
(Leavis 1969: the phrase is part of his title for Chapter 4
there). In effect, they represent a ‘minority culture’ embattled
with a ‘mass civilisation’, and their identification and protec-
tion as the (Great) Tradition is essential because these are the
works which constitute the syllabus in a university ‘English’
course, where the crucial work of refining and revitalising the
nation’s cultural life goes on. And for Leavis, the focus is very
much ‘The National Literature’, which enshrines the qualities
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56 LITERATURE
Just as Leavis’s moral mission distinguishes him from an
abstract and aesthetic critical formalism, so too does his socio-
logical and historical sense. ‘Literature’, for him, is a weapon
in the cultural politics of battling with the modern world; and
the ‘great’ literature of the past (his chosen period is the seven-
teenth century—i.e. before Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’
[Eliot [1921] 1969:288] had taken place) bears witness to the
organic strength and stability of pre-industrial cultures. In this,
as for Arnold, Eliot, and indeed the Newbolt Report as we
have seen earlier, the past and past literature act as a yardstick
for measuring the sterility of the present ‘wasteland’. However,
the work of ‘great’ moderns such as Eliot and D.H.Lawrence,
for example, in its ‘necessary’ difficulty, complexity and com-
mitment to cultural values, is also mobilised by Leavis on
behalf of ‘Life’ in the barren destructiveness of a twentieth-
century ‘mass civilisation’. It is not without point that in New
Bearings in English Poetry (1932) Leavis effectively first
taught people how to ‘read’ The Waste Land as a modern
‘master-work’, nor that the title of his later book,
D.H.Lawrence: Novelist (1955), presents the author as the
essence and acme of his genre. It is ‘Literature’, then—and
especially ‘English Literature’—in which humane values sur-
vive, and it is ‘Literature’ which holds at bay the worst evils of
contemporary life. So attuned to the mindset of its period was
this paradoxical mixture of radical affirmation and élitist pes-
simism that it constituted the ideological heart of culturalist
thinking throughout the middle of the century.16 It became
effectively synonymous with ‘Literary Studies’ in England, and
placed the Leavisian conception of ‘Literature’ centre-stage in
the wider national and social arena.
In America, in the same period, the analagous movement in
criticism and education was the ‘New Criticism’ which
emerged during the late-1920s and 1930s, and which was espe-
cially dominant in the 1940s and 1950s. Its origins were in the

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 57
work of members of a group of traditionalist academics from
the American South hostile to what they saw as the hard-nosed
industrialism and materialism of a United States dominated by
the North. In this, a consanguinity with the conservative
humanism of Arnold, Eliot and Leavis is to be descried. Its
high point of influence during the Second World War, and the
‘Cold War’ succeeding it, may be explained by the way New
Criticism seemed to offer a quietistic haven for whole genera-
tions of academics and students overwrought by war and
political strife. Its privileging of literary texts whose ‘order’
and ‘harmony’ cause them to transcend history and ideology,
and its own ‘impersonal’ analysis of what makes them great
works of art, were well-suited to the mentalité of what
E.P.Thompson called ‘Natopolis’ (Thompson 1960:144). In
addition, with the huge expansion of the student population in
the States in this period catering for second-generation prod-
ucts of the American ‘melting pot’, New Criticism, with its
‘practical’ basis, was at once pedagogically orientated and eco-
nomical (copies of short ‘unseen’ texts—primarily poems—
could be distributed to everyone on an equal basis). It was also
a way of accommodating the disparate cultural needs of
masses of individuals who had no history in common. In other
words, the ahistorical, ‘objective’ nature of this critical prac-
tice, the study only of ‘the words on the page’, was an appar-
ently equalising, democratic activity appropriate to twentieth-
century American experience.
The movement acquired its name from the the title of John
Crowe Ransoms book on, inter alia, Eliot and Richards, The
New Criticism (1941); and his earlier essay, ‘Criticism, Inc.’
([1937] 1972), laid down some of the ground-rules for it. Criti-
cism should be the ‘business’ of professionals (i.e. university
professors); it should become ‘more scientific…precise and sys-
tematic’; students should ‘study literature, and not merely
about literature’; criticism was not ethical, linguistic or histori-

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58 LITERATURE
cal studies, but should be able to exhibit, not the ‘prose core’
to which a poem may be reduced, but ‘the differentia, residue,
or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire’ (Ransom
[1937] 1972:229, 230, 232, 238). Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Penn Warren’s textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and
Understanding Fiction (1943) are widely regarded as having
spread New Critical doctrine throughout generations of Ameri-
can literature students, and books of essays like W.K.
Wimsatt’s symptomatically-titled, The Verbal Icon: Studies in
the Meaning of Poetry ([1954] 1970) and Cleanth Brooks’s
own volume of close readings, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies
in the Structure of Poetry ([1947] 1968), gave practical applica-
tion to Ransom’s precepts. In his essay, ‘Keats’s Sylvan Histo-
rian: History Without Footnotes’, for example, Brooks explic-
itly rejects the relevance of biography. He focusses throughout
on the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’s‘ exemplification of ‘irony’,
‘paradox’, ‘dramatic propriety’ and ‘wholeness’, and he
admires the poem’s own ‘history’ for its resolution of the
‘clash between the ideas of war and peace…[in a] sense of sta-
ble repose’ (Brooks [1947] 1968:132). He praises its ‘insight
into essential truth’ (134)—in contradistinction, it is implied
throughout, to our ‘meaningless’ ‘accumulations of facts’ and
the ‘scientific and philosophical generalisations which domi-
nate our world’ (134, 135): ‘like eternity, its history is beyond
time, outside time’ (133)—and, in this, he locates its value for
the present (1942—at the height of wartime ‘history’). For
Brooks, the ‘Ode’s’ essential value seems to lie in the ‘ironic
fact’ (his phrase) that, like Keats’s urn itself, which is ‘All
breathing human passion far above’, the poem ‘stress[es] that
all human passion does leave one cloyed; hence the superiority
of art’ (130; second emphasis mine). The New Critical ‘aes-
theticisation’ of the art object is epitomised here.
Equally characteristic of this tendency are W.K.Wimsatt and
Monroe C.Beardsley’s two influential essays, ‘The Intentional

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 59
Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. These set the ‘classical
objectivity’ of New Criticism in opposition to both the bio-
graphical-critical pursuit of the author’s ‘intention’ in writing a
poem, since the latter ‘goes about the world beyond his power
to intend about or control it’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley [1946]
1972:335), and ‘romantic reader psychology’, which sets up a
confusion between the poem and its ‘psychological effects’
where ‘the poem, as an object of specifically critical judge-
ment, tends to disappear’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley [1949]
1972:354, 345). For the New Critic, they contend, the impor-
tance of the poem itself is that, by ‘fixing emotions and mak-
ing them more permanently perceptible’, by the ‘survival’ of
‘its clear and nicely interrelated meanings, its completeness,
balance, and tension’, it represents a transhistorically valuable
artefact which offers a life-line to the denizens of twentieth-
century chaos: ‘In short, though cultures have changed, poems
remain and explain’ ([1949] 1972:356, 357).
Whatever the socio-cultural explanations for its provenance,
and despite its differing inflections, New Criticism was clearly
characterised in basic premise and practice. It celebrated the
uniqueness of the literary art object in and for itself; it was not
concerned with ‘context’, be it historical, biographical or philo-
sophical; it privileged poetry but did not seek out a poem’s
meaning, being concerned rather with how it ‘speaks itself’
(Archibald MacLeish’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’, itself a synoptic
New Critical manifesto, ends: ‘A poem should not mean/But
be’.)17 Nor was New Criticism interested in the ‘fallacies’ of
‘intention’ or ‘affect’. It was concerned solely with the poem as
‘text’: with its language and organisation—how the parts
relate, how it achieves its ‘order’ and ‘harmony’, how it con-
tains and resolves ‘irony’, ‘paradox’, ‘tension’, ‘ambivalence’
and ‘ambiguity’—and with articulating the very ‘poem-ness’,
the formal quintessence, of the poem itself. But New Critical
formalism was overdetermined ultimately by the value it

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60 LITERATURE
ascribed to the poetic artefact: its very superiority to the chaos
and strife of ‘life’, history, politics; its aesthetic resolution of
contradiction and tension; its supreme achievement, precisely,
of not being ‘life’.
By the middle of the twentieth century, in the Anglo-American
tradition, the concept ‘Literature’ was centrally established in
the terms outlined above: a select(ive) and valuable aesthetic
and moral resource to replenish those living in the spiritual
desert of a mass civilisation. My account will seem to have
been focussed on the institutionalisation of ‘Literature’ in the
academy, but after all, as Roland Barthes so neatly defined it:
‘Literature is what gets taught’18. Even so, the ideological force
of its cultural assumptions and meanings permeates well
beyond the realm of professional criticism. To take just one
example: however much ‘non-academic’ readers may find their
material in the wide realms of the much-despised ‘popular lit-
erature’, it is precisely the marker ‘Literature’ which demands
that qualification ‘popular’, and most people would recognise
it as such without any first-hand knowledge of its contents.
Boris Ford’s ‘General Introduction’ to a volume in the first edi-
tion of The Pelican Guide to English Literature is illuminating
in this respect:
…it is well to remember that this is the age of the Digest
and the Headline, of the Comic and the Tabloid, of the
Bestseller and the Month’s Masterpiece: an age when a
‘deep-seated spiritual vulgarity…lies at the heart of our
civilization’…. Perhaps in response to this, the twentieth
century has also been a period of unusually lively criticism,
a time when a small number of writers and critics have
made a determined effort to elicit from literature what is of
living value to us today; to reestablish…a sense of literary

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 61
tradition and to define the high standards that this tradition
implies. At the same time it is also important that this feel-
ing for a living literature and for the values it embodies
should be given as wide a currency as possible, and that
literature—both today’s literature and yesterday’s—should
have a real and not merely a nominal existence among a
comparatively large number of general readers.
(Ford 1954–61, vol. 6 [1958] 1963:7)
I would suggest that this (now evidently) ‘Leavisite’ manifesto,
with its scorn for mass culture, its unproblematical assumption
as to what literature is, its emphasis on a minority clerisy’s feel-
ing for ‘living’ value(s), and its messianic zeal to make this
(high) culture ‘prevail’, would have been accepted as natural
and unarguable amongst the vast majority of ‘general readers’
in the 1950s. It would have been, too, in the early 1960s when
I went to Nottingham University to take an ‘English’ degree
exported from Cambridge, whose ‘Literature, Life and
Thought’ syllabus unsurprisingly had at its heart our old friend
‘Practical Criticism’. Readers may have been differentiated as
‘high-’, ‘middle-’ and ‘low-brow’, and many different kinds
and schools of criticism there certainly were, but no one at
that point seriously challenged the notion of ‘Literature’ itself
as represented in the later parts of the present chapter.
I might even propose that, despite the revolutionary assault
on ‘Literature’ in theory and practice from the late-1960s
onwards, the concept has retained its discriminatory force
throughout the last three decades. It is not without point that
The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, first published
in 1983, contained a ‘General Introduction’ which opened
almost identically to the one cited above (including the same
quotation from L.H.Myers about the ‘spiritual vulgarity…[of]
our civilization); nor that in 1980, the publisher Routledge &
Kegan Paul, whose list already included examples of radical

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62 LITERATURE
critical theory, also published a book entitled The Anatomy of
Literary Studies by Marjorie Boulton which does credit to
Arnold and the Newbolt Report. There, Boulton presents liter-
ature as having ‘civilizing powers’ which will ‘broaden our
sympathies, widen our tolerance’ (Boulton 1980:12), while
conceding, with pained incredulity, that despite taking a First
in English at London University—and ‘knowing some of the
things he must have known to achieve this’—‘Lord Haw Haw’
(William Joyce) somehow still became a Nazi traitor (7)). Even
in 1997, a Guardian reviewer could castigate a new novel by
Ian McEwan in such untroubled clichés from the naturalised
culture of ‘Literature’ as: ‘McEwan is a good and not a great
writer’ whose ‘novels are efficient fictional engines, but not
true novels’; ‘the book has a thinness of literary texture’ which
helps to ‘demote its status as a literary artefact’; and so it fails
to become ‘a true literary achievement’ (Wood 1997:9–10).
It is the case, too, that ‘English Literature’ still remains a key
subject in secondary and higher education throughout large
chunks of the world. The editors of The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, for example, note in 1995 that, despite challenges to
the cultural dominance of ‘English’ in (ex-)colonial tertiary
education institutions during the 1970s, since then
little has really changed. Few ‘English Departments’ of
Commonwealth and former Commonwealth countries have
abolished the title, and most (including universities in the
United States) still retain English literature as the core cur-
riculum. And in spite of fundamental changes in literary
theory most still remain Anglo-oriented if not
Anglo-dominated.
(Ashcroft et al. [eds] 1995:426)
Equally indicative is the fact that many major publishers have
popular series of literary ‘Classics’ (some now staggeringly

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WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN? 63
cheap), together with extensive catalogues of criticism en titled
‘Literature’; and that bookshops and libraries sectionalise their
wares in a markedly hierarchical fashion (‘Classics’, ‘Poetry’,
‘Romance’, ‘Popular Fiction', etc.). Further, if I ask ‘non-
academic’ friends what they understand by the term
‘Literature’, they will name as many ‘canonic’ writers as they
can remember, and define it in a recognisable version of the
dominant sense we have encountered above, while often simul-
taneously—and unnecessarily shamefacedly—admitting that
they themselves ‘can’t get on with’ George Eliot or Jane
Austen, despite having enjoyed the TV serialisations. Apropos,
and in a paradoxical way, the persistent appearance of ‘Clas-
sic’ serials and film versions of canonic works also confirms
the continuing widespread popular penetration of ‘Literature’.
Nevertheless, something did happen from the late-1960s
onwards. So that where, in 1961, F.R.Leavis could be found
defending the ‘life-values’ of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the
famous Penguin Books obscenity trial at the Old Bailey, by
1968 Kate Millett was making ferocious fun of that novel’s
phallocratic sexism (Millett [1969] 1971: chapter 5). So, too,
that when I left university and England in 1968 to teach
‘English Literature’ in northern Sweden, not a cloud had
crossed my received notion of ‘Literature’; but by 1971, in the
‘Humanities’ department of a new London polytechnic, its fea-
tures had become barely visible—so thoroughly was it at the
eye of the prevailing intellectual storm.

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3
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO
‘LITERATURE’?
A History of the Concept, Part Two:
After the 1960s
A crude but effective way of signalling an answer to the ques-
tion this chapter’s title poses is to cite the acronym ‘DWEMs’—
or ‘Dead White European Males’ (with a silent ‘H’, perhaps,
between the ‘E’ and the ‘M’ standing for ‘Heterosexual’).
Sometime during the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ which have been
raging in the United States for the past two decades (see pp.
77–80), those five letters became the public announcement
that ‘Literature’ as we have seen it develop in the previous
chapter was deeply beleaguered. Whether they spell the end of
‘Literature’ remains a moot point, but it is incontrovertibly
clear that the received orthodox notion of it is now intellectu-
ally and culturally derelict.
It was from within feminism that the letters first emerged,
and feminism has indeed been at the forefront of the decon-
struction of ‘Literature’ (although, as we shall see, many other
socio-cultural, political and theoretical movements and
impulses have also contributed to this process). So that while it
would be wrong finally to privilege the ‘M’ in ‘DWEMs’, it
was nevertheless the male hegemony inscribed in ‘Literature’
and ‘Literary Studies’ which was originally pinpointed for
attack. What ‘DWEMs’ does spell is ‘Canon’, a male construct
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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 65
comprised of male authors (and a very few honorary female
ones) handed down by male critics and lecturers—in British
higher education at least—to a largely female constituency of
students. What the new feminists of the late-1960s and beyond
perceived and challenged was that the Canon of ‘Literature’,
handed down as ‘their’ cultural heritage, was made up of
works by ‘dead’ (past, old, ‘classic’) male writers, who were
also almost exclusively European in origin. The Canon, in
other words, was unproblematically Eurocentric, despite the
existence of other literary cultures predating or contemporary
with it. Furthermore, these male writers were ‘white’ (an exclu-
sive Canon, therefore, in the context of contemporary multicul-
tural societies); were chiefly written, we may add, by hetero-
sexual males about heterosexual experience from a male
perspective; and when they were by homosexual males, it was
certainly not for any suggestion of sexual deviancy that they
were read, admired and canonised. While there is nothing
intrinsically wrong with being dead, white, European or male,
the fact that the received Canon was so emphatically imbued
with these characteristics revealed that it was neither ‘natural’
nor ‘given, but rather was constructed, ideological and partial.
In the light of this recognition, the immediate project for
feminist critics in the 1960s and 1970s was to recover, on
behalf of women, female writers and a female literary tradition
from their historical occlusion. Similar innovative work was
going on simultaneously in other areas, and the title of the his-
torian, Sheila Rowbotham’s book, Hidden from History
(1973), together with the brilliant feminist perception that his-
tory hitherto has indeed been ‘his-story’ not ‘her-story’, is the
most concise and telling synopsis of the rationale for this
project. The titles of influential books such as Ellen Moers’s
Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of
Their Own (1977), and Mary Jacobus’s Women Writing and
Writing About Women (1979), are also symptomatic short-

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66 LITERATURE
hand signs from that period. In the same vein is the cotermi-
nous development of ‘Gynocriticism’ which sought to set up a
female framework for the analysis of literature written by
women, to focus on women’s experience as expressed there,
and to establish a female literary and cultural tradition (see
Showalter 1977). A related development was the reconstitu-
tion of the Canon to include many more female writers, signifi-
cantly facilitated by the collateral initiative of setting up
‘Women’s Presses’. These published both well- and little-
known women writers from the past whose works had long
been out of print—‘hidden from literature’—and whose evi-
dent previous ‘minority’ could now be called in question by
the texts’ availability for sympathetic re-reading and re-
evaluation. A new emphasis, too, on contemporary women’s
writing—‘serious’ and ‘popular’—both hugely expanded the
range of literature available for study, thereby controverting
the historically determined disparity occasioned by women’s
previously limited access to literacy, and enfranchised hitherto
excluded groups such as black and working-class women writ-
ers. In addition, a radical new focus on female sexuality in its
different forms at once challenged and problematised male sex-
ual predominance, gave a voice to the sexually silenced, such
as lesbians, and opened up sexual discourses in past literature
to re-reading ‘against the grain’. In all these respects, the femi-
nist project, whether or not it had the deconstruction of ‘Litera-
ture’ and the Canon primarily and strategically in view, was
fundamentally instrumental in achieving precisely that.
But in foregrounding the founding contribution of feminism,
we should not lose sight of another centrally important ele-
ment encoded in ‘DWEMs’. The implications of ‘white’ have
been signalled above in respect of black women writers; and in
the context of post-war American society, the dynamic emer-
gence of black, Asian and Latino/a writers in particular,
whether male or female, has been highly significant in de/

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 67
reconstructing literary culture. Race, in other words, has an
equally significant place in this process as gender, and it is as
well to remember that even white feminist critical theory and
practice have been shown to be oblivious to race (and thus tac-
itly racist) in their otherwise radical opposition to a patriarchal
‘Literature’. In her salutary essay, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism’, Gayatri Spivak shows how Anglo-
American feminist critics, in elevating Charlotte Brontë’s novel
Jane Eyre to being ‘a cult text of feminism’ (Spivak 1985:263),
fail to perceive how its meritocratic individualism is deeply
inscribed with conventional nineteenth-century discourses of
imperialism. Having a ‘basically isolationist admiration for the
literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America’
(ibid., 262)—and so that ‘Jane Eyre can become the feminist
individualist heroine of British fiction’ (ibid., 270)—such West-
ern criticism ‘reproduces the axioms of imperialism’ by ignor-
ing the fact that Bertha Mason’s firing of Thornfield Hall at
the end of the novel can be read ‘as an allegory of the general
epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-
immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social
mission of the colonizer’ (ibid., 262., 270). Western feminists
may radically re-read ‘the great tradition’ and reappropriate it
for women, but it will still be oppressive if the critical gaze
remains partially sighted.
It is only in recognising the exclusions implied by ‘European’
in the acronym—especially when combined with ‘white’—that
the other crucial dimension in the assault on ‘Literature’ as an
ideological formation comes fully into view. A Eurocentric
conception of ‘Literature’ excludes the ‘New World’, the
(white and black) ‘Commonwealth’, the ‘Third World’, and all
the indigenous literatures that any of the cultures in the exclu-
sion zone may ever have produced. If we leave aside the United
States—or at least those components of the American literary
and critical traditions which may be contained within the

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68 LITERATURE
broad European sense of ‘Literature’—and focus on what were
the old ‘colonies’ of European states, we find that it is in the
challenges and subversions of postcolonial literary and critical
thinking that the other major deconstructive drive against ‘Lit-
erature’ appears. An obvious instance of this, in the case of ex-
British colonies, has been the attempt in the academy to
achieve, in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s words, ‘The Abolition of the
English Department’ (at the University of Nairobi in this
instance); to ‘reject the primacy of English literature and cul-
ture’; and to set up ‘a Department of African Literature and
Languages…in its place’. So that, ‘with Africa at the centre of
things, not existing as an appendix or satellite of other coun-
tries and literatures, things must be seen from the African
perspective’ (Thiongo’o [1972], in Ashcroft et al., [eds]
1995:441). Equally, in white ‘settler colonies’ such as Canada
and Australia, there has been a fierce rejection of the neocolo-
nialism, or continuing cultural imperialism, implicit in the
centrality of ‘English Literature’ in the university curriculum,
where their own literatures are still only available as ‘options’.
Such ‘cultural cringe’, which represents a tacit admission of the
superiority of the metropolitan centre, is rooted out by post-
colonialist reversals of what Franz Fanon called the ‘hierarchy
of cultures’ (quoted in Docker [1978], in Ashcroft et al., [eds]
1995:443).
More broadly, the postcolonial project has been to challenge
both the ‘Western Canon’ and ‘colonialist’ literature in seeking
to recover from oblivion a ‘literature of their own’: to ‘write’ a
history/articulate the experience of the unvoiced colonised, and
to explore in positive terms the subsequent ‘hybridity’ of post-
colonial subjects. Once again, the title of a pioneering critical
book in this area highlights the projects trajectory: The Empire
Writes Back (Ashcroft et al., [eds] 1989), with its telling allu-
sion to the ‘popular’ ‘Star Wars’ movie, The Empire Fights
Back. Central to this notion of ‘writing back’, here, has been

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 69
the way postcolonial writers and critics have ‘re-written’ and
‘reread’ canonic texts both to expose their complicity in racial
domination and to denaturalise their assumed ‘value’ as recep-
tacles of universal wisdom in ‘our’ cultural heritage: that is,
one so designated on behalf of the colonised, too.
J.M.Coetzee’s ‘re-vision’ of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in
his novel, Foe ([1986] 1987) (see Chapter 5, pp. 168–72), is an
excellent example of this, as is Chinua Achebe’s devastating
critical essay on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which
he proposes that Conrad was ‘a thoroughgoing racist’, who,
by using Africa in his story only ‘as setting and backdrop…
eliminates the African as human factor…thus reducing Africa
to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European
mind’ (Achebe [1988], in Brooker and Widdowson, [eds]
1996:267). The ‘real question’ this raises for Achebe is:
‘whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which
depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a
great work of art’ (ibid.). His own strategically controversial
negative answer is difficult to counter from within a Western
aesthetic conception of the canon of ‘Literature’.
Significantly, some of the most destabilising recent postcolo-
nial writing, literary and critical, has come from women writ-
ers who have had to negotiate both the racial and the gender
components of a DWEM ‘Literature’; and here again we may
note that the resulting necessary focus on contemporary writ-
ing has radically loosened the hold of the Canon on how we
think about literature. For instance, the question of ‘literary
value’ in relation to new works, unencumbered by the weight
of historical ascription of ‘classic’ status, immediately brings
into view the contingent, subjective and often arbitrary nature
of evaluation, and thereby problematises the notion of innate
‘literary value’. We can observe, as they occur, the material
market forces and cultural predilections of publishers, review-
ers and critics which are visibly at work ascribing to a text

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70 LITERATURE
those literary features and qualities which will then be ‘found
in’ it to value or deprecate. In the light of this, the making of
value-judgements, as I suggested in Chapter 1, should now
properly be seen to be only provisional, strategic and
function-specific.
As crucial agents in the process, then, feminism and post-
colonialism simultaneously deconstruct ‘Literature’ and the
‘Western Canon’ by exposing their partial and ideological
nature; allow for a creative re-reading of past ‘classic’ works;
and bring into view other literatures (especially, but not exclu-
sively, contemporary ones) which articulate hitherto occluded
areas of experience from those which are constrained within
the conventional conspectus of ‘Literature’. Thus we can see in
these new literatures precisely that the ‘making’ of ‘new reali-
ties’ by way of their specific literary formulation which I will
go on to claim (especially in Chapters 4 and 5) is the reason
for not throwing out the literary baby with the bathwater of
‘Literature’.
But feminism and postcolonialism were not the only factors to
bring about the demise of the received notion of ‘Literature’.
By the libertarian, if politically unfocussed, mid-1960s, a more
general disenchantment and rebelliousness were beginning to
set in. Even in Cambridge, which for 30 years had been the
source in higher education at least of ‘English’s’ mission on
behalf of ‘Literature’, the citadel was under threat. Having
gone to that university in 1966 solely in order to be taught by
the ‘Marxist’ Raymond Williams, David Hare describes his
‘aversion to the drawing up of lists’ of ‘moral’ writers who
were given ‘dignified approval’ and of those who were not.
The conventional teaching of ‘English’ seemed to be entirely
comprised of such:

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I had no desire to train to be a non-commissioned officer in
the arts police, patrolling literature for capital offences
such as ‘failure of seriousness’…. The attitude of [the
dons] implied such a contempt for the ordinary feelings of
people that the inevitable result of all this list-making would
surely be more to remove me from life than to plunge me
into it.
(Hare 1989:2)
This kind of response was as yet a largely personal rebellion,
but it found focus in the politicising process engendered by the
‘events’ of May 1968 throughout Europe and the United
States, in which the whole traditional curriculum and the
authoritarian relationship between lecturer and student were
called in question. Changes to the ‘English’ or ‘Literature’ syl-
labus were everywhere demanded in the midst of all this tur-
moil, but it was in the newer institutions in Britain—the ‘New
Universities’, the Open University, and, even more radically, in
the recently created Polytechnics—that the changes were most
rapid and apparent. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ was the buzz-word
here, signalling that the old subject boundaries should be bro-
ken down to create new combinations of studies, most charac-
teristically called ‘Humanities’. In degree courses with this
name, ‘English’ might well be a large participant, but it would
be there not in its own right (as the Leavisian ‘core’) but in
equal relation to other subjects, most usually history, sociol-
ogy, politics and philosophy. In this context, the assumed and
naturalised status of the canonical text was subjected to the
ferocious glare of other subjects’ interrogations. Historians
would ask: why is King Lear essential reading for a study of
early-seventeenth-century England; why is it more important
than a contemporary sermon; what makes it a ‘major’ work
compared to some other anonymous ‘minor’ play; who says
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72 LITERATURE
would wonder why the ‘popular literature’ of a period, that
which ordinary people actually read, was of less significance
than the canonic texts. A Leavisian response, or one based on
an aestheticist formalism, cut no ice; and as soon as such ques-
tions demanded answers which went beyond the received
literary-critical thinking, the inner process of dismantling ‘Lit-
erature’ began. How do we know that George Eliot’s Adam
Bede (1859) is more important than Mrs Oliphant’s contempo-
raneous novel, Salem Chapel (1863); what are the intrinsic
features that make it so; how do we identify them, and by
what criteria; by what processes has this hierarchical evalua-
tion come about; might it not be reversed in a specific context
(e.g. Salem Chapel gives us a better insight into mid-nineteenth-
century English religious life than does Adam Bede)?1 A self-
parodying question from that period still indicates the force
and logic of this mode of enquiry about cultural texts: ‘Why is
Middlemarch more important than a beer-mat?’
Of course, ‘English Literature’ had long been a misnomer
for what was strictly ‘Literary Studies’. Are Dunbar and Hen-
ryson, Balzac and Tolstoy (even in translation), Robert Burns,
Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Ezra Pound
and William Faulkner, for example, usefully described by
‘English’? But what became strikingly apparent in the 1970s
and beyond—as Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, the
Chartist poets, Robert Tressell, Jackie Collins, Linton Kwesi
Johnson, Coronation Street, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kris-
teva joined the syllabus—was that ‘English’ (or even ‘Litera-
ture’) now even less accurately described what went on in its
name. In 1987, the cultural critic, Peter Brooker, was writing:
even while ‘English’ is employed as the public description
of many University and Polytechnic departments, it stands
above their doors, with all its ideological freight, as the
false title to courses in literary and cultural theory, litera-

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 73
ture and society, American and European literature, popu-
lar literature and women’s writing…. We would do better to
describe such courses as discourse analysis, or text analy-
sis, or again, cultural studies.
(Brooker 1987:27)
The expansion of the syllabus included courses on hitherto
despised sub-genres such as ‘Gothic Literature’, ‘Romance’,
‘Fantasy’, ‘Working-class Writing’, ‘Women’s Writing’, ‘Black
Writing’ and ‘Popular Fiction’; on semiotics, linguistics, stylis-
tics, film, comparative literature, rhetoric and creative writing.
In place of the traditional ‘Author’ and ‘Genre’ courses also
came ‘Period Studies’, in which the content was a vertical sec-
tion of the written cultural production of a short period in the
past (e.g. the 1790s, 1840s, 1900–14) undifferentiated by later
canonic hierarchies. Pointedly, however, such courses often
foundered on the absence in print of the disregarded ‘minor
works’: with commercial publishing reinforcing canonic ‘Litera-
ture’, the latter indeed remains, in Barthes’s phrase, 'what gets
taught’2. A growing focus on ‘contemporary writing’ also
began to force the older periods and ‘classic authors’ off the
syllabus. So that where in the early-1970s even the Council for
National Academic Awards’ (CNAA’s) sole compulsory
requirement for the ‘English’ courses it validated in the new
polytechnics was that they should include the study of Shake-
speare, as had been prescribed by the Newbolt Report (see p.
47), by CNAA’s demise in the early-1990s, it was perfectly
possible to ‘do English’ without reading a line of his works.
Above all, and I shall return to this later, ‘Literary’ or ‘Critical
Theory’ courses were de rigueur in almost every degree pro-
gramme in the UK, the main exception being Oxford s. It is
worth noticing, too, that in the title of many of the kinds of
courses identified above—which are now staple diet in English-
degree provision—the word ‘writing’ has replaced ‘literature’.

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74 LITERATURE
This, of course, was both to signal a distance from ‘Literature’
and to allow for the study of written discourse which falls out-
side the conventional notion of ‘the literary’: autobiographies,
memoirs, essays, songs, journalism, etc.—all in an egalitarian
symbiosis with ‘literary’ writings.
Apropos—and to move the focus outside the academy—in
1970s Britain, there was a further democratisation of literature
underway in the fostering of working-class writing and com-
munity publishing by, inter alia, such groups as Centreprise
Publishing Project (London), Commonword Writers’ Work-
shop (Manchester), East Bowling History Workshop
(Bradford), Hackney Writers Workshop (London),
QueenSpark Books (Brighton), Scotland Road Writers’ Work-
shop (Liverpool), Tollcross Writers’ Workshop (Edinburgh)
and Women and Words (Birmingham). In 1976, these and oth-
ers formed a loose amalgamation to become the Federation of
Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP). The
title of the collectively-compiled volume, The Republic of Let-
ters, which describes its history and aims, pointedly combines
‘letters’—from which the word ‘literature’, meaning ‘the whole
body of books and writing’ (Williams 1976:151–2), originally
developed—with the notion of an egalitarian and popular
state. The rationale behind the FWWCP’s foundation was to
‘“disestablish” literature, making writing a popular form of
expression for all people rather than the preserve of a
metropolitan or privileged élite’ (Morley and Worpole [eds]
1982:1). It was particularly aimed at those hitherto most com-
prehensively disenfranchised by all that ‘Literature’ repre-
sented: the working class, women, racial minorities. In order
to give them the possibility of finding a voice, it was necessary
to create sympathetic communities outside the academy in
which people could practice writing and exchange comment
on the results, and to publish and distribute work indepen-
dently, co-operatively and cheaply beyond the control of the

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 75
mainstream commercial industry. This, as the authors say, put
them ‘on a collision course with literature as it is conceived
and established’ (ibid., 43); since if the kind of literary produc-
tion they were engaged in were to become the norm, it would
put conventional publishing—‘competitive, élitist, profit-
controlled, labour-dividing, separating producer from con-
sumer’ (ibid.)—out of business. It was against the institutions
which determine what is ‘literary’ and what is not—with, as
Ken Worpole has elsewhere put it, their ‘narrowness of vision’
and ‘cultural paranoia’ when it comes to defining ‘English Lit-
erature’ (Worpole 1984:4–5)—that the FWWCP launched its
challenge, rather than against literature itself. But the new
independent publishing initiatives also ‘established new forms
of writing, discovered new writers and new networks of read-
ers’ (5) which have contributed significantly to the general
‘disestablishing’ of ‘Literature’ and the consequent widening
and invigorating of contemporary literary culture.
In the context of British higher education, a further factor in
the dissolution of ‘English’/‘Literature’ needs to be noted (one
cognate with the extra-academic cultural politics of the com-
munity writing and publishing groups glanced at above). The
essay by Peter Brooker quoted on pp. 71–2 is sub-titled ‘Is
There English After Cultural Studies?’, and it was with the
development of ‘Cultural Studies’ out of and alongside
‘English’ and ‘Literary Studies’ that the emphatic notification
was made that the focus of interest was shifting from ‘Litera-
ture’ to all forms of cultural production and representation,
and most centrally to ‘popular culture’. Its origins, signifi-
cantly, lay in adult education: the widely influential Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham Univer-
sity was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, author of The
Uses of Literacy (1957), and later developed by Raymond
Williams, Stuart Hall and others. In its earlier phases, mass-
circulation newspapers, the BBC, television, film, advertising,

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76 LITERATURE
working-class ‘culture’ (in the greatly expanded sense of ‘lived
experience’ or, in Williams’s founding phrase, ‘a whole way of
life’: [1958] 1961:18), sub-cultures (youth, sport), style (Mods
and Rockers, punks, working-class teenage girls), literacy and
mass education, became the objects of attention—all those dis-
courses, in other words, that ‘Literature’ had more or less
explicitly defined itself against, and in all of which the notion
of ‘the text’ had to be fundamentally rethought. More impor-
tantly perhaps, Cultural Studies—intellectually ‘impure’,
fiercely political, and an irritant on the margins of the academy
—was never quite a new ‘discipline’, but rather, in Brooker’s
phrase, ‘a radicalising mentality’ (Brooker 1987:27), or what
Richard Johnson, a former CCCS director, has called a mode
of ‘critique’; that is:
procedures by which other traditions are approached both
for what they may yield and for what they inhibit. Critique
involves stealing away the more useful elements and reject-
ing the rest. … From this point of view cultural studies is a
process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge.
(Johnson 1983, quoted in Brooker: ibid.)
Cultural Studies, in other words, has been less a discrete ‘sub-
ject’ and more a politicised way of thinking beyond the limita-
tions of whatever field of enquiry it enters or recuperates.
Ironically in light of this, for a while in the 1970s and
1980s, it seemed that Cultural Studies might take the place of
‘English’ in British higher education institutions (the situation
is somewhat different in the United States; see pp. 79–80), and
that literature would be subsumed, as one element among
many, within a broader conspectus of ‘cultural history’. That
this has not happened in the UK—that Cultural Studies as a
named academic area in the mid-1990s seems to be on the
wane, despite Antony Easthope’s Literary into Cultural Studies

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 77
(1991) with its proposals for a ‘New Paradigm’, while
‘English’ appears to thrive—can only be explained by reference
to political, ideological, institutional and academic factors well
beyond my scope here. But two points are worth making in the
present context. The first is that many of the constituent ele-
ments and theoretical/methodological praxes of Cultural Stud-
ies (Johnson’s ‘procedures of critique’) have implanted them-
selves in other academic fields, such as Women’s Studies,
Third World Studies, Film, Media and Communication Stud-
ies. But they have also embedded themselves within ‘English’,
which discipline, whilst retaining its ‘false title’ (see Brooker
on p. 71), has been transformed in terms of content and intel-
lectual orientation in the ways I have suggested earlier:
‘canonic’ texts resituated in their ‘period’; different categories
of ‘writing’ introduced alongside them without a hierarchy of
‘value’; ‘theory’ and ‘contemporary literatures’ foregrounded.
Perhaps the most radical and pervasive dimension of all this,
however, is in the following two ways: i) that the subject itself
(as well as its content) has been historicised, where the histo-
ries of ‘Literature’ and of ‘English’/‘Literary Studies’ them-
selves are—or should be—primary components of all such
degree courses; and ii), that it has been explicitly politicised.
Any notions of ‘disinterestedness’, ‘scientific’ objectivity and
‘ideological innocence’ have been scuppered by the political
analysis of Cultural Studies, as they have, too, by those of the
latter’s principal theoretical drives: Marxism, feminism and
postcolonialism. In other words, the construct ‘Literature’, and
the studying of what it comprised, have been denaturalised
both as object and as practice.
The second point about the persistence of ‘English’/‘Literary
Studies’ (albeit radically reformulated in the mould of Cultural
Studies) is partly explained by the rationale for the later parts
of this book. For while ‘Literature’ may have been terminally
wounded, literature in general has not been: rather, it is widely

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78 LITERATURE
read and studied in late-twentieth-century ‘mass communica-
tion’ societies, and retains a discrete and distinct presence
amongst other contemporary media—including ‘writing’ as a
generic whole.
A similar process of destabilisation and redefinition has been
going on in the United States during the same period.
Women’s and ethnic presses, such as Feminist Press, Aunt
Lutte, Spinster’s, Arte Publico and Tikun, have fulfilled a simi-
lar function to the alternative presses in Britain glanced at
earlier. But more broadly, from the late-1960s, it is the ‘Cul-
ture Wars’ which have represented the battle between the
radical Left and the conservative Right over what the educa-
tion curriculum should contain—and the study of literature
has been at the centre of them. As Regenia Gagnier puts it,
with the increasing democratisation of higher education follow-
ing the 1960s, ‘the problems of society have become the prob-
lems of higher education, including ethnic and racial conflict,
gender conflict, political and economic inequality, intolerance
and lack of consensus’ (Gagnier 1997:4). Crucially, in a multi-
cultural society where African-American ‘assertiveness’, femi-
nism, and gay liberation movements are dynamically active,
the question of whose culture should be taught as the curricu-
lum has been posed and vigorously contested over the past
three decades. In his influential contribution to the current
debates, Beyond the Culture Wars (1992; see also pp. 79–80),
Gerald Graff has written:
Today’s academic disputes over which texts should be
taught in the humanities, over the competing claims of
Western and non-Western culture, and over the pros and
cons of affirmative action and codes regulating hate
speech mirror broader social conflicts over race, ethnicity,

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 79
and privilege. Even the quarrels sparked by esoteric liter-
ary theories about the pertinence of gender questions to
the study of Shapespeare echo debates over sex roles in
the larger society provoked by feminists, gay activists, and
the entry of women into the professional work force.
(Graff 1992:9)
With the rise of Reaganite ‘neo-liberalism’ in the 1980s, how-
ever, a right-wing reaction got underway against a cultural
pluralism which was seen as destroying higher education and
the sense of belonging to a common national culture. Heads of
the National Endowment for the Humanities like William Ben-
nett and Lynne Cheney began to attack what they saw as the
dominance of the Left in the universities, in particular its ‘dis-
missal’ of the canonic classics of ‘Culture’ from the syllabus,
and their views were reinforced by such books as Allan
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, E.D.Hirsch’s Cul-
tural Literacy (both 1987), and more recently by Harold
Blooms The Western Canon (1994; see pp. 22–3). As a conse-
quence, in the late-1980s and early-1990s, the ‘Culture Wars’
hit the national news in an unprecedented fashion: Newsweek,
Time, the New Republic, the Village Voice, Harper’s, Atlantic,
the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and
the National Review, amongst many others,3 ran regular
instalments on the controversies around ‘political correctness’,
often focusing on such prestigious universities as Stanford and
Duke. Most infamously, the Atlantic published a piece by
Dinesh D’Souza in 1991, entitled ‘Illiberal Education’ (rapidly
turned into the book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race
and Sex on Campus, 1992), which asserted that classics by
‘white males’ were being ‘expelled’ from universities’ required-
reading lists, and quoted a remark by Christopher Clausen,
head of the English Department at Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity, in 1988, to the effect that he was willing to ‘bet that

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80 LITERATURE
[Alice Walker’s novel] The Color Purple is taught in more
English courses today than all of Shakespeare’s plays com-
bined’.4 A furore broke out, with President Bush denouncing
the tyranny of ‘political correctness’5 at the University of
Michigan, and Time magazine bewailing the subjection of stu-
dents to ‘a literature class that equates Shakespeare and the
novelist Alice Walker not as artists but as fragments of sociol-
ogy’. It added, significantly, that ‘obfuscatory course titles and
eccentric reading lists frequently are wedded to a combative
political agenda or outlandish views of the nation’s culture and
values’ (Gubar and Kamholtz [eds] 1993:2). ‘Literature’, in
this context, clearly reveals itself as continuing to enshrine the
ideological values we saw inscribed in it during its construc-
tion in the nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries. Whether
Henry Louis Gates is right, therefore, when he says that the
‘vulgar cultural nationalists…are whistling in the wind’ (Gates
1992: xvi) remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, in the American context as in the British, an
unproblematic conception and study of ‘Literature’ can no
longer be sustained. Evidence of this is apparent in the prolifer-
ation of courses in African-American, Women’s, and Gay/
Lesbian writing and theory—to name but three obvious exam-
ples—and in the Deconstructionist and New Historicist theoret-
ical approaches which inform much contemporary criticism
and pedagogy. Further, as Regenia Gagnier points out, in the
United States there is a move in the humanities towards a gen-
uinely interdisciplinary ‘Cultural Studies’. This is driven partly
by institutional/economic determinants which are demanding
proof of ‘relevance’, and partly by the perceived inadequacy by
academics themselves of single-discipline approaches to study
in a multi-ethnic and multicultural society. Faculty members
from many different disciplines work together to identify and
explore ‘the ways that individuals and groups represent them-
selves to themselves and thereby construct their identities’

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 81
(Gagnier 1997:7). In this, literature and the study of it, can
clearly contribute a great deal.
But perhaps the most influential intervention in current
debates in the United States about the role and function of ‘Lit-
erary Studies’—and one accepted by Gagnier as inevitably
implemented in the new Cultural Studies—is Gerald Graff’s
project for ‘teaching the conflicts’. We saw in Chapter 2 how
Graff identifies conflict as marking the development of
‘English’ in the US from the start, while being disguised, for
much of its history, under a blanket of catholicity and compre-
hensive ‘coverage’ of the whole field of literature; and how the
only sustainable project for Literary Studies is to take as its
syllabus the conflicts which actually determine its constitution.
In his more recent book, After the Culture Wars: How Teach-
ing the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, Graff
now argues that the ‘Wars’ themselves are merely the most
extreme latterday manifestation of these endemic conflicts; so
that ‘the history of modern American education has pitted the
liberal pluralist solution (everyone do his or her own thing)
against the conservative solution (everyone do the conserva-
tives’ thing)’ (Graff 1992:10). The present ‘Culture Wars’
represent these positions; but they are ‘two sides of the same
coin; neither is able to imagine any positive role for cultural
conflict’ (ibid.). To transcend the impasse, he says, we must
‘teach the conflicts themselves, making them part of our object
of study and using them as a new kind of organizing principle
to give the curriculum the clarity and focus that almost all
sides now agree it lacks’ (12). By bringing into the classroom
at once ‘the conflicts themselves’, the misrepresentations of
them by the media, and our own cognate research problems to
do, say, with methodology, canonicity or cultural politics: that
is, our own theoretical insertion within the field, we may com-
municate the intellectual relevance and vitality of literature
and the contemporary study of it.

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82 LITERATURE
My closing emphasis above signals what is clearly missing so
far from this account of what happened to ‘Literature’ from
the end of the 1960s onwards: the place of ‘Theory’ in all this.
In a way, of course, that is where I began—by focussing on
feminism and postcolonialism. But while acknowledging that
Theory does indeed underpin all the developments adduced so
far, it was never intended that this chapter should simply be a
potted digest of contemporary critical theory, nor to make it
appear that it was principally theory which caused all the
upheaval. Neither will (can) what follows here be such a
digest:6 it merely sketches in the ways certain recent theoretical
movements have undermined the concept of ‘Literature’ and
the resulting effects for literature at the present time.
The so-called ‘Moment of Theory’ may be charted from the
late-1960s, through its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, to the
current situation in which some would argue that its ‘Moment’
is over, and others that it is now so much in the intellectual
bloodstream that ‘continuum’ is a more accurate word to
describe it. What is beyond dispute, however, is that from the
early-1970s onwards, wave after wave of new (and some
older) theories destabilised ‘Literature’ and transformed liter-
ary criticism.
The ‘Bakhtin School’
The work of one earlier theoretical movement, the ‘Bakhtin
School’ (in Russia in the late-1920s, and of which Mikhail
Bakhtin is the best-known member), may be adduced first,
since it became widely influential in the post-1960s period
through its emphasis on the social nature of language. In its
critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s identification of the arbi-

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 83
trary relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ in the ‘sign’
(word) in language, and its resituating of this in a social con-
text, the Bakhtinians saw that relationship as invariably
fraught with interference and conflict, inasmuch as every utter-
ance launched into social space implies a dialogue or a con-
tested interpretation and is therefore potentially a site of
struggle. Hence, language is always contaminated by the
semantic accretions deposited there in the endless process of
human struggle and interaction. By relating this dynamic view
of language to the study of literary texts, Bakhtin himself
emphasised, not the way texts reflect society or class interests,
but the way in which their language may disrupt authority and
liberate alternative voices. His theory of the ‘polyphonic’ or
‘dialogic’ novel, for example, stresses the presence in such of
various ‘voices’ (heteroglossia) which express different points-
of-view and are not subordinated to the author’s controlling
purpose. The text, therefore, articulates liberating and often
subversive discourses beyond the author’s authority (see
Bakhtin 1981).
Bakhtin’s identification of ‘Carnival’, as an aspect of this
dialogism, has been particularly influential in the subversion of
‘Literature’. Seeing carnivals as traditionally collective and
popular, in which hierarchies are turned on their heads, oppo-
sites mingle, the authoritarian and the sacred are profaned,
subverted and mocked by the release of folk ‘laughter’, he
developed the term ‘Carnivalisation’ to describe similar effects
within literature (see Bakhtin 1984). Such effects are precisely
where voices are set free to speak subversively and shockingly
beyond the author’s control. Indeed, they may well refuse,
mock or subvert even the author’s own ‘dominant’ voice and
viewpoint. Bakhtin’s revelation of ‘Carnival’ has been instru-
mental in breaking up the hold on literature of the organicist
aesthetic formalism which dominated much mid-twentieth-
century criticism (see Chapter 2). By promoting the idea that

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84 LITERATURE
literary works are multi-layered and resistant to unification, he
problematised the notion of ‘character’ as a stable and unitary
individual identity and loosened the grip of the author on his
or her text. While Bakhtin’s own work, in fact, still retains a
firm sense of the writer’s controlling artistry, its politicised crit-
ical reading nevertheless anticipates major tendencies in later
Structuralist, Poststructuralist and Psychoanalytic theories:
• in its destabilising of the notion of the unified human
subject;
• in celebrating liberty and pleasure over authority and
decorum;
• in privileging the ‘polyphonic’, ‘dialogic’, ‘heteroglossic’ or
‘plural’ text;
• and in opening up the potential dialogism of all literary
works.
Structuralism
Structuralism was also indebted to Saussure’s concept of the
signifier/signified duality. But, in contrast to the Bakhtin
School’s social orientation, it developed the theory that as a
signifying system which is meaningful only in respect of the
internal linguistic ‘codes’ of which it is comprised, literature
does not allude to any reality outside itself, and therefore can-
not be truthful: it is neither ‘mimetic’ nor ‘expressive’ (see p.
29). Hence follows, in Roland Barthes’s famous formulation,
‘the death of the author’ (Barthes 1977), since there can be no
‘humanistic’ communication between author and reader by
way of the literary work; and the sole object of a structuralist
criticism, therefore, can only be to analyse the internal rela-
tions between the levels of meaning within the closed system of
the text itself.

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 85
Marxist theory, the New Historicists and Cultural Materialists
Since most contemporary schools of theory are not discrete,
but partake of elements of each other, recent Marxist theory (a
loose catch-all term for what is better referred to as ‘Material-
ist’ theory), while still concerned with the social, economic and
cultural ‘modes of production’ which determine the literary
work in its own historical moment, has also taken up a ‘struc-
turalist’ position which sees a text as encoding and revealing
aspects of the ideology which shaped it beyond its own con-
scious ‘knowing’. Its textual ‘gaps’, ‘omissions’, ‘lapses’ and
‘silences’—its ‘not-said’—thus take on greater import than its
explicit significations.7 So that, for the New Historicists and
Cultural Materialists, for example, the prizing open of what
the text cannot itself know is a route to understanding the
problematics of, and resistances to, the dominant ideology of
the conjuncture in which it was formed. In this, of course, they
are also beholden to Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘discursive
formations’—those discourses of power which determine and
constrain the forms of knowledge and the types of ‘normality’
and ‘subjectivity’ that prevail in any given period, but which
are also open to contestation. Texts of all kinds—literary ones
amongst them—have a complex insertion into these processes,
and can be made to reveal how this is inscribed in their own
constituent discourses.
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Poststructuralism (again a catch-all term for a multitude of
different theories) takes the Structuralist position to the point
of self-deconstruction; for where Structuralism was based on
the informing notion of a structure of language, Poststructural-
ism denies the existence of such a structure—or, indeed, of any

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86 LITERATURE
kind of fundamental structure. Emphasising the essentially
unstable nature of signification, Poststructuralism undertakes a
‘playful’ (but deadly serious) exposure of the contradictory
meanings any text may be shown to articulate, insofar as it
consists of words inextricably inscribed in the multiple dis-
courses that inform it. Contra the aesthetic formalism of, say,
New Criticism (see pp. 56–9), it is the disunity and excess of
the literary work’s heteroglossic textuality which is the source
of our ‘jouissance’ (extreme pleasure) in reading it. In the most
influential of Poststructuralist theorisations, the Deconstruc-
tion of Jacques Derrida, any reading which ‘makes sense’ of a
literary text can immediately be destabilised by way of the
same text’s signifying system. Thus all writing deconstructs
itself (‘Texts deconstruct themselves by themselves’ [Derrida
1986:123]). Such a position thus holds that, in another of Der-
rida’s famous statements, ‘there is nothing outside the text’
(Derrida [1967] 1976:158), no controlling of it by the author’s
‘intention’, and no unitary or ‘essential’ truth to be gained
from it. Inasmuch as we only know the world through lan-
guage, and because ‘reality’ is inseparable from the discourses
in which it is known, there can be no absolute certainty about
anything, since everything exists only in the unstable play of
textuality and discourse. The most sophisticated literary-
critical appropriation of Derridean Poststructuralism is Ameri-
can Deconstruction, sometimes also called ‘Rhetorical Read-
ing’ or ‘Cultural Poetics’, which incorporates and supercedes
the insights of Structuralism by showing the pressures and
ironies which traverse the structural dualisms of Western dis-
course. In such work, the minute close reading of, or ‘response
to’, the language of literary texts proves their infinitely com-
plex, contradictory instability and ‘iterability’ (their susceptibil-
ity to being continually ‘re-written in the process of being read
and ‘interpreted’ by different readers). A Deconstructive read-
ing, then, is governed by aporia (moments of absolute uncer-

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tainty), and the recognition and acceptance that all texts are
ultimately unreadable, insofar as ‘readability’ implies that a
text is reducible to a single ‘definitive’ interpretation. Again,
therefore, the author does not control the literary text, it does
not contain ‘a meaning’, and it cannot be seen to hold a ‘final’
truth which can be extrapolated from it. Nevertheless, Ameri-
can Deconstruction, with its detailed attention to the linguistic
textuality of literature, makes it possible to recoup a notion of
‘the literary’ in terms of its specific formal composition.
Reader-Response Criticism
Albeit based on different premises, Reader-Response Criticism
has also been influential in emphasising the reader’s participa-
tion in the construction of meaning which a text promotes.
Here, the reader does not mine the text for its ‘innate’ mean-
ing, but acts upon it to produce meaning in the dialectical
relationship between the textuality of the text and her or his
experiencing of it as an individual reading-subject. Thus for
the German theorist, Wolfgang Iser, the text is a potential
structure which is ‘concretised’ by an ‘actual reader’ filling in
the indeterminancies or ‘blanks’ that any text must contain in
relation to her or his life-experience, an experience which will
itself be modified in the act of reading. Once more, the literary
object is seen not as an anterior and determinate receptacle of
meaning and value, but as a potential spectrum of possible
readings, since its meaning is constructed in the adjustments
and revisions which are brought about in the reader’s mind
during a specific act of reading. Equally, the critic’s task is not
to explain the text, but to analyse the relationship between the
‘implied reader’ which the text creates for itself (‘a network of
response-inviting structures’ which predispose us to read it in

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88 LITERATURE
certain ways) and the ‘actual reader’ as defined above (Iser
1974, 1978).
Postmodernism
Postmodernist theories extend the implications of Poststruc-
turalism in positing the discursive nature of all experience, and
the impossibility, therefore, of arriving at any certainty or
truth. The ‘grand narratives’ (see Lyotard [1979] 1984) of
social and intellectual progress initiated by the Enlightenment
are discredited. Any grounding of such ideas in notions of ‘his-
tory’ or ‘reality’ is no longer possible in the comprehensively
‘textualised’ world of images and simulations which charac-
terise this age of mass consumption and advanced technolo-
gies. But Postmodernism also celebrates the endless ‘play’, and
re-playing, of meaning in any discursive ‘simulacrum’ (i.e. a
deceptively ‘real’ representation of an always already unreal
‘reality’): where there can be no absolute truths, there is a kind
of anarchic freedom in the ‘depthless’ provisionality of the (re)
cycling of signifiers. In all these respects, Postmodernist theo-
ries, whilst having a more general social import in the defini-
tion of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation, have also radically
challenged the hegemony of ‘high culture’. So that ‘Literature’
becomes merely one set of discursive texts in the ‘technologi-
cal’ continuum of popular-cultural production and reproduc-
tion of all forms of art.
Psychoanalytic theory and Neo-Freudianism
Psychoanalytic theories, remodelled in the context of Poststruc-
turalism by the Neo-Freudianism of Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva and others, also focus on the functioning of language,

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 89
but particularly its part in the construction of subject identity.
Lacan stresses that the ego is itself a construct, and that this
‘ego-artefact’, while seeming unified, consistent and determi-
nately centred, is, in fact, a discursive fiction made up of dis-
parate fragments yoked forcibly together and always on the
verge of dissolution (Lacan [1973] 1979, 1977). Language is
especially important in respect of the formation of sexual iden-
tity, because males are held to enter the ‘figurative’ or ‘sym-
bolic order’—where words are substituted for objects them-
selves—more readily than women. Since our lives are lived out
within the ‘symbolic order’ (there is nothing beyond ‘text’ or
‘discourse’), this relationship between language and gender is
fundamental in sustaining the sexual inequality of a patriar-
chal society. Such a theory’s impact on literature and criticism
has been at once to reconfirm the sense that language is neither
referential nor expressive, but constitutive; that human subjec-
tivity (the notion of individual, unitary and essential
‘character’) is in fact constructed, heterogenetic and unstable;
that literary texts may be read psychoanalytically like dreams;
and that they will encode complex and contradictory messages
in the ‘not-said’ of their textuality.
Feminism
Such Neo-Freudian theory has had much to say to Feminism
both in the way language constructs subjectivity, so that, for
example, deconstructing it can assist in the deconstruction of
imprisoning subject-positions; and in the quest for a kind of
‘feminine language’ which would articulate pre-oedipal, pre-
verbal, pre-symbolic discourses, thus restoring connection with
that lost order which is now only glimpsed in eruptions from
the Unconscious. For Kristeva, poetic language introduces the
subversive openness of what she calls the ‘semiotic’ across soci-

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90 LITERATURE
ety’s closed symbolic order (see Kristeva 1986). More broadly,
as we have seen, Feminism has politicised ‘Literature’ and the
study of it as a form of sexual politics in which a male Canon
is denaturalised, a female tradition established, and a discourse
unearthed which voices women’s experience and sexuality in
order to release their difference—a difference hitherto sub-
sumed in the submission of feminine to masculine identity. The
principal variations on this last initiative appear either in
Anglo-American ‘gynocriticism’ (see p. 65), or in ‘French’ fem-
inism’s conception of ‘écriture feminine’, which may be
defined as a kind of writing which seeks to access the pre-
figurative ‘semiotic’/‘poetic’ experience of the female subject
(see Eagleton, Mary [ed.] 1991).
Gay, Lesbian and Queer theory
Developing out of Feminism (and out of Deconstruction) have
been more recent, and arguably now more radical, Gay, Les-
bian and Queer theories which at once explore the complex
sexual discourses inscribed in past literature and seek to
‘transgress’, in literature and elsewhere, the constructed and
constraining conventional binaries of sexual identity in order
to reveal their more unsettled and dynamic relations. One sub-
versively Postmodern instance of this transgressive sexual/
cultural politics is Donna Harraway’s notion of the ‘Cyborg’—
a ‘creature of a post-gender world’ which is radically free of
the dualities and polarities which underpin conventional West-
ern organising structures of subjectivity. The Cyborg’s open-
ness to technology opposes ‘it’ to all myths of origin, fulfil-
ment and organic wholeness (including those implicit in Anglo-
American and French feminist theories); and writing,
significantly, is ‘preeminently the technology of the cyborgs’.
In the political struggle for meanings in language—‘the strug-

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 91
gle against perfect communication, against the one code that
translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogo-
centrism’—writing which works outside the constraints of an
originary common language celebrates its own ‘illegitimacy’ as
it works to subvert the central myths of Western culture (Har-
raway [1985] 1990, passim).
Postcolonialism
Such thinking as the above clearly relates to Postcolonialism,
where most of the theoretical positions sketched in earlier find
a combined focus:
• in its exposing and challenging of Western hegemony and
the construction of the colonial subject;
• in deconstructing the dominant logocentrism of Western
culture;
• in seeking a ‘decentred consciousness’;
• and in creating a discourse which returns a voice to the
unvoiced.
In respect of this last, it literally ‘writes’ a history for those
denied a history, and restores the (unwritten) experience of
being the colonial ‘Other’. Postcolonialism thus posits hybrid-
ity (the condition of being the ‘subject’ of cultural cross-
breeding) and marginality (the condition of being situated at
the edges of metropolitan society) as challenging unity and cen-
trality in the postcolonial world. Perhaps the most telling
contemporary convergence of many of these theoretical posi-
tions is in the work of ‘women-of-colour’ and postcolonial
feminists (for example, that of Gayatri Spivak in ‘Can the Sub-
altern Speak?’ [1988], Trinh T.Minh-ha in Woman, Native,
Other [1989], and Chandra Talpade Mohanty in ‘Under West-

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92 LITERATURE
ern Eyes’ [1991]) who emphasise the ‘double colonisation of
women in the Third World or metropolitan racial minorities.
Such women are the site of shifting and multiple identities;
they are, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, ‘border women, ‘living
on the borders and in the margins’ of several sexual and racial
formations (Anzaldúa 1987). In promoting a more flexible,
plural, unbounded and transcultural figuring of femininity,
and in celebrating this ‘cultured culturelessness’ of the ‘Border-
lands’, such postcolonial feminisms have a clear linkage with
notions of ‘Cyborg’ identity, with transgressive sexual politics,
with all the creative postmodern movements whose rationale is
the continual breakingdown of unitary and universalising
paradigms—and of which ‘Literature’ has surely been amongst
the most powerful.
Diverse as these theories may be in their specific agendas and
formulations, they have all had the effect of demolishing ‘Liter-
ature’ and the hagiographic study of it:
• by historicising and politicising it;
• by challenging notions of the authority of the author, ‘the
text itself', inherent ‘meaning’, and essentialist
‘interpretation’;
• by revealing its ‘not-said’ and the contradictory discourses
within it which it could not know itself;
• and by opening it up to infinite variations of re-reading in
history.
Nevertheless, as is immediately apparent if one walks into any
bookshop, literature as a whole has not gone away. On the
contrary, and regardless of the multifarious forms of alterna-
tive cultural production available in contemporary societies,
reading seems to be widespread and popular as never before.

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’? 93
On the day I write, an article in The Guardian on the new
‘lifestyle’ bookstores, ‘Books: Change in Store’ (1997), notes
that ‘the largest bookshop to open in Britain for 50 years is
unveiled today in Glasgow, boasting a stock of 350,000 vol-
umes; that the collapse of the British Net Book Agreement has
led to retail groups like the Asda supermarket chain joining the
book-selling industry; and that, as a result, book sales overall
have risen in volume ‘probably by 11 per cent over the past
year’.8 students on ‘Literary Studies’ courses, having supped
full of Theory, are demanding to see how the theories work in
practice in assisting their reading of what they had principally
come to study in the first place: the ‘primary material’, as it is
still ironically called in academic discourse; while much ‘post-
modern’ literary writing now contains its own ‘theory’ as part
and parcel of its self-reflexive textuality. A movement also
seems to be emerging, principally in the United States and per-
haps as a reflex of the ‘Culture Wars’, to develop a ‘new aes-
thetics’ or ‘new formalism’ in theory and criticism which can
mount, as the titles of two recent books announce, ‘A Defence
of Poetry’ in sophisticated post-Deconstructionist terms. One
of these ‘defends’ poetry, significantly, as a ‘need, not a com-
modity’ in people’s ‘perennial and pancultural’ demand for it
(Fry 1995:2); the other, as ‘any cultural creation that fruitfully
exceeds destructive norms and passes beyond theory’s reduc-
tive explanatory powers’ (Edmundson 1995:28). So, while
‘Literature’ may now indeed be a straw man, literature in gen-
eral seems to have come through the ‘Theory Wars’, and all
the associated hostilities, renewed and refurbished. If this is
indeed the case, then we certainly do need to establish what
‘the literary’ might mean to us, and what literature—in the
light of such a definition—does, and can do, for us as we
approach the postmodern millenium.

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4
WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’?
If ‘Literature’ as a conceptual term is as discredited as we have
seen it to be in the preceding chapter; but if, as I propose, we
also wish to retain a discrete notion of the domain literature
occupies within cultural production, then ‘the literary’ may be
the best way to describe it. The following pages will therefore
attempt to define what I think we should understand by that
term. Once again, this will not be done by outlining the multi-
farious aesthetic and theoretical definitions which have
accrued around the notion—if not the term itself—throughout
history, although it will be readily apparent that my concep-
tion of it is often beholden to an eclectic range of previous
insights by others. Rather, my intention is to establish a coher-
ent working term for the kind of written discourse I believe
has some irreplaceable uses in our society, and without which
our cultural lives would be impoverished and diminished. It is
also to allow for the possibility of a metadiscourse to talk
about ‘the literary’ as a specific category of the generic ‘writing’.
It will be noticed immediately that I have adapted the usual
part of speech, the adjective ‘literary’, into a substantive noun:
‘the literary’—which is not by any means an original coinage,
although the OED does not list this usage at all. This is partly
94

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 95
to signal that what I am calling the ‘domain of the literary’ is a
generic category of discursive practice which may be cognate
with ‘Literature’, but is distinguished from it, and from its
adjectival forms: as, for example, in such phrases as ‘literary
artefact’ or ‘literary achievement’. It is also to avoid using the
noun ‘literariness’, both in its conventional sense: ‘the quality
of being literary’, often now suggesting in a mannered or pre-
cious way, and to distance my position from the more purely
formalistic associations of the word as used by the Russian
Formalists earlier this century. It is only fair to admit here,
however, that the Russian Formalist sense of ‘literariness’ as
‘that which makes a given work a work of literature’, and their
emphasis on the need to study the specificity and distinctive-
ness of literature not merely as a formalistic analysis of the art-
object but as an instance of ‘the autonomy of the aesthetic
function’,1 will find echoes in some of what I have to say later.
My notion of ‘the literary’, then, is intended to identify a cate-
gory of writing which is distinguished, first, from ‘writing’ in
general—both in its own self-consciousness of being ‘literary’
and in its reader’s apprehension of that property; and second,
from other conventionally related art-forms such as music,
painting and film. These distinctions will be based principally
on an assessment of the social and cultural effects of ‘the liter-
ary’ rather than on any attempt to locate intrinsic aesthetic or
linguistic characteristics of ‘literariness’.
As Derek Attridge has pointed out in the introduction to his
book, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the
Renaissance to James Joyce, there is a fundamental contradic-
tion, throughout the Western tradition of thought about litera-
ture, between ‘two mutually inconsistent demands—that the
language of literature be recognizably different from the lan-
guage we encounter in other contexts, and that it be recogniz-
ably the same’ (Attridge 1988:3). There has been no convinc-
ing proof that there is a language ‘peculiar’ to literature; but if

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96 LITERATURE
it is indeed ‘recognizably the same’ as ‘ordinary’ language,
then ‘the existence of literature itself as a distinct entity’ is
endangered (1). The notion of literature as ‘difference’, there-
fore, has to shift its ground from attempting to identify a spe-
cial ‘literary language’ (as we will see the Russian Formalists
try to do) to recognising that literature exists within, and is
determined by, ‘a shifting web of socially produced relations,
judgements, and distinctions’ and is consequently open to
‘change and cultural variation (6). Thus Attridge
aims to show why the domain of literature and of literary
theory cannot provide its own self-sufficient and lasting
answers to the question of the distinctiveness of literary
language…. [T]he judgements that control its status and
function as art must be related to the wider context in
which they are formed, sustained, and modified.
(16)
Like his, my attempt to define the ‘difference’ of ‘the literary’
will also be culturalist and functionalist in orientation.
The reader will also notice in what follows that I make no
distinctions in including within ‘the literary’ all types of writ-
ing which meet the definitions I propose. So while I continue
to respect the usefulness of basic generic differentiation, no
categories are to be found here of the ‘serious’/ ‘popular’,
‘major’/ ‘minor’ variety. Thus there should be no possibility of
thinking that ‘the literary’ is, in fact, comprised of some writ-
ing which is more ‘literary’ than other ‘literary’ writing, or that
pre-emptive evaluations are being made: all writing which fits
the bill comprises my conception of ‘the literary’. In this way,
it seeks to promote a ‘commonwealth’ or ‘republic of letters’
which enfranchises the diverse plenitude of literature, and in
which, as a necessary reflex of this, evaluation is always provi-
sional, variable and justified by function.

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 97
First of all, I would argue that ‘the literary’ is distinguished by
its own sense of being ‘of the literary’. This apparently circular
definition means that writing which presents itself as being
‘creative’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘artificial’ (i.e. composed of and by
artifice) simultaneously conceives of itself as being different to
other kinds of writing which do not so conceive of themselves.
I do not have in mind here Aestheticism or the kind of strate-
gic self-reflexivity associated currently with postmodernist texts
—where there is an explicit internal commentary, for example,
on the discursive practices of creating a fiction—but the sense
in which any literary text emits a consciousness of understand-
ing itself to be ‘literary’. The literary text is the product, first,
of a writer who elects to write a poem, a drama or a prose fic-
tion, itself a choice knowingly made within a cultural context
which is also known to ascribe meaning to these genres. Sec-
ond, it is the product of a reader who recognises, by way of
their own ‘literary competence’ (see pp. 98–100), that what
they are reading is indeed a literary text. In this respect, the
text is so indelibly inscribed by these ascriptive consciousnesses
that we may say that one of its determinate characteristics is
its sense of being ‘literary’. To put it more simply, a poem iden-
tifies itself as belonging to the ‘literary’ genre of poetry, and its
‘poem-ness’ helps to determine how it is read. In exactly the
same way, a novel’s self-presentation as being of the ‘literary’
genre of prose fiction is a constituent feature of its difference
from a piece of writing which does not have that self-
consciousness. Both examples, I am suggesting, are in fact
fundamentally constituted by announcing their location within
‘the domain of the literary’.
It could, of course, be retorted, certainly in respect of peri-
ods before the modern generic classifications became conven-
tionally established, that a writer of drama would not be

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98 LITERATURE
conscious of writing a ‘play’ or that an early novelist did not
think of him or herself as writing a ‘novel’; nor that the audi-
ence/reader in either case were aware of themselves as being in
the presence of such. But as noted on pp. 8 and 34 lexical his-
tories do not always match conceptual ones, so it does not
necessarily follow that the anonymous authors and audiences
of medieval miracle plays were unaware that they were creat-
ing or watching something different from the Bible or liturgical
services in church. Nor would it be the case that Daniel Defoe
and Henry Fielding were not conscious of composing what
turned out to be ‘novels’ rather than kinds of writing which
were ‘factual accounts’ or ‘histories’—if for no other reason
than that of their self-conscious preoccupation with their own
fictional contrivance or with affirming that their stories were
indeed ‘true’. It is clearly apparent, too, that the rapidly estab-
lished popular readership for this ‘novel’ kind of writing under-
stood and appreciated its novelty or difference very well.
Leaving aside generic ‘naming’, then, my argument is that
the matrix of conscious production and reception in which ‘the
literary’ is formed metaphorically invests the self-consciousness
of ‘being literary’ in the written work itself. So that while we
accept that there is no such thing as a specifically ‘literary’, or
‘peculiar’, language, we nevertheless regard the language of a
text as ‘literary’, rather than as an ordinary act of communica-
tion, because we read it as a ‘literary’ work. In Umberto Eco’s
words, ‘a well-organised text’ (for which read, a self-
consciously ‘literary’ one) ‘presupposes a model of competence
coming, so to speak, from outside the text, but on the other
hand works to build up, by merely textual means, such a com-
petence’ (Eco [1979] 1981:8). The ‘external’ competence of the
reader will indeed make the text readable, but it is the text’s
own ‘internal’ textual strategies which summon and confirm
that competence.
This is not the place to discuss in detail the concept of ‘liter-

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 99
ary competence’, but as I am using a broad notion of it here,
some definition is called for. Drawing on Noam Chomsky’s
concept of ‘linguistic competence’ (those language rules inter-
nalised by native speakers that enable them to generate and
understand grammatically correct sentences), ‘literary compe-
tence’ posits the existence of implicit knowledge or internalised
rules—‘conventions of reading’, as Jonathan Culler calls them
—which enable readers to discriminate, read and make sense
of literary works (Culler 1975:114). This indicates a distinc-
tion, therefore, between simple literacy and what we might call
‘literar-acy’. Put simply, ‘competent’ readers, when faced with
a text, seem to have internalised norms and procedures which
enable them to know how to understand it, and to decide what
is, or is not, an appropriate ‘interpretation’. While this literary
competence may seem to shift the recognition and ascription
of being ‘literary’ from text to reader, it is also the case that
literary writers write on the assumption of it, since they write
as literature what can be read as literature.
We acquire literary competence through our general accul-
turation, but most obviously in education. As one commenta-
tor has put it:
We tend to forget the fact that reading is an unnatural act—
left alone, no child would do it. Reading must be taught….
The child is taught not only to sound out the words, but to
interpret their meaning—which is to say that literary criti-
cism is there from the moment the child’s parents begin to
read to him or her or explain the meanings of signs on the
street.2
In other words, unlike ‘natural’ linguistic competence (we are
not formally taught how to speak and understand grammati-
cally correct sentences), ‘literary competence’ is learnt through
nurture and, therefore, will be acquired differentially. Because

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100 LITERATURE
we cannot then assume that the entire adult population will
have such competence, it could be argued that, whereas the
writer may have made a specific choice to produce a literary
text, a reader without ‘literary competence’ will not be able to
recognise the kind of literary ‘self-consciousness’ proposed ear-
lier. On my own terms, therefore, this cannot then be a defin-
ing characteristic of my notion of ‘the literary’—which would
certainly seem to make it meaningless. However, this requires
the hypothesis of a reader who can indeed read, but who lacks
the ‘literary competence’ to discriminate the poem they are
faced with from other kinds of written text: the hypothetical
reader, in other words, would have become literate while escap-
ing any of the accompanying processes of acculturation. Para-
doxically, therefore, this may be seen to prove my point
instead: for the reader who is outside ‘literary competence’
means that they cannot recognise ‘the literary’ or ascribe the
poem accordingly, so that the poem is not then ‘of the
literary’. This surely implies that ascription of ‘the literary’ is
indeed a constituent of the poem as literary object.
My usage of the notion assumes, however, that the vast
majority of people in late-twentieth-century societies where
literacy is ubiquitous will, in fact, have internalised the ‘con-
ventions’ which enable them at least to perceive the difference
between different kinds of writing, and will have a greater or
lesser ‘competence’ in reading literary ones. Such factors as
schooling from an early age, in which the reading and writing
of poems and stories is a common activity; the huge children’s
books industry, ‘constantly swelled by 7,000 new titles a year’
(‘Dive into a book’ 1997:3); the ubiquitous presence of book-
shops and libraries, publishers’ catalogues, literary festivals
and prizes, reviewing in mass-media outlets, readings and adap-
tations on radio, TV and film, all constantly reinforce the
acquisition of ‘literary competence’ and keep the specificity of
‘the literary’ in the general public eye. So that most readers

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 101
may be presumed to function within the context of a culturally
determined and received notion of ‘literature’. Faced with a
poem, in other words, they would be able to name it as such,
even if they could not formulate what makes it ‘a poem’ rather
than the football results—thus recognising its self-inscription
as being ‘of the literary’
My second defining characteristic of ‘the literary’ returns us to
the concept of poiesis or ‘making’. I noted on p. 26 that for a
very long period of time the word ‘poetry’ stood for what later
became known as ‘literature’, and that a synonym for this in
English, especially during the Renaissance, was the ‘arte of
making’. This more literal notion of the business of composing
literary texts was, of course, later overdetermined by the
Romantics’ emphasis on creativity, ‘the imagination’, and the
role of ‘the poet’ as individual and original ‘genius’: the ‘uncon-
scious legislator of the world’; ‘The Hero as Man of
Letters’—‘in a world of which he is the spiritual light’.3 But
what I want to focus on here is the fact that literature, even
when it purports to be a form of realistic mimesis, in ‘copying
nature’ or ‘representing reality’, is actually ‘making’ what I
have called ‘poietic realities’.
If we think of the modern adjective ‘creative’, which now
has the looser meaning either of ‘imaginative originality’ in
characterising someone’s artistic talentedness, of ‘imaginative
writing’ genetically, or of the practice of it (‘creative writing’),
and restore to it its primary sense, we are returned, in the
OED’s words, to ‘that which creates’/‘makes out of nothing’.
In deploying the notion of a writing which creates, it is that
basic meaning of the verb ‘to create’ which is what I wish to
emphasise: ‘to bring into being; esp. form out of nothing…
Make, form, or constitute for the first time or afresh’ (OED).
The force of that ‘bring into being/form out of nothing/

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102 LITERATURE
constitute for the first time’ is what lies at the nub of my argu-
ment; for whilst recognising that literary texts are, of course,
created out of something (i.e. language), it is precisely the orig-
inal ‘form’ in which language is organised which makes the
new object indeed ‘formed out of nothing’. This is reinforced
by the OED’s subsequent definition of the noun ‘creation’:
‘The action of making, forming, producing, or constituting for
the first time… An original (esp. imaginative) production of
human intelligence’ (my emphases). It is the apparent contra-
diction implicit in being brought into being (i.e. material exis-
tence) by way of the imagination (i.e. by an act of mental
contrivance) that signals the crux of my definition of ‘the liter-
ary’. It is no coincidence that James Joyce, in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, causes Stephen Dedalus, descendant of
the ‘fabulous artificer’ of Greek legend, to think of the mature
artist as ‘like the God of creation’ (Joyce [1916] 1964:215),
nor to believe himself, at the end of the novel—and subject to
Joyce’s irony—to be about ‘to encounter…the reality of experi-
ence and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con-
science of my race’ (253; my emphases). ‘Forge’, of course,
means at once to ‘make’ and to ‘fabricate’, in the senses both
of ‘constructing’ and ‘inventing falsely’; but it is ‘uncreated’
which implies that in the process of this ‘forging’ something
new will be made. My definition of ‘the literary’, then, rests on
this basic sense of ‘creative’ as making for the first time.
We may also notice that other words than ‘poet’/‘maker’
used in relation to literature carry similar connotations. For
example, the word ‘playwright’ is indeed not ‘playwrite(r)’ but
cognate with, say, ‘wheelwright’ or ‘shipwright’—where
‘wright’ is glossed by the dictionary simply as ‘a maker’. A
playwright ‘makes plays’—or ‘creates’ them, as defined above.
Equally pointed in this context is the word ‘fiction’. Derived
from the Latin fingere/fictum—to ‘fashion’ or ‘form’—by way
of the substantive fictio/fictionis—‘a shaping’—the modern

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 103
word carries the sense both of imaginative prose narratives
(novels) and of pure invention, often in respect of the deliber-
ately deceptive. Thus we use it to denote a feigned or false
‘fabrication’: as in, ‘his story to the court was pure fiction’ or
‘little Johnny is not beyond telling a few fictions about his
friends’. The Oxford Companion to the English Language
(McArthur 1992:401–2) further reminds us of the usage involv-
ing ‘social or cultural constructs’ (‘a special kind of fact’), such
as ‘temporal fictions’ (the days of the week) and ‘geographical
fictions’ (the Equator). These, the Companion notes, are at
once ‘part of life’ and the ‘products of imaginative
storytelling’, so that ‘fictively, Sherlock Holmes and the Equa-
tor are on a par’. It adds that ‘at a certain level of discussion
the [English] language is itself fictive: something created by the
human mind within a cultural system so as to serve certain
social ends’. Two points emerge from all this in my context
here.
First, whilst conscious that some of the concepts which fol-
low have been prejudicially gendered within male critical
discourse,4 I nevertheless want to highlight that sense in the
etymology of ‘fiction’ which means that it is a kind of aesthetic
‘forming’, ‘fashioning’ or ‘shaping’. Like other kinds of literary
writing, fiction is a fashioning of language; but because the
genre is characterised by a more overtly referential modality in
purporting to relate to ‘real life’, it also seems to form or shape
the raw material of lived experience into the ‘world of the
book’. Coleridge’s notion of the ‘esemplastic’ power of the
‘secondary imagination’ which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,
in order to recreate’ represents a founding aesthetic formula-
tion of this process.5 But Henry James, in his preface to The
Spoils of Poynton, neatly points up its significance in my con-
text here when he asserts that ‘life persistently blunders and
deviates, loses herself in the sand. The reason is, of course, that
life has no direct sense whatever for the subject and is capable

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104 LITERATURE
(luckily for us) of nothing but splendid waste. Hence the
opportunity for the sublime economy of art…’ (James [1907]
1962:120). Art, in other words, precisely does ‘have a sense of
subject’, which it ‘rescues’ from the ‘splendid waste’ of life,
‘fashioning’ a perceptible reality for us in its textual ‘shaping’
of the inchoate into comprehensible designs or patterns. In this
respect, fiction is just as constitutively poietic as poetry itself. I
will return to the notion of ‘pattern’ in a moment.
The second point is that the correlation between ‘fiction’
and ‘fabrication’—and the ambiguous relations between the
‘real’ and the ‘fictive’—reminds us that our comprehension of
the world is constructed within discourse; that we are all
formed by, and complicit in, ‘telling stories’; that our systems
of knowing, meaning and making sense are all textualised nar-
ratives. Exactly because of this, I will argue in Chapter 5 that
the evident textualising of ‘the real’ in ‘the literary’ is one of
the pressing reasons why literature remains a salutary resource
for us.
My proposition that ‘poietic making’ has a fundamental
defining role is not to argue, however, that ‘the literary’ does
not allude to a ‘real’ material reality outside itself, but to estab-
lish that even at its most realistic the literary discourse never-
theless constructs the reality it purports to represent. Neither is
it to argue that other kinds of writing are not ‘creative’ in the
sense used earlier: a political pamphlet, for example, will
‘make’ an argument in language on behalf of a particular
cause, which can then be ‘unmade’ by an opposing argument
put forward in response; popular journalism daily creates its
news in writing its news-stories (the word is indicative). But in
both these cases, there is, on the one hand, an assumed exter-
nal context of ‘real’ reference which justifies or substantiates
the pamphlet’s and news-story’s own engagement with it; and,
on the other, a self-presumption on the part of such writings
that they belong to the real world as ‘truthful’, ‘factual’ dis-

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 105
courses (i.e. precisely not fictive), and that they will be taken
on trust to be so by their readership. This assumption of not
being ‘of the literary’, in other words, distinguishes them from
even the most ‘real-world’ allusive of novels once the novel has
‘self-consciously’ disclosed itself to be such—which, as I have
argued earlier, is central to its generic self-definition as being
‘of the literary’.
But the most important feature of literary ‘making’, I am
proposing, is that it creates ‘poietic realities’ which would not
otherwise exist. Without wishing to collude in a Romantic dis-
course which sees ‘originality’ as the central attribute of
‘genius’, I would nevertheless claim that it is the unique speci-
ficity of all literary works by definition—since only a word-for-
word copy would exactly replicate the original—which allows
them to bring into view newly perceptible ‘subjects’ from the
‘splendid waste’ of life. Here, we are at what Seamus Heaney
has called ‘the frontier of writing’: ‘the line that divides the
actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative repre-
sentation of those conditions in literature’ (Heaney 1995: xvi).
This kind of ‘originality’, however, is only an enabling charac-
teristic of ‘the literary’, not a value-bestowing property: rather
it is interpretation and evaluation—whilst always provisional
and function-directed—which will make of the ‘making’ what
they perceive and value there.
A reworking of one of Raymond Williams’s earliest and
vaguest, but most fertile, formulations will help to clarify what
I mean here. In The Long Revolution, he famously defined ‘cul-
tural history’ as ‘the study of relationships between elements in
a whole way of life’, and added, importantly for my present
purpose, that ‘a key-word, in such analysis, is pattern
(Williams [1961] 1971:63; my emphasis). By ‘pattern’, I under-
stand him to mean what we have seen Henry James claim is
art’s ability to extrapolate a ‘sense of subject’ from the undif-
ferentiated ‘inclusion and confusion’ of life. By way of this

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106 LITERATURE
perception of ‘pattern’, Williams says, we can tap into the
‘structure of feeling’ of a period, and experience ‘the particular
living result of all the elements in the general organisation’ of a
community: that is, its ‘culture’ (64). In the process of showing
how fiction is a vital form of access to this ‘structure of
feeling’, he makes a passing remark which I wish to focus on
and then extrapolate to ‘the literary’ as a whole. Having noted,
pertinently in my context here, that ‘art creates, by new percep-
tions and responses, elements which the society, as such, is not
able to realise’, he writes: ‘We find also, in certain characteris-
tic forms and devices, evidence of the deadlocks and unsolved
problems of the society: often admitted to consciousness far
the first time in this way’ (86; my emphases). What Williams is
suggesting here is not merely access through content, but much
more importantly that this access is by way of fictional fashion-
ing (‘certain…forms and devices’) which produces new knowl-
edge by ‘shaping’ a ‘pattern’ which ‘consciousness’ perceives
‘for the first time in this way’. Whether we read the ambiguous
phrase ‘in this way as ‘by these means’ or ‘in this specific
form’, what Williams seems to confirm is my argument that
‘the literary’ ‘forms out of nothing… makes for the first time’
new perceptual realities in its creative textuality. We will find a
consonance between these views and those of Louis Althusser
quoted later (pp. 118–19).
Williams developed these ideas in his later concept of the
‘knowable community’ ([1970] 1974:66). His argument, by
way of George Eliot in particular, is that she ‘extends the
community of the novel’, not so much by increasing its ‘real
social range’, but by articulating it so that ‘the known commu-
nity, creatively known (67–8; my emphasis: that is, known
through its creation in Eliot’s text) is perceived to be the
‘divided’ relationship between the ‘real social’ community and
the ‘knowing’ of it by the novelist’s ‘signifying consciousness’:
a consciousness ‘not of the known or the knowable but of the

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 107
to-be-known (69, 74). What Eliot has bequeathed us in palpa-
ble form is that it is the ‘signifying consciousness’ itself, of the
now partially estranged observer/ novelist, which defines the
‘to-be-known’ community she writes about. In other words, it
is her vision, articulated in and as the text, which defamil-
iarises habitualised sight, and so allows us to ‘know’ a commu-
nity which is unable to know itself as it gets on busily with
living the ‘splendid waste’ of its ‘real social’ life. I will return
to notions of ‘defamiliarising vision’ later (pp. 112–16).
Eliot’s importance for Williams, then, lies in her ability to
depict ‘a knowable community, but knowable in a new sense’
(73; my emphasis). She gives form to a consciousness which is
‘thinking beyond, feeling beyond, the restrictions and limita-
tions…[of] the defining weight, of a limited and frustrating
world’ (77): a consciousness ‘running beyond’ (ibid.) the
present to embrace the change which historical process will
bring as the future. Such a proleptic realism, to put it another
way, embodies the ‘to-be-known’ as ‘knowable‘. In effect, it
creates—Williams’s own phrase, significantly, is ‘literally
made’ (ibid.; my emphasis)—a new form of historical knowl-
edge by way of its textuality, and whose vision arguably has
greater potential to ‘think beyond, feel beyond’ the determi-
nate ‘real social’ community than, say, academic history.6 To
quote Seamus Heaney again, ‘the literary’ is ‘more dedicated to
the world-renewing potential of the imagined response than to
the adequacy of the social one’ (Heaney 1995: xvii). How such
literary works are thereafter valued and hierarchised as regards
their ‘originality’ is not presently my concern. For now, all I
want to establish as a matter of definition, is that all literary
works are ‘creative’ in respect of their original ‘making’ in lan-
guage, whilst also potentially holding for us, in this, what
Thomas Hardy called ‘moments of vision’ (see p. 112–15).

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108 LITERATURE
By way of illustrating ‘the arte of making’, and to mitigate the
paradox that a book about literature has so far unremittingly
disregarded specific examples of it, let me quote, and then
offer a close reading of, Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-
Fox’ (Hughes 1957). This is not to make great claims for this
particular poem; it is simply that the poem rather obviously
and self-consciously helps to establish my substantive point:
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 109
The page is printed.
Let me analyse in some detail how the poem works. First,
there is its internal time-frame: in stanza one, it is posited that
this is a ‘midnight moment’—which ‘this…forest’ belongs to
(‘midnight moment’s’ is a possessive); there is a clock, and ‘this
blank page where my fingers move’. We should note that the
tense of ‘move’ implies a continuity in the present (surely
invoking the famous lines, ‘The Moving Finger writes; and,
having writ,/Moves on’, from Edward Fitzgerald’s poem, The
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám); and that, as we shall see, this
continuity frames the whole of the rest of poem. Stanza two
opens with ‘I’ seeing ‘no star’ through the window. If we then
jump to the final two lines of the last stanza, we find that ‘The
window is starless still’—where ‘starless still’ may mean both
the temporal ‘still starless’ and the physical ‘starless and still’,
i.e. unmoving—which implies that nothing has changed in
time or space during ‘this midnight moment’. Equally, ‘the
clock ticks’—not, we may note, the continuous temporal pro-
gression of, say, ‘the clock ticks on’—again implying that
between stanza one and stanza six only one tick occurs (a
‘moment’), while the final line reads: ‘The page is printed’.
Whether ‘printed’ suggests that the ‘moving fingers’ in line
four are typing on ‘this blank page’, or whether it is a
metaphor for the page now having marks (‘prints’) upon it, is
uncertain, but we will notice in a moment that the fox ‘prints’
the (’blank’ sheet of) snow in stanza four. In other words, the
internal ‘time’ of the poem is exactly equated with the time of
the poem’s composition; so that the poem is indeed, to borrow
D.G.Rossetti’s apposite phrase, ‘a moment’s monument’.7
This suggests that the line ‘Something else is alive/Beside the
clock’s loneliness’ in stanza one refers not only to the poem’s
fox, but also to the process of composing the poem in the
poet’s ‘imagination’. Indeed, it opens explicitly with ‘I
imagine’. The crux here is the word ‘Beside’—which can easily

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110 LITERATURE
be misread as ‘besides’, meaning ‘in addition to/as well as’—
but which should be read as ‘in close proximity to’/‘next to’.
That is to say, the poet’s ‘imagination’ is located ‘beside’ the
clock and ‘this blank page where my fingers move’. This read-
ing can be sustained throughout the last three lines of stanza
two, where the ‘Something more near’ may also be the onset of
poetic creation which ‘imagines’ the poem in the ‘loneliness’ of
‘the clock’s’ suspension of time (the ‘moment’ between ‘ticks’).
However, this is so far unrealised, since the page is not yet
‘printed’, and is thus confined ‘deeper within darkness’: that is,
within the as yet only emergent creative process. If we again
skip forward to the second line of the last stanza, we find this
correlation of fox and poem picked up once more by the
poem’s fox entering ‘the dark hole of the head’ in its realised
entirety, where the ‘deeper darkness’ of the earlier stanza is
now being occupied, or possessed, by its own creation. In
respect of all this, we may well feel that the poem’s ‘subject’ is
its own composition.
However, stanzas three to five of the poem clearly imply
that ‘Something else’ and ‘Something more near’ is indeed
‘something else’: the physical presence of the approaching fox.
Like many of Ted Hughes’s animal and bird poems, these stan-
zas offer an empathetic attempt to realise the specific otherness
of a non-human creature. Here, it would seem, we have a vivid
poetic invocation of a fox’s very fox-ness. The fox’s cold nose
‘touches twig, leaf’ as delicately as the falling ‘dark snow’
does, and its ‘Two eyes serve a movement that…/Sets neat
prints into the snow’. ‘Serve’, here, in what I will call its ‘realis-
tic’ function, presumably means ‘assists’ or ‘services’ the fox’s
‘wary’ movement—i.e. the fox’s acute eyesight patrols the
safety of its progress. But we should notice, too, that here the
fox is only made up of some of the constituent elements of its
being—its ‘nose’ and ‘eyes’; and that while these may indeed
be the physical features that we ‘see’ first when making out the

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 111
presence of a fox, they are also being used here as a synec-
doche for the fox as a totality. In this respect, the word ‘serve’
takes on a further sense: I suggest there is an ‘as’ tacitly under-
stood between ‘serve’ and ‘a movement’, so that the two eyes,
together with the nose, effectively define or delineate the fox’s
movement—they ‘serve as’ its movement in the poem. In other
words, the fox exists only as a trope of the poem’s rhetorical
strategies.
Returning to the ‘realistic’ depiction of the fox, we see how
the staccato repetition of ‘that now/And again now, and now,
and now’ tracks the precise movements of the fox as it ‘Sets
neat prints into the snow/Between trees’, and we follow the
‘lame/Shadow’ as it ‘warily’ ‘lags’ (comes slowly, hangs back)
through the forest landscape. Again, however, we should note
that the ‘movement’ traced by the ‘two eyes’ only ‘Sets neat
prints in the snow’, and, by implication, on the white (‘blank’)
sheet of ‘the page’, as the form of its definition. The full corpo-
real presence remains unseen behind them, what we ‘see’ being
only a ‘shadow’—an ‘image’ or visual simulacrum—not the
thing itself. The final line of this stanza announces the advent
of the full reality: ‘Of a body that is bold to come’. Here, the
sense in which ‘bold’ is being used has to wait for the first line
of the following stanza in order to be completed: the fox is
‘bold to come/Across clearings’, i.e. fearlessly out of the protec-
tive ‘darkness’ of the ‘forest’. But if we consider the meaning
of ‘a body bold to come’ in that suspended moment between
stanzas, then its sense is less clear: it seems possible to read the
phrase as meaning that the body will ‘come out bold’, i.e.
realise itself in bold definition unlike the ‘shadow’ we have
seen hitherto (it is even possible to read ‘bold’, in relation to
‘prints’, as invoking the sense of an emphatic type-face).
Equally, the word ‘clearings’ in the next line may also suggest,
not just the open spaces in the forest, but a ‘clearing’ of the
matricial ‘darkness’ which has up to now enveloped the cre-

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112 LITERATURE
ation of the fox. The following lines in this stanza continue to
portray the physical reality of the fox, its ‘eye’ becoming
descriptively realised as itself rather than merely serving as one
of the markers of the fox’s ‘movement’: ‘Coming about its
own business’—‘Brilliantly, concentratedly’. But again, in my
simultaneous double-reading of the poem, we may consider
those two adverbs as at once felicitous descriptive words for a
fox’s eye, and a self-congratulatory comment on the poem’s
own realisation of its fox as it emerges in the poem so far. So
that ‘Coming about its own business’ may also be a self-
reflection on the poem’s ‘own business’: which is to articulate
itself. But at this point, the ‘real’ fox arrives in the sensuous
form of ‘a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’; although, as we
have already noticed, it arrives in the ‘dark hole of the head’
(the poet’s and then the reader’s) and is transliterated into a
‘printed page’.
The substantive point I want to make by way of this reading
of Hughes’s poem is that the fox and the poem are one and the
same thing: fox is poem and poem is fox, since both are cre-
ated simultaneously and neither would exist without the other.
In other words, the ‘reality’ of both only resides in the linguis-
tic textuality of the poem. No matter how much the poem may
appear to refer to an external recognisable ‘reality’ of foxes,
this way of seeing this fox is uniquely that of the poem as
encoded in its language, just as the poem would have no sub-
stance without its fabrication of the fox. We should not forget
that the opening two words of the poem—‘I imagine’—
determine everything which follows, nor that its title, ‘The
Thought-Fox’, clearly attempts to signal the fox’s mode of exis-
tence (although ‘The Poem-Fox’ might be more apt). What the
poem does, then, is to create a ‘poietic reality’, unseen before
but now realised in its specific formulation. It is this function
of creation, together with the way in which literary texts simul-

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 113
taneously enable us to ‘see’ the new ‘reality’ being created,
which lies at the heart of my definition of ‘the literary’.
While accepting that not all (or even most) poems are so self-
consciously ‘about’ their own fictive composition, I will never-
theless want to propose—especially in Chapter 5—that the
constitutive textuality of ‘the literary’ as a whole enables us to
see the way in which any text’s ‘reality’ is indeed textualised.
However, two other possible objections must be dealt with, so
that they do not seem to slide into the definition itself. First,
while everything I have written above must imply that an indi-
vidual text is determinate insofar as it is this one thing and no
other, I am not claiming that this ‘text-in-itself’ is the ultimate
arbiter of its unitary ‘essential’ meaning. The ‘words on the
page’ are neither restricted in signification by the author’s
‘intention’ nor by their unique linguistic specificity: my own
reading of the poem above, in its strategic partiality of interpre-
tation, is certain proof of this. Second, neither am I claiming
that the poem’s value lies, in this instance, in the way it sends
us back to ‘life’ with a new perception of ‘fox-ness’ (although
‘the literary’ may do that, as I will suggest later); rather, that it
allows us to observe the process by which any extrinsic effectiv-
ity it may have is achieved. In other words, in seeking a func-
tionalist definition of ‘the literary’, I am simply saying this is
what literary texts seem to do by dint of their self-conscious
creation of themselves as ‘poietic realities’. That uses and
virtues may stem from this quality I happily accept—indeed I
will hope to enunciate some of them in the following chapter—
but these lie in particular and partisan ascribed functions result-
ing from this quality, not as a primary constituent of its
definition.
Let us consider this quality of ‘being literary’ in a different
way. Earlier, I quoted the phrase Thomas Hardy used as the

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114 LITERATURE
title for one of his volumes of poems, Moments of Vision. A
close inspection of this seemingly simple, but resonantly com-
plex phrase will act as a further gloss on much of what I have
said so far. The ambiguity of the word ‘vision’ is readily appar-
ent: at once the literal ‘seeing/sight’ (as in ‘20/20 vision’); the
meta-physical notion of imaginative revelation (‘she had a
vision’); and the proleptic ability to see through or beyond the
immediate (‘he has vision’, ‘her vision of the future’). The
ambiguity of the cluster of inflexions around ‘moments’, how-
ever, is rather less obvious. Of course, ‘moments’ are brief
fractions of time, usually implying stopped fragments in the
temporal process (as in ‘this midnight moment’, ‘wait a
moment’, ‘magic moments’ or ‘moment of truth’), and this is
certainly the upper meaning in Hardy’s title: particular
instances of ‘vision’. But there are two other senses which
haunt the fringes of the word: first, that of serious conse-
quence (‘momentous’, ‘matters of pith and moment’); second,
and for my purposes here more fertile, that within physics
which means the measure of a turning effect (as in ‘the
moment of a force’). So Hardy’s phrase may imply that the
instants of vision are important (‘moments’ of great
‘moment’), but also that the vision is somehow itself in
motion: turning, pivoting, swinging round a point.
If we think, then, of the effect of a turning vision, in the
most literal sense, we must conceive of a ‘seeing’ which moves
round its object (consider astronauts observing earth from
their circulating spacecraft), and which can theoretically move
round it through 360 degrees in any direction. Move round
your chair, looking at it, and you will al various stages see it
from all sides and angles. In other words, you will be able to
apprehend it as a totality, a three-dimensional entity. But two
things may strike you: one, if you stopped the moment when
you were theoretically looking straight up at it from below
(chair suspended absolutely vertically above you), the ‘image’

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 115
from that ‘moment of vision’ would look remarkably unlike
one’s standard received image of a chair. (Think of that kind
of trick-photography which takes pictures of familiar objects
from unfamiliar angles: where a bucket, for example, taken
directly from above, becomes no more than a set of concentric
circles.) Two, how on earth (and I use this phrase here, as will
become apparent, not merely as a manner of speaking) would
you represent, in visual terms, your total apprehension of the
complete three-dimensional chair: the chair in all its chair-
ness? How, indeed, would you ‘see’ it all, all in one moment?
Two senses of ‘moment’—turning and stopped instant of time
—clash here in fundamental contradiction: one is, precisely, in
motion, in time; the other, equally precisely, is still, ‘stopped’,
out of temporal process. Is there any way of resolving this
physical impossibility? Well, yes, but only if we return to the
other term in the phrase under consideration: ‘vision’.
For vision, in what I have called its metaphysical senses,
allows us (but especially the creative artist) to break out of the
space/time trap of the third dimension, and enter that zone of
relativity beyond the determinate factors of time and space.
Put simply and crudely, ‘vision’ allows us to ‘see’ the future, or
‘envision’ another world; but it would also enable us to see, in
one totalising ‘moment’ (in this case, both stopped instant and
full circular movement) all of our chair at the same time. This
fourth-dimensional liberation from space/time, this envisioned
‘simultaneity’ of experience, was the principle on which the
modernist painters early this century based their dislocations
of conventional realist/mimetic form. That is why one can see
both profiles of a face simultaneously in Cubist portraits, or a
violin dismantled with all its planes simultaneously displayed
on the two-dimensional picture-surface of a modernist still-life.
‘Vision’, then, both as a momentary revelation of the very
‘this-ness’ of something (what James Joyce, in Stephen Hero,
called an ‘epiphany’ [1944/56] 1969:216–18) and as a ‘turn-

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116 LITERATURE
ing’ or destabilising perception, is a way of breaking with the
conventional, familiar, naturalised representations approved
by ‘commonsense’. Indeed, it ruptures a world constructed
very largely by such a ‘realist’ cultural ideology: one which has
a profound antipathy to the strange, the disturbing, the unset-
tling, the improbable or implausible, all of which qualities are
themselves frequently the result of, precisely, vision and ‘the
visionary’. ‘Vision’, in this binary sense (‘double vision’?), is to
‘re-vision’ the always already visioned—both in terms of ‘revis-
ing’ and of ‘re-envisioning’.8 To put it another way, it is a way
of ‘defamiliarising’, of ‘making strange’, the naturalised or
habitualised world of conventional perceptual reality, of ‘see-
ing things as they really are’. I have strategically chosen the
Russian Formalists’ terms for the notion of ‘estrangement’ here
so that I can return to it a little more fully in a moment.
But Hardy himself, in the specific context of distancing him-
self from ‘realism’ in (literary) art, pinpoints the effect of the
process incident on such ‘moments of vision’ when he writes:
Art is a disproportioning—(i.e. distorting, throwing out of
proportion)—of realities, to show more clearly the features
that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or
reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but
would more probably be overlooked. Hence, ‘realism’ is
not Art.
(F.E.Hardy, [1928/30] 1975:228–9)
I will argue that realism is very much a part of literary ‘Art’,
and that it does, in fact, ‘disproportion’ reality—perhaps most
revealingly when at its most realistic, but when read against
the ‘natural’ grain (see pp. 141–8). Nevertheless, we can still
see in Hardy’s formulation strong affinities with Henry
James’s notion of art identifying a ‘subject’ in the ‘splendid
waste’ of life, and with Raymond Williams’s sense of newly

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 117
perceptible forms of consciousness emerging from the ‘know-
able communities’ realised in literary fictions. But in this
attempt here to define the effect of ‘the literary’, let us pick up
the consonance between Hardy’s concept of ‘disproportioning’
and the Russian Formalist notion of ‘defamiliarising’, since my
definition will, in part, be seen to be cognate with certain
aspects of Formalist thinking.
The concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ derives from the Russian
word ostranenie, meaning ‘making strange’ or ‘estrangement’.
The critic Victor Shklovsky argued that we can never retain
the freshness of our perceptions of things because the processes
of our cultural and social life cause them to become ‘natu-
ralised’ or ‘automatised’. The special task of literature is to
give us back our awareness of things which have become
habitualised in our daily perception of them, as though we
were seeing them for the very first time (Shklovsky [1917]
1965:13). The ‘pure’ formalism of the earlier Formalists’
work, however, lies in the fact that they were not so much
interested in the perceptions themselves as in the nature of the
devices which produce the effect of ‘defamiliarisation’; an
image, therefore, was merely a ‘device of poetic language’. As
Shklovsky wrote:
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar, to
make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception, because the process of perception is an aes-
thetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not
important.
(ibid.: 12; Shklovsky’s emphasis)
If we think of the Ted Hughes poem in this spirit, we would
say that the fox as ‘object’ is ‘not important’, but that our per-
ceiving of it by way of the defamiliarising ‘devices’ of the poem

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118 LITERATURE
is ‘an aesthetic end in itself’. Conversely, my own reading of
the poem suggests that what is ‘important’ is our perceiving of
the ‘artfulness’ of the poem itself as ‘object’—not as ‘an aes-
thetic end in itself’, but in its displaying of how ‘the aesthetic’
functions.
The Formalists’ technical focus also led them to treat ‘liter-
ary’ language as of a special kind, which achieves its distinc-
tiveness by deviating from and distorting ‘practical’ language.
While the latter is used for acts of communication, literary lan-
guage has no practical function of this kind at all except to
make us ‘see’ differently. What distinguishes it from ‘practical’
language is its constructed quality, whose special property is
its ‘foregrounding’ of the rhetorical devices themselves, and
which, in so doing, draws attention to the fact that the utter-
ance is uncommon (‘peculiar language’). This changes our
mode of perception from the ‘automatised’ to the ‘artistic’, and
hence renovates the resources of a language worn smooth by
conventional usage. It is on the tropes and figures of this ‘con-
structedness’ that Formalism concentrates, proposing that the
way in which a literary text ‘lays bare’ its own devices is its
most essential literary quality. The Formalists took Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandyas a key text in exposing its own fic-
tiveness as a novel (see Shklovsky [1921] 1965), and thus, by
implication, the artificiality of the whole genre’s supposed ‘real-
ism’. But Bertolt Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ in the theatre,
where the audience is forced by a play’s self-revealing devices
to recognise that it is indeed watching a play, and the self-
reflexivity of much postmodernist fiction, would be equally
good examples of the processs of ‘laying bare’—albeit with
political or strategic functions which go well beyond the For-
malists’ notion of it as defining ‘literariness’.
However, in their belief that language was a social phe-
nomenon and could not be separated from ideology, the theo-
rists/critics associated with the ‘Bakhtin School’ (see pp. 81–3)

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 119
returned ‘the literary’ to its wider cultural, historical and social
relations. ‘The language of art’, Medvedev, for example,
observes, ‘is only a dialect of a single social language’.9 Fur-
ther, by shifting the emphasis of interest from ‘the device’
(static) to ‘function’ (dynamic), ‘defamiliarisation’ becomes not
an essential(ist) property of the literary, but an historically
determinate effect of its textuality in resisting the relentless
processes of naturalisation, habitualisation or automatisation.
It also follows from this ‘functional’ conception of defamiliari-
sation that literature’s variability of function, meaning and
evaluation in different societies and periods is a reflex of
change and historical process, thereby undermining any idea of
a fixed canon of ‘Literature’ in which eternal verities are
enshrined.
Clearly, my own notion of ‘the literary’ has much in com-
mon with this latter position, since, on the one hand, I accept
that there can be no such thing as a distinct ‘literary language’
in terms of its linguistic or rhetorical properties (see pp. 15–16,
and Attridge 1988, pp. 94–5); and, on the other, I wish to situ-
ate a definition of ‘the literary’ in its historical, cultural and
social locations, functions and effects, rather than in terms of
its aesthetic essence. But I also wish, nevertheless, in what I
suppose may be called a formalist-materialist critical method,
to tread a narrow line between affirming the extrinsic cultural
definition of ‘the literary’ and retaining a sense of its inherent
difference from both other forms of written discourse and
other modes of cultural production, since it will be in this,
finally, that the claims I make for ‘the literary’ as a discrete
cultural category must reside.
Formalism influenced both Structuralist and Marxist critical
and cultural theory, and it is to the ‘Structuralist-Marxist’
philosopher, Louis Althusser (see also p. 84, n. 7), that I now
turn in order to try and negotiate the difficult manoeuvre out-
lined above. Althusser spends very little time on literature in

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120 LITERATURE
his works, but some brief comments in his short essay, ‘A Let-
ter on Art’, are of some help here. He claims that the effect of
‘the specificity’ or ‘peculiarity of art’ (in contradistinction to
‘knowledge’ or ‘science’) is: ‘to “make us see”…“make us per-
ceive”, “make us feel” something which alludes to reality…
[that is] the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes,
from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes’
(Althusser [1966] 1977:204; Althusser’s emphases here and
below). In other words, art achieves ‘a retreat, an internaldis-
tantiation’ (ibid.), precisely because of its formal composition
as art, from its informing ideology. Because novels give ‘form’
to ideology as ‘the “lived” experience of individuals’, they
‘make us see’ ‘the spontaneous “lived experience” of ideology
in its peculiar relationship to the real’ (204–5), and in so doing
critically unmask the ideology in which the novels are neverthe-
less still ‘held’. Althusser concludes that: ‘the real difference
between art and science lies in the specific farm in which they
give us the same object in quite different ways: art in the form
of “seeing” and “perceiving” or “feeling”, science in the form
of knowledge (in the strict sense, by concepts)’ (205). What he
also recognises is that we need ‘an adequate (scientific) knowl-
edge of the processes which produce the “aesthetic effect” of a
work of art’ (206); that he does not offer one is, I suspect,
because the analysis of ‘the processes’, rather than the ‘effects’
themselves, would again lead up the Formalist blind alley. Nev-
ertheless, in an earlier essay focussed partly on Brecht,
Althusser suggests that, rather than in its ordered surface
unity, it is in the ‘silences’ or ideological suppressions and in
‘the dynamic’ of its ‘latent asymmetrical-critical structure’, that
literature promotes the ‘internal dissociation’ which works
upon and exposes ideology (Althusser [1962] 1977:142).10 It is
to these that the critic must attend, not in an explanative
hermeneutic reading, but in a ‘symptomatic’ one which reads

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 121
the tell-tale signs of an informing but unacknowledged condi-
tion below the surface.
My reference to Althusser’s ideas here is not to emphasise
‘ideology’ in relation to ‘the literary’ (whether that is all it
enables us to ‘see’ will be further examined in Chapter 5).
Rather, it is to foreground his sense both that the
‘different’‘specific form’ of a literary text is a crucial factor in
its ‘defamiliarising’ of the naturalised and automatised within
the social and cultural order (ideology), and that it has a social
and cultural effect in thus exposing the way ideology relates us
to ‘the real’. This dual perception of ‘form’ and ‘effect’ neatly
brings together the various strands of my argument so far. For
the crucial point is that the ‘special’ function of ‘the literary’—
that which distinguishes it from other kinds of cultural produc-
tion—does indeed seem to lie in its formal ‘making’ of newly
perceptible ‘poietic realities’, in its textualised defamiliarising
‘moments of vision', and in the ‘patterns’ or ‘sense of subject’
‘knowably’ inscribed in its linguistic texture.
Two disclaimers must be made, however, in relation to this
assertion. First, to emphasise ‘the literary’ as a special cate-
gory, is to acknowledge that it is recognisable as such in all
historical periods and cultures, but simultaneously to accept
that it will be differently inflected within them. In other words,
I am not defining the category in itself as unchanging and tran-
shistorical. Second, in foregrounding the literary text’s ‘mak-
ing’ of a specific ‘poietic reality’, I am not implying that this
once and for all determines and fixes its meaning throughout
history: that it is a ‘moment of vision for all time. On the con-
trary, while the text itself may remain by and large the same,
its readability, its meanings and functions, will be the product,
precisely, of that text’s insertion in history. In other words, it
may defamiliarise differently in different historical and cultural
locales, while also being itself defamiliarised by its insertion in
them. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, while remain-

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122 LITERATURE
ing textually the same, functions differently in the context of
postcolonialism than it did, say, when colonialism was at its
most ideologically dynamic. Where once it may have helped
subliminally to ‘fix’ the colonial relationship (Prospero and
Caliban) between Europe and its ‘others’ by establishing, in
Helen Tiffin’s words, ‘patterns of reading alterity at the same
time as it inscribed the “fixity” of that alterity, naturalising
difference within its own cognitive codes’ (Tiffin [1987]
1995:98), it can now be seen to defamiliarise the ideology in
which it is complicit. The poietic reality ‘made’ in the specific
textuality of that text, to put it emphatically, is witness to its
ability to provide a permanent ‘pattern’ or ‘shaping’ of histori-
cal reality which can then be decoded differentially in and on
behalf of later histories.11
Of course, much of what I have said above about ‘the literary’
could just as well be said, too, of other art forms such as
music, painting or film (including TV). They are also ‘creative’
in the senses I have noted earlier; they also construct ‘aesthetic
realities’ which have an oblique relationship to lived reality;
they also produce ‘moments of vision’ which defamiliarise the
‘automatised’ world, and so on. By nevertheless still insisting
on its difference from, the other arts, and on the need to retain
a discrete space or domain for it, I have no intention of trying
to privilege ‘the literary’ or suggest that it is superior to music
or painting or film. I merely wish to insist that it is indeed dif-
ferent from, and does different things to, those art forms.
Here, the crucial factor is my original definition, in Chapter 1,
of what constitutes the subject-matter of the present book: that
literature is in written form, and that its originating modality
and final point of reference is its existence as written (now
printed) text.
While I hope to have established ‘the literary’s’ difference

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 123
from other kinds of written discourse by way of my remarks
on its ‘self-consciousness’ and on ‘literary competence’, what
makes it different to music, for example, is that the latter is
not primarily a form of linguistic notation. Even when it has
‘words’ associated with it, and that although it is, in a sense,
‘written (as sheet music or score), it is is not ‘read’ in the same
way as the linguistic textuality of literature is. We do not read
music to comprehend a conceptual totality made up of words
which have a social and cultural referentiality beyond their
specific formulation as ‘the text’, but in order to ‘hear’ it as a
musical structure. Furthermore, written music assumes perfor-
mance by instrument or voice, which may be said to become
its full realisation. As with produced or performed drama,
therefore, a mediating interpretation intervenes between ‘text’
and recipient prior to the subjective act of interpretation which
occurs when one reads a literary text for the first time. An indi-
vidual performance is thus transient (even if ‘memorable’); but,
unlike drama, there is no linguistic text to return to after the
event, since even recordings are only ever of the particular per-
formance. So that, for example, at the very end of Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, following Estragon and
Vladimir’s decision: ‘Well? shall we go? …Yes, let’s go’, we
can still register the full force of that resonating final stage-
direction: ‘They do not move’ (Beckett [1956] 1970:94). A
play, then, is arguably a readable totality without necessarily
being performed, and is, crucially, accessible to any person
who can read but is without the more specialist skill of reading
music. Those who have this ability, of course, can return to the
score after the evanescent performance, but the system of nota-
tion, unlike that of the (‘literary’) play-text, will still not be the
fundamentally acculturated linguistic notation possessed by
any literate person. In addition, and as we will also see below
in respect of painting and film, the logistics of attending per-
formances constitute a further distinguishing feature between

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124 LITERATURE
music and ‘the literary’ (all you can listen to in bed, for
instance, would be a recording of a concert). Music, to put it
simply, functions in different kinds of ways to literature, pre-
cisely in not having a commonly accessible linguistic referent
for private reading.
Apropos of the visual arts, we may say that, unlike music,
we have a permanent perceptible referent in its totality (the
painting or sculpture as physical object); but the difference
here to ‘the literary’ is again that a painting, for example, is
not made up of words, but of visual images constructed in
paint on a surface for apprehension primarily through sight. If
it were to be argued that reading words is also first of all an
act of sight, we can counter this, in terms of the specificity of
‘the literary’, by saying that a blind person who has never seen
a painting could indeed have it described to them, but the act
of describing it would, in effect, be a mediating act of interpre-
tation. Conversely, a person having a literary work read to
them would receive—except, perhaps, in the vocal inflections
of the reader—as unmediated a sense of the text as if they been
able to read it themselves in the first place. And if the reading
were on tape, they would have a permanent reference as ‘text’.
By contrast, a tape-recording of someone describing the paint-
ing would only perpetuate the mediating interpretative descrip-
tion, as, in a sense, does a recording of performed music.
A further significant difference between the visual arts and
‘the literary’ is also perceptible here, one which is also a cen-
tral defining characteristic of the latter as a pervasive cultural
medium. I have argued that one of the defining terms of ‘the
literary’ is the ‘originality’ implicit in any text’s uniqueness,
and this is a central claim made for the individual visual art-
object too. But the fact that the determinate medium of litera-
ture since the invention of printing has been that it appears in
print means that the ‘original’ work is expected to be exten-
sively reproducible without damaging or detracting from the

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 125
experiencing of the work itself. Photographic reproduction of
paintings, on the other hand, while now of very high quality, is
never regarded as equivalent to seeing ‘the real thing’: paint-
ings are not ‘made’ to be reproduced, whereas literary works
in our culture are.12 It follows from this that to experience the
totality of a painting one must go and see the original wher-
ever it is located, in a museum, art gallery or art dealer’s show-
room. But it may be either entirely inaccessible, if it is in a
private collection, say, or logistically difficult to refer to on
countless occasions: to see the ‘Mona Lisa’ means going to
Paris; and in what sense, following the earthquakes in central
Italy, can the Cimabue frescoes now be seen in a form other
than that of inadequate reproduction? The very reproducibility
of literature means that it is readily and cheaply accessible for
perusal, both in its general availability (shops, libraries) and in
its physical permanence: if my copy (note the word) of Anna
Karenina gets burnt, I can buy another ‘copy’ immediately, but
that ‘copy’ will be no different or inferior to the ‘copy’ that
was burnt. A ‘copy’ of a painting, on the other hand, however
good, and even if done by another talented artist, will not sub-
stitute for ‘the original’—as sale prices, if nothing else, make
clear. Indeed, the conflation of financial and aesthetic evalua-
tion in respect of the visual arts is itself pointedly distinctive.
Film and forms of radio and television production, of
course, have all the wide access and reproducibility I have been
suggesting are characteristic of ‘the literary’, and it is often
now argued that these media are the forms in which fictional
narrative and drama find their most innovative contemporary
expression. Nevertheless, as I have pointed out on a number of
occasions in the course of this book, they do not seem to have
curtailed the reading of literature; and the answer to this may
lie in the difference again between these media and ‘the
literary’. First, we may note once more the fact that they are
not primarily written forms; for while there is always a script

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126 LITERATURE
on which the finished product is based, the script is granted lit-
tle status or autonomy as an object of reading in and for itself.
While this means that, like music and drama—if not more so—
what we see in the cinema or living-room is the always already
mediated/interpreted production or performance of an origi-
nary text. But unlike both music (score) or drama (play), only
rarely do TV or film viewers get to see a script at all,13 and
when they are published in print form, they arguably enter the
‘domain of the literary’ themselves. For example, both Michael
Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient and Anthony
Minghella’s screen-play for the film of the ‘same’—which is, in
fact, rather different—are currently on sale as discrete works
with identical main titles: so that a careless buyer may well
pick up either as ‘the novel’.
A number of further distinctions also accrue from the fact
that the terms cinema/cinematic derive from the word ‘kine-
matic’, i.e. pertaining to motion: from the Greek kinemat,
kinema: ‘movement’, from kinein: ‘move’ (which also gives us
the word ‘kinetic’: ‘in motion, ‘moving’), and are thus, as the
early names for film make clear, ‘moving pictures’, ‘motion
pictures’, ‘movies’. The first point is that the primary modality
of these media is indeed pictures, where most of the screen
‘business’ we observe is communicated visually and dialogue is
secondary. So that the script-writing of an adaptation of a lit-
erary text will involve the transference of much written dia-
logue into visually enacted forms; and, therefore, the experienc-
ing of the ‘text’ will be quite different from that of reading the
written word. Secondly, these pictures are, as we have heard,
‘motion pictures’, which means that if we watch a film in a
cinema, or a one–off television broadcast, differential logistics
of the kind we noted in relation to music and painting also
obtain. For instance, one cannot currently watch a film, or
indeed a video-recording, on the bus, tube or train, because
they are not ‘portable’ in the way books are. Nor can we easily

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 127
return to ‘the text’ in the way that we can with a literary
work: we cannot keep returning to the cinema, with its regu-
larly changing repertoire, summon up at will the ‘repeat’ we
missed on television, or turn back the film/TV programme
which is presently running, in order to ‘review’ in whole or in
part what we have seen flash in front of us for the first time.
Of course, the wide availablity of video-recordings does now
mean that we can both repeatedly see films or TV programmes
we like, and, by dint of the rewind button, turn back con-
stantly to parts we wish to study in detail. Even so, we only
turn back to ‘pictures in motion’, to the ‘kinetic’ modality
which defines film and distinguishes it from literature, and can
only hold it still by using the ‘pause’ button—a device which
ipso facto interrupts the essentially kinetic modality of the
form. Although individual words in a written text are in
sequence and we read them in a progressive manner, they do
not themselves ‘move’ as a determinate feature of their
meaningfulness.
A comic but telling exemplification of this difference in liter-
ary and cinematic modes is the last chapter of David Lodge’s
novel, Changing Places. Entitled ‘Ending’, it is presented as a
film-script in which one of the characters is made to ask—
ostensibly about the events she is involved in: ‘Where is this all
going to end?’ (Lodge 1975:227). In fact, the question signals
the whole chapter’s self-reflexive commentary on the nature of
endings in life, film and written fiction, as the closing para-
graphs (pointedly running across the novel’s final two pages)
make explicit:
PHILIP
You remember that passage in Northanger Abbey where
Jane Austen says she’s afraid that her readers will have
guessed that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.
MORRIS

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128 LITERATURE
(nods) Quote, “Seeing in the tell-tale compression of the
pages before them that we are all hastening together to
perfect felicity.” Unquote.
PHILIP
That’s it. Well, that’s something the novelist can’t help giving
away, isn’t it, that his book is shortly coming to an end? It
may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he can’t dis-
guise the tell-tale compression of the pages….
I mean, mentally, you brace yourself for the ending of a
novel. As you’re reading, you’re aware of the fact that
there’s only a page or two left in the book, and you get
ready to close it. But with a film [page-break in Lodge’s
own text] there’s no way of telling, especially nowadays,
when films are much more loosely structured, much more
ambivalent, than they used to be. There’s no way of telling
which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along,
just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things,
drinking, talking, and we’re watching them, and at any
point the director chooses, without warning, without any-
thing being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can
just…end.
PHILIP
(shrugs) The camera stops, freezing him in mid-gesture.
(233–4)
There follow the last words of the novel: ‘THE END’. Lodge
is, of course, amusingly having it both ways in destabilising the
distinction between film and novel endings; but even so, physi-
cally we know that we are indeed on the penultimate page of
his novel before we turn the page and see ‘THE END’ (and
then turn back to re-read it). In this, it confirms my point
about the permanently static presence of the literary text com-
pared to the continuously kinetic absence of the filmic one. But
I may also point to the way Lodge’s ending indicates how ‘the

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WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’? 129
literary’ extrapolates, and fixes for perusal, a complex ‘subject’
from what Thomas Carlyle called ‘the Chaos of Being’ of lived
experience (Carlyle [1830] 1971:55): the physical realisation,
in the novel’s printed textuality, of the arbitrariness of ‘endings’.
In claiming as I have that a fundamental defining principle of
‘the literary’ is that it is reproducible in print, I may seem to be
contradicting myself, since I have stated in Chapter 2 that liter-
ature (if not ‘Literature’) unquestionably predates the inven-
tion of printing by thousands of years. But it was precisely the
transcription of literary works into written texts by the earliest
scholars (see p. 27) which also made them available for
mechanical reproduction when printing was invented. The
canonic classics of the Western tradition, it could thus be
argued, have only become such because they were susceptible
to reproducibilty in print. In the post-Gutenbergian order,
however, what the impact on ‘the literary’ of computerised
discourses such as hypertext will be, it is too soon to know. A
recent newspaper article on the ‘hypertext novel’ suggests (sig-
nificantly, in the context of what I have had to say about ‘the
literary’ differing from other art forms) that, in its attempts ‘to
break the bounds of the printed page and the models of linear
narrative implied by the printed page’, this will be ‘an original
art form—literature with cinematic or live performance quali-
ties—not a replacement for a book’ (Lillington 1997:2). How-
ever, the inclusion of hypertext fiction in the present Norton
Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, and the fact that
the newspaper tells us that ‘a comfortable reading device [for
hypertext] is probably not far off’ (ibid.), may suggest other-
wise. But if ‘the book’ does survive, and widespread repro-
ducibility is indeed one of its informing characteristics, then
CD Rom and the Internet alone suggest that the day of ‘the
literary’ may only just be dawning.

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130 LITERATURE
A centrally determining characteristic of ‘the literary’, then,
along with the other attributes I have attempted to assign to it,
is that it is realised in a tangible object which is readily present
for close inspection or re-reading, and that it does not have to
be performed (pre-emptively interpreted) in order to be read
for the first time as unmediated text. Of course, publishing,
reviewing and academic criticism—if not, by definition, ‘liter-
ary competence’ itself—mean that no literary text can ever be
entirely unmediated (for example, by being described as ‘a clas-
sic’, ‘Caribbean poetry’, ‘a romance’, ‘Restoration Comedy’,
etc.). But I am working on the hypothesis that a reader coming
to such a text for the first time will read it ‘for themselves’ as
the primary act of comprehension. As a result of this common
accessibility and unmediatedness, therefore, ‘the literary’ is
amongst the most democratic of art forms: as witnessed both
in its pervasive popularity, and in its fear-induced censorship
by those who most wish to curtail freedoms. It is for these rea-
sons that its uses, both as a practice of writing and as an
object of reading, have been and remain so legion, multifari-
ous, and valued. But if this substantive functionalist claim for
the importance of ‘the literary’—and for its retention as a cru-
cial ‘space’ in contemporary and future culture—is to be justi-
fied and sustained, my definition of it will need to be grounded
in the identification of some of those uses. It is to a more
extended and illustrated analysis of ‘the uses of the literary’,
therefore, that the next chapter now turns.

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5
THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’
Newstories
In answer to her own question: ‘Why Read?’, Diane Elam
replies: precisely because ‘reading literature has the great poten-
tial to be totally useless…. Reading literature is not a guaran-
tee; it is a possibility’ (Elam 1997:12; her emphasis). Her
argument concerns the need to preserve a space, specifically
within the contemporary ‘corporate’ university, for the kind of
thinking that literature promotes. Literature, she notes, is
bound by its own temporality, but ‘something always remains,
a literary leftover, waiting to be read’: so that reading is, in fact,
a re-thinking, a literary questioning that continues to ques-
tion the question, including the very question of literature
itself. … [T]he nothingness and potential uselessness of
reading keeps thought open as a question, as questioning,
so that even answers are part of questioning.
(13; her emphasis)
I absolutely take her point, but would suggest that paradoxi-
cally it is in that very ‘nothingness and potential uselessness’
that the uses of ‘the literary’ do indeed lie. If, as Elam says,
something always remains in literature—‘a residual, a leftover
131

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132 LITERATURE
from the past demanding to be thought as a question for the
future’ (ibid.), and if we subsume within her notion of ‘the
past’ a present which is always already past—then the contem-
porary usefulness of that resource cries out to be explored.
What this final chapter will seek to offer, by way of readings
of selected literary texts from the different genres, kinds, peri-
ods and cultures, are some specific examples of the diverse
uses which that ‘residual’ inscribed in literature, both past and
present, may hold for us today. I employ the word ‘uses’, there-
fore, rather less in the sense of productive agency (i.e. to what
use was the writer putting ‘the literary’ as s/he wrote her text?)
than in the receptive sense of its ‘functions’ or ‘effects’ with
regard to contemporary readers. My suggestions are necessar-
ily partial, tentative and provisional, since the whole trajectory
of my argument here is based on the recognition of the differ-
ences of reading which the synchronic and diachronic position-
ing of readers makes inevitable. Indeed, that is a central reason
why the permanently accessible ‘leftover’ of literature is so
important to us: it is always there, in Elam’s phrase, ‘waiting
to be read’, prompting variable questions about the world in
which it was produced and for the world in which it is being
consumed. Apropos, I have crudely distinguished in what fol-
lows between ‘past literature’ and ‘contemporary literature’,
because, while all literature is, in a sense and as I have sug-
gested, ‘contemporary’, we will find differently inflected ‘uses’
in relation to literature which has come down to us from the
historical past, not least in its cultural inscription by way of
the old concept, ‘Literature’. But before I turn to some exam-
ples of these two broad categories, I want to introduce one
free-floating ‘use of the literary’ which may appear frivolous
but which is, in fact, fundamental to its continuing popularity
and cultural prevalency.
As with other art forms—albeit in the determinate form
which distinguishes it from them (see pp. 120–7)—literature

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 133
gives pleasure: people simply seem to like reading it. Any num-
ber of reasons may be adduced for this: insomnia, curiosity, to
pass the time, to obviate boredom, to stimulate thought, for
excitement or escape, to find out what happens, to admire ver-
bal dexterity, to enter realms of otherwise inaccessible experi-
ence, to contemplate characters like/unlike ourselves, and so
on. Or alternatively there may be no adducible reason at all:
just liking. It behoves literary professionals to acknowledge
that behind all the science, theory and practice of literary study
lies the fundamental and irrational premise of a contingent ‘lik-
ing’. No doubt there are social, psychological, and cultural
explanations for every individual reader’s predilections—their
acquisition of their particular variant of ‘literary competence’
(see pp. 98–100)—but given a particular example al a particu-
lar moment, the hardest question to answer is just why we like
reading, and, even more disturbingly, why we like reading
some literary texts better than others. As a professional critic
and teacher, I can come up with explanations and rationalisa-
tions for my own preferences; and within the seminar-room, of
course, when confronted with the response: ‘I didn’t really like
this book’, I will harry the poor student to explain that
remark. But if I am honest, I know that residually I just like
some things and not others. I am ashamed to say that I have
only recently read for the first time Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende’s The
House of the Spirits. Other people tell me that Márquez’s
novel is magnificent, but I read the two books in the ‘wrong’
order (Allende before Márquez), and am aware that Allende’s
novel is profoundly influenced by Márquez’s, if not parasitic
on it. I can identify the characteristic achievements and prob-
lems in both books—but deep down I must acknowledge that I
simply like the Allende far better than the Márquez. Family
and friends ‘know’ the kinds of books I will/am likely to like
and which not. Whether it was reading Donne’s poetry and

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134 LITERATURE
T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ at an early
and formative moment, I still read them now with enormous
pleasure, whereas I never readily go to Milton or Ezra Pound; I
cannot get on with Shelley, while enjoying Keats; I infinitely
prefer King Lear to Othello; I wish I had written Christopher
Isherwood's ‘Berlin novels but not Günter Grass’s The Tin
Drum; and so on. It is simply important to accept that liking is
the fundamental premise on which other potential ‘uses’ rest;
without liking (and I am not suggesting that liking cannot be
learnt), the functions and effects I outline below will never
have a chance to be realised. In a way, I suppose, my notion of
‘liking’ is analogous to Diane Elam’s positing of the ‘nothing-
ness of reading’: it establishes the space in which the uses can
emerge.
‘THE LITERARY’ AS HISTORY
The quantity, diversity and heterogeneity of literature defies
any even remote possibility of a comprehensive survey of ‘the
uses of the literary’ at the present time, just as it also precludes
the selection of speciously ‘representative’ examples. What fol-
lows, therefore, is an evidently partial choice of literary writ-
ing: texts selected for their accessibility and/or familiarity, but
which nevertheless involve many different kinds of production
and which focus, as a unique form of historical knowledge,
issues of politics, race and gender. While I can imagine the gri-
maces of the politically incorrect as they hear me trotting out
the predictable trinity of terms from what they see as the new
orthodoxy, I will only retort that those three issues do, in fact,
incorporate rather a lot of what is central to human experi-
ence, and that it would be a peculiarly impoverished literature
and a feeble literary criticism which passed them by for other
less ‘fashionable’ topics, whatever they may be.

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 135
The kinds of writing which I propose to consider all relate
‘the literary’ to history in various different ways, and all are
what I will call ‘newstories’. This elided word is intended to
exploit the unresolved ambiguity between ‘new stories’ and
‘news-stories’, a slippage amusingly focussed by Sally Shering-
ham’s children’s tale Clifford the Sheep, in which Clifford
delivers newspapers: ‘He was also an excellent story-teller, so
when he was a bit short of news, he made up some stories’
(Sheringham 1986:10). Such ‘newstories’, I want to argue, and
with the correlation between ‘history’ and ‘story’ firmly in
mind, somehow offer us a kind of history for our own times:
special forms of access to the past (‘old stories’ re-read in the
present invariably become ‘newstories’ too), and to the experi-
ence of living in contemporary culture which we ignore at our
peril or loss. In this, and in diversely addressing the ‘trinity’ of
issues mentioned above, these examples of ‘the literary’ cru-
cially exemplify what Michael Dash has called ‘a counter-
culture of the imagination (Dash [1974] 1995:200).1
It is worth noting that the words ‘history’ and ‘story’ in
English both derive from the Greek historia: ‘learning by
inquiry’—from histor: ‘a person who knows or sees’—so that,
in its origin, ‘story’ implies a form of knowledge, a way of
knowing. Our words come down to us by way of the earlier
English usage in which both ‘story’ and ‘history’ can be ‘an
account of either imaginary events or of events supposed to be
true’ (Williams 1976:119). But where the modern French word
histoire retains both the senses ‘story’ and ‘history’, from the
fifteenth century onwards the English word bifurcates, with
‘history’ coming to mean ‘an account of past real events’,
while ‘story’ includes ‘less formal accounts of past events and
accounts of imagined events’ (ibid). We should remember,
though, that in the early period of the English novel, Henry
Fielding entitled his ‘new’ work of fiction The History of Tom
Jones. Furthermore, in the process of setting up a cluster of

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136 LITERATURE
words and meanings in which it is possible to trace the correla-
tion: story>history>knowledge, we may also note that the
word ‘narrative’ (which originates in the Latin narrare/
narratum. ‘to tell or relate’) is derived ultimately from the
archaic word gnarus, which significantly meant ‘knowing’.
Gnarus is also the source of our word ‘cognition’: ‘the act or
faculty of knowing—the product of this, a perception or
insight’. ‘Perception’ (seeing) and ‘insight’ (vision) are precisely
what I am claiming ‘the literary’ offers us. Both ‘story’ and ‘his-
tory’, then, are narratively organised ways of knowing about
the past; and ‘the past’, of course, can be as recent as a
moment ago.
But history, it may be argued, presents itself as uneqivocally
concerned with ‘the real world’, with fact, with giving a seri-
ous and truthful account of ‘past real events’. So why am I
pairing it with ‘story’? As Thomas Carlyle pointed out long
before postmodernism was heard of, where in ‘acted History’
events are ‘simultaneous’, or what he calls a ‘Chaos of Being’,
in written History’ the record of them is as a ‘series’: ‘Narra-
tive is linear, Action is solid’ (Carlyle [1830] 1971:55; his
emphases). Two consequences follow from this: first, that his-
tory can only offer an inadequate account of the simultaneity
of ‘solid Action, one which is, by definition, partial, but which
purports to be the whole truth; and second, that History-
writing is indeed ‘Narrative’, a ‘story’ which makes knowledge
possible by ‘forging’ ‘patterns’ or a ‘sense of subject’ out of the
‘Chaos of Being’ which is the totality of past and present expe-
rience. If we hear echoes in this of my definition of ‘the liter-
ary’ in Chapter 4, it will not be fortuitous.
Furthermore, as modern historiography itself insinuates, the
facticity of fact is variable: when does a fact become a fact;
who says it is one, and why; can there be an uninterpreted
fact? Do not historians ‘reproduce’ or ‘write’ the past in terms
of their own present ideological positioning; and is not written

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 137
history, then, just as fabricated as any other discourse? But this
raises a further peremptory question: whose past is being
passed off as the Past?—one central to non-Eurocentric histo-
ries, for example, or to the ‘herstory’ of an anti-patriarchal
women’s history. Until recently, women and colonised peoples
had been written out of the colonialist/patriarchal discourses
of ‘his-story’, except in the terms in which that dominant nar-
rative chose to introduce and display them. Telling another,
differently inflected, narrative al once proclaims the endemic
partiality of ‘his-story’ (indeed, of any history), and opens the
possibility for alternative liberating histories which have been
silenced by the ‘official’ discourses of Authorised History. The
form in which these histories may be written, and the nature of
what they do, is the subject of this chapter; and in this context,
it is worth noting a comment by Juliet Mitchell on early
women novelists. They were trying, she says, ‘to create a his-
tory from a state of flux… The novel is the prime example of
the way women start to create themselves as social subjects
under bourgeois capitalism—create themselves as a category:
women’ (Mitchell [1966] 1984:288–9). I have italicised ‘cre-
ate’ in this quotation because it illustrates what I have sug-
gested in Chapter 4 is a fundamental characteristic of ‘the
literary’: i.e. that it ‘brings into being/forms out of nothing/
constitutes for the first time’. What we perceive here is ‘the
literary’ as a proactive writing of history in order to discover—
or rather, ‘form out of nothing’—an identity in a social forma-
tion whose dominant discourses would consign a repressed
group to silence: ‘hidden from/by his-story’, women wrote
themselves in story—‘herstory’ precisely. I will return to such
‘creative’ [hi]story-writing in the contemporary context later in
the chapter.
The key-word in defining my term ‘newstories’, however, is
indeed ‘novel’—although in no sense do I limit my coinage to
prose fiction alone. Both modern English senses of ‘novel’ (the

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138 LITERATURE
literary genre, and ‘new in one’s experience, innovating, inge-
nious, having an element of the unexpected’) derive originally
from the Latin novus: ‘new’. But the former sense comes into
English in the sixteenth century from the Italian novella
(storia): ‘a little new (story)’; while the latter derives from the
French nouvelle, which in its modern form still carries the
senses, at once, of ‘new, novel’ and—importantly—‘news’. The
English literary term ‘the novel’, it can be argued, retains
traces of all these senses: ‘a new story’; ‘new, innovating,
strange’—perhaps even ‘making strange or ‘defamiliarising’;
and offering ‘news’—information or ‘insights’—about social
life. ‘Newstories’, to repeat then, are at once ‘new’ and ‘news’
stories which offer us histories (and herstories) of the past and
the present. The nature of what they may tell us, and how they
do it, will comprise the rest of this chapter. I will look first at
some of the ways by which literature from the past may pro-
vide us with ‘new’ historical understanding.
PAST LITERATURE AS HISTORY
The crucial differences between ‘past literature’ and that which
I am calling ‘contemporary’ (i.e. roughly post-Second World
War) are: first, that such writings are the product of historical
societies and cultures which seem more or less remote from
our own, and consequently that we may wish to read them in
terms of what they convey to us about their own past. Second,
given this, we may also want to ascertain why we still read
them today, and what relevance they have to our lives. Third,
in part answer to the last point, they will have undergone a
long process of evaluation and reproduction, especially if they
are texts which have been ‘canonised’, and will carry with
them, therefore, the accretions of their own extended cultural
history in a way that contemporary works, which are only in

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 139
the process of acquiring theirs, do not. With the former, we
are presented with a kind of fait accompli; with the latter, a
chance to observe those accretive processes at work. My inten-
tion here, then, is to offer a synoptic and simultaneous
response to all three of these issues by focussing on the ways in
which two past examples of ‘the literary’ may be seen to illus-
trate the defining characteristics of that term as adduced in
Chapter 4. It is important to understand, however, that in
claiming these ‘old stories’ as ‘newstories’ I am not subscribing
to Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as ‘news that STAYS
news’ (see Chapter 1, note 2 on p. 4). For where Pound
implies ‘literary value’ in the transhistorical or universal
inscription of meaningfulness, I am pointing precisely to the
new and differential activation of meanings in different histori-
cal readings—albeit as potentialities inscribed in the determi-
nate textuality of the works.
Let me start with Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Taken to
be the last of his ‘last plays’, extant in only one text (the Folio
of 1623), and considered the ‘cleanest’ of all his texts, The
Tempest has a central place in the Shakespeare canon and in
‘World Literature’. It has been admired, performed and criti-
cally interpreted ad infinitum, it has inspired or been ‘written
back to’ by scores of other writers and artists; it has supplied
us with the now mythic figures of Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and
Miranda, along with dozens of familiar quotations (not least
‘brave new world’). It has such an inescapable presence in
global cultural history that it does indeed always remain there
‘waiting to be read’.
Written as the colonial imperative was emerging most
dynamically in the early-seventeenth century, the play would
seem to underwrite that imperative in the colonising and civilis-
ing of the island by the humane learning of Prospero and in
the play’s representation of the ‘savage’ Caliban. Certainly,
throughout the colonial project, the binary of Prospero/

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140 LITERATURE
Caliban figured the (European) Self/Other opposition, and
helped to ‘fix’ alterity in its characteristic hierarchical forms.
Nevertheless, it is possible to say that the play’s textuality has
always contained within it tensions and ironies which prob-
lematise such ‘fixings’:
• Prospero’s colonising is the result of his being ‘exported’ by
European evil (Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian);
• the ‘superior’ race contains within it both the clowns,
Stephano and Trinculo, and the ingenuous idealism of
civilised womanhood, Miranda;
• the executive arm of Prospero’s power (Ariel) carries out
his orders under duress, and chafes to be free of it;
• that power is itself sustained by and as ‘magic’, and Pros-
pero well understands the limits of its sustainability. When
he relinquishes his ‘so potent art’ (pointedly also referred to
in the same line as ‘this rough magic’ [Shakespeare (1610–
11) 1975: V. 1. 50]), he knows that,
…like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(IV. 1. 151–6)
It is not too obvious to point out that these subversive ele-
ments of the play’s discourse are now brought into bold relief
in the postcolonialist context, and that the play can, as it were,
be seen simultaneously to promote and problematise the colo-
nial paradigm. It is as though, in Althusser’s sense, The Tem-
pest achieves a distantiation on the ideology in which it is

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 141
nevertheless bathed. Most particularly, we may see a close cor-
relation here between ‘magic’ and ideology—the factitious
“‘representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals
to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser [1970]
1977:152)—where Prospero’s magic performs exactly that
function in respect of the individuals shipwrecked on ‘his’ (or
is it Calibans?) island. And, like magic, the ‘baseless fabric’ of
(colonial) ideology only has to be exposed and ‘dissolved’ to
lose its power to mystify and control.
But wherein does the power of Prospero’s magic lie? The play
is insistent that it is in the ‘secret studies’ of his beloved books:
‘Knowing I loved my books’, Gonzalo had furnished him ‘with
volumes that/I prize above my dukedom’ (I. 2. 77, 166–8);
with more ‘business’ to be done, Prospero says ‘I’ll to my
book’ (III. 1. 94–6); and at the end of the speech in which he
‘abjures’ his ‘rough magic’, he promises to ‘drown my book’
(V. 1. 57). However, if we register that the ‘three hours’ of the
play’s own duration is self-consciously reiterated throughout,
we can see the whole play itself as comprised of ‘magic’, includ-
ing the transfiguration of the ‘bare island’ of the stage (‘Epi-
logue’, line 8), the shipwreck, the action of the characters at all
points, and the ‘baseless fabric’ of the pageant. It follows,
then, that the constitutive discourse of Prospero’s own magic is
the very language of the ‘book’/play itself, which Prospero/
Shakespeare’s ’Epilogue’ implies, when, in stepping outside of
the play’s charmed ambience, it admits it now ‘want [s]/Spirits
to enforce, art to enchant’ (13–14). But it is also in the ‘magi-
cal’ power of language that the colonising of the island and its
inhabitants lies.
The crucial scene here is Act I Scene 2, in which Caliban
describes his trajectory from being ‘mine own king’ to being
‘all the subjects that you have’. In so doing, he voices vividly
the process of dispossession which follows the initial wooing
of the indigenous inhabitant: ‘This island’s mine…which thou

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142 LITERATURE
tak’st from me’—leaving him in ‘this hard rock’ (his ‘native
reservation’), ‘whiles you do keep from me/The rest o’
th’island’. A central factor in this gradual dispossession is
teaching Caliban the colonisers’ language: they ‘teach me how/
To name the bigger light, and how the less,/That burn by day
and night. And then I loved thee…’ (331–41, passim; my
emphasis). Made complicit in his own enslavement by linguis-
tic acculturation, Caliban is turned into a slave. It is the civilis-
ing European female idealist, Miranda, who is centrally
instrumental in this, since it was she who
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each
hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
(354–8)
This is a crucial passage, for the way cultural imperialism
works is indeed to de-voice the colonised of their own lan-
guage, on the supposition that the subject ‘savage’ does not
know his ‘own meaning’ until it has been transliterated, and
hence appropriated, into that of the coloniser and her mean-
ing. Note how Miranda ‘endowed thy purposes/With words
that made them known’. Language, in other words, is the tex-
tualising process by which magic/ideology subjects the subject
to complicity in their own subjection. Paradoxically, the acqui-
sition of this ‘sameness’ also fixes their ‘difference’ and ‘other-
ness’. But it is Caliban’s famous riposte which focuses my point:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 143
For learning me your language!
(363–5)
At one and the same moment, then, the play can be seen to
articulate the cultural processes involved in colonisation and
their self-subversion by way of the very factors which bring it
about in the first place. A better example of the notion of post-
colonial ‘writing-back’ it would be hard to find, and yet there
it is in a play of 1613, a play which at another level may be
seen to be instrumental in establishing the figuration of the
colonial hierarchy.
My point is that it is in the extant textuality of The
Tempet’s own constitutive discourse that this formative
moment of colonialism’s power, and of the inherent contradic-
tions which determine its dismantling, can be seen by future
generations (i.e. by the contemporary reader/playgoer). But
because we have already understood that both Prospero’s and
Shakespeare’s ‘magic’ are themselves comprised of linguistic
textuality, we are further enabled to see how magic/ideology
functions by textualising subjects; and that, by observing such
processes of textualisation, we can also register the sublimi-
nally imperceptible processes which textualise us all. Equally,
as Prospero’s late speeches referred to above make clear, such
textualisation (‘potent art’) is indeed deconstructible (it is, in
the event, only ‘rough magic’). The ‘baseless fabric’ of a
‘vision’ of Empire, of racial superiority, of (Western) civilisa-
tion, can be ‘dissolved’ by stepping outside the magic circle of
discursive incorporation, as the (proto-Brechtian) ‘alienation
device’ of Shakespeare’s envoi seems to admit. By breaking the
‘spell’ in which the audience has been held, he (and we) are
‘released’ from his ‘spirits to enforce, art to enchant’
(‘Epilogue’, 14; my emphases). We are enabled to be free (as
are Ariel and Caliban when Prospero’s magic is lifted) by the
very process of ‘seeing’ how language (including that of ‘the
literary’) ‘enchants’ us. All this, I am arguing, the play enables

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144 LITERATURE
us now to perceive in the context of our own historical con-
juncture. In this respect, the text of The Tempest may be said
to be 'waiting to be read’ in this way.
My second example of what past literature may ‘hold’ for us
is George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Despite being a first novel by a
largely unknown writer, it achieved immediate popularity and
high regard, thereafter rapidly acquiring canonic status, in F.R.
Leavis’s phrase, as ‘a classic in itself’ (Leavis 1961: vii). Leavis
goes on to say that ‘[t]he historical value of Adam Bede lies in
her novelist’s [sic] creation of a past England—of a culture
that has vanished with the triumph of industrialisation’ (xii),
and that: ‘As sociologist and social historian [Eliot] is scrupu-
lously precise’ (xiv). The question I wish to pose is: what kind
of ‘historical/ sociological value’ may the novel now be seen to
offer us?
Adam Bede resolutely assumes its own truthfulness in giving
an account of the view of the world it espouses: a positivist
humanism, or ‘religion of humanity’, in which the acquisition
of ‘sympathy’, fellow-feeling and altruism will obviate the
destructive egoism of human individuals in their natural, ‘sub-
jective’ lowest form, and will gradually lead to the betterment
of Society, which represents humankind in its ‘objective’ high-
est form. This essentially empiricist or ‘realist’ philosophy is in
fact symbiotically related to George Eliot’s ‘truthful’ fictional
realism, since this is the vehicle for ‘tell [ing] my simple story,
without trying to make things seem better than they were;
dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity’ (Eliot, George [1859]
1961:176). Such realism meant the detailed description of the
particular histories of all sorts of common humanity as a way
of revealing and understanding their otherness; and in this, it
would help to obviate egoism and develop the altruistic sympa-
thy necessary for social progress. In Adam Bede, what Eliot
appears to give us in pursuit of this project is an entirely vera-
cious account of a real world and material issues. Even though

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Chapter XVII, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, is a frame-
break-like interruption in the seamless realism of the novel,
and one in which Eliot effectively offers her credo as humanist-
realist novelist, it serves merely to reinforce the ‘reality’ of the
world she purports to describe. She does not hold it
the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as
they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I
might refashion life and character entirely after my own
liking…. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest
effort is to avoid any…arbitrary picture, and to give a faith-
ful account of men and things as they have mirrored them-
selves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective …the
reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell
you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were
in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
(174)
The entire discourse of ‘accounting’, ‘picturing’ and
‘mirroring’, rather than of ‘refashioning’, implies an anterior
reality which is simply being reported or ‘reflected’, although
as I have indicated on pp. 103 and 115, literary realism, by
definition, makes/ creates ‘poietic realities’ just as surely as any
more overtly artificial literary discourse. But the effect of
Eliot’s intervention, especially her admission of the ‘defective-
ness’ of her ‘reflecting’ consciousness, rather than causing us to
perceive her partiality, seems to confirm her essential truthful-
ness. ‘Telling things as they really are’ here attains a totalising
self-conviction which, in its turn, convinces.
Paradoxically, however, two contrary effects arise from the
very solidity of the novel’s realism. First, because the world of
the book is so convincingly realised, it tends to invoke other
extra-textual and material ‘realities’ which are implicit in it but
not directly addressed there. A dialectic is established, in other

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146 LITERATURE
words, between the text’s realism, which results from its
informing ideological view of reality, and the real social rela-
tions from the novel’s historical contexts which that realism at
once summons up and suppresses in its concrete specificity of
depiction. I will give some examples of what I mean here in a
moment. Second, as a reflex of the text’s realist conviction and
plausibility, wherever there appear ‘gaps’, aporias, irresolu-
tions or silences in the text, we may assume that the limits of,
and contradictions within, its ideological world-view—its
determinate and defining partiality—are disturbing the other-
wise coherent vision the realism articulates. In other words,
realism at its most solidly realised provides Althusser’s ‘critical
distance’ on the ideology which sustains and legitimates it.
To give some brief examples of the two related points
above: first, in respect of the absent ‘contexts’ I have suggested
the novel’s realism invokes. Adam Bede is set historically and
geographically very precisely, in and around the village of
‘Hayslope’ in Warwickshire some sixty years prior to Eliot’s
publishing of the novel (1859), its first paragraph giving an
exact date for the opening of the main action: ‘18, June 1799’
(17; it ends in June 1807 [504]). In other words, the placing of
the action in the past in a single small rural community is a
crucial factor in establishing the (unacknowledged) limits
within which the informing world-view will be realised as a
material world. It is as though a particular historical moment
in a particular place has been sealed off as the world of the
book; and it is noticeable, for example, that although there are
scattered references throughout the novel to the French wars
(revolutionary and then Napoleonic), these are never to do
with the material bearing—in terms of prices, recruitment,
shortage of labour, bereavement, etc.—that the wars would
have had on the community, but only as individual characters’
opinions. As John Goode pertinently observed, Eliot needs to
‘choose an historical reality she can dehistoricise’ (Goode

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 147
1970:21). We may then ask—since the novel’s humanistic
vision is, we are led to believe, universally valid for all times
and places—why it was set sixty years in the past in an iso-
lated rural village? Did George Eliot’s own fractiously politi-
cised society in the 1850s seem less susceptible to her ‘religion
of humanity’ than the ‘organic’ Hayslope sixty years earlier (in
the self-consciously ‘truthful’ Chapter XVII, she enigmatically
reflects: ‘Sixty years ago—it is a long time, so no wonder
things have changed’ [174])? Does the minimisation of the
effects of the French wars, which kept prices high and exacer-
bated the distress of the urban poor, represent a recognition
that there is a public world impervious to the individualist
focus of liberal humanism?
Further, Dinah Morris, one of the central characters in the
novel, is that unusual figure in mid-nineteenth-century fiction,
an itinerant female Methodist preacher. Within the book’s
moral schema, however, Dinah gradually loses her fiercely ide-
alistic evangelistic edge, and finally becomes feminised and
domesticated as Adam Bede’s loving wife in the reformed
humanistic idyll of Hayslope. Despite the importance given to
Methodism in the novel, it is precisely its presence solely in the
shape of the character of Dinah which excludes historical
Methodism as a powerful (and disruptive) nineteenth-century
religious and social movement—a movement of dissent,
amongst others, which was energetically active and effective
within acutely distressed urban industrial communities. Why,
we again might want to ask, is Methodism constrained, in the
‘social history’ the novel represents, to being exclusively
located in Dinah Morris within a prosperous rural commu-
nity? Was the exclusion of urban environments a recognition
that such places might respond better to the proselytising and
dissenting energy of Methodism than to the benevolence of
bourgeois humanism? Is Dinah’s brand of Methodism a way
of excluding other, more radical and working-class-directed,

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148 LITERATURE
forms of dissent which were very much less susceptible to
incorporation within the homogenised humanist community
that Hayslope finally becomes?
But Dinah also opens up another ‘context’. For much of the
novel, she is represented as an independent and emancipated
young woman (an itinerant preacher, after all, whose personal
calling precludes marriage [45]). In the 1850s, as George Eliot
prepared to write Adam Bede, the ‘Woman Question was a
passionately debated issue, as indeed were those around the
increase in prostitution, the ‘philosophy of free love’, and the
beginnings of a demand for female suffrage—all developments
which destabilised the prevailing mid-Victorian patriarchal
ideology of ‘woman worship’. The question then arises as to
whether, in displaced ways, the novel invokes but suppresses
those issues of its ‘own’ period. Is Dinah’s Methodism, in
other words, a figuration of the potential threats of female
social mobility, sexuality and independence outside marriage,
which Eliot’s ‘totalising’ realist-humanism could not counte-
nance or contain; and her final domestication an affirmation
that the ‘proper sphere’ for women is indeed within the home
and family? Significantly, in the ‘Epilogue’ we learn that the
Methodist Conference ‘has forbid the women preaching’, and
that Dinah has ‘given it up’—a decision approved by the
humanised Adam (by now the authoritative voice of the
novel), who says: ‘Most o’ the women do more harm nor good
with their preaching…and she’s seen that, and she thought it
right to set th’ example o’ submitting…’ (506). It could not be
more plainly put. So does Dinah’s curtailed independence as a
woman give veiled utterance to the challenges posed by rival,
nascent or emergent movements to the dominant sexual ideol-
ogy in Eliot’s own 1850s, only to erase them fictionally by
removing the ‘social history’ of the novel to the 1790s when
they could not be ‘realistically’ included in its fabric? What
Adam Bede does, I am suggesting—and what its realism allows

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 149
us to perceive it doing—is to construct an apparently real
world made credible by its exclusions. But it is one so convinc-
ing in its realistic fabrication that it simultaneously introduces
into the text, from its material historical contexts, the determi-
nate absences it has had to exclude in order to be able to
realise itself in the first place.
Second, as an instance of the way a realist novel of this kind
can reveal its suppressed contradictions and the limits of its
own totalising project, let us focus on one moment when a
destabilising uncertainty occurs—an example of fictive con-
trivance enacted in the text’s otherwise ‘convincing’ realist
texture. But while it is precisely its poietic textuality which
‘holds’ this slippage as potentially visible to us, it requires
some reading against the realistic grain to render it so. Hetty
Sorrel, made pregnant outside wedlock by the young squire,
Arthur Donnithorne, has been convicted of the murder of her
new-born baby, and is in gaol awaiting execution. Her
reprieve comes in a chapter entitled, perhaps self-consciously,
‘The Last Moment’, one which is not only the shortest in the
novel, but is only a single page long. The actual reprieve is con-
tained in its final paragraph, which slips uneasily into the
present tense and over-wrought prose: ‘The horse is hot and
distressed, but answers to the desperate spurring; the rider
looks as if his eyes were glazed by madness… See, he has some-
thing in his hand—he is holding it up as if it were a signal’
(438)—‘a signal’ indeed: but of what? No further mention of
the event is made in the book, and no explanation is given of
how Arthur obtained the ‘hard won release from death’ (ibid.;
my emphasis). Hetty is, in fact, transported and dies on her
way home, as a single passing remark in the final chapter
informs us (505). ‘The Last Moment’, in seeking to reduce a
crucial event to nothing, stands out in stark and melodramatic
relief from the rest of the book—‘a signal’, perhaps, of its own
embarrassed recognition of the evident fabrication going on.

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How do we explain this fissure in the firm terrain of the
novel? Why could Hetty not have been hanged, as the logic
might suggest; or, failing that, why not fuller treatment of how
and why Arthur wins the reprieve? The short answer is that
the moral conception of the book has no room for such mate-
rial: Hetty, the epitome of myopic egoism and vanity, and, as
such, a character entirely constructed within the novel’s
humanist-realist schema, has fulfilled her purpose within it and
must be removed hors de combat. Hanging her would intro-
duce into its moral universe a note of barbarity (at the start of
the chapter, Eliot has shuddered at ‘the hideous symbol [the
gallows—not named] of a deliberately inflicted death’ [437])
out of tune with social and moral humanism. Perhaps more
importantly, it would have invoked a recognition of public
institutions and issues which could not be assimilated into the
humanist pastoral of the novel. Similarly, any extended expla-
nation of Arthur’s use of privilege and class leverage in obtain-
ing a reprieve would have introduced a political dimension
which opposed the moral world-view George Eliot was propa-
gating. Class politics, like Methodism and female indepen-
dence, destabilise the homogenising project of liberal-humanist
culture, as we also see in Matthew Arnold. Furthermore, to
allow Hetty to remain in, or return alive to, England would
have been to raise questions about the social position of ‘fallen
women’ and about prostitution. This was a burning contempo-
rary issue which fuelled a ‘literature of prostitution’ (of which
Eliot knew), and in which similar circumstances to those of
Hetty and Arthur (young squire seducing dairymaid) were
stereotypical. Hetty is a ‘ruined maid’, to borrow Thomas
Hardy’s later phrase for the ex-country-girl prostitute of his
poem (‘The Ruined Maid’, in Hardy, T. 1901), and prostitu-
tion would very conceivably have been her destiny. That this is
precluded is because it would radically disharmonise the
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endorse. The embarrassment of that short fictive moment,
together with the summary dismissal of Hetty later, helps to
expose—if we hypothesise the course the novel might have run
—a sublimated recognition of the limits and exclusiveness of
the novel’s ‘totalising’ realism and its sustaining ideology.
My general point, then, in respect of Shakespeare’s play and
George Eliot’s novel, and by extrapolation to other literary
works from the past, is that within their own realisation of
what they set out do, they also embody discourses which run
counter to that original project but which are every bit as
much a part of their totality. Hence, they offer future readers
the opportunity to read the signs as they will, and so provide a
different kind of ‘social history’ to the one they were inscribed
by or believed they were providing. In literary texts, to restate
my argument, the subtle and usually invisible processes which
construct our lives within ideology are encoded in the complex
and shifting ‘poietic realities’ comprised by the works’ determi-
nate textuality. It is these processes which are then susceptible
to retrieval and scrutiny. This is equally true of contemporary
literature—to which we now turn—although there I shall shift
the emphasis to more immediate and pressing ‘uses of the
literary’.
‘THE LITERARY’ AS CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
The problematics of history have been compounded over the
past 30 years or so by its place and function in the postmodern
world. Indeed the deconstructive strategies central to ‘herstory’
and postcolonialism are arguably themselves instances of post-
modernity. If, as Jean-François Lyotard has it, the ‘postmodern
condition’ witnesses the discrediting of the ‘grand narratives’
(my emphasis) of post-Enlightenment civilisation and their
replacement by the petits récits’ (little stories) of localised

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import (Lyotard [1979] 1984), then an authoritative ‘History’
is surely one of the casualties. Equally, when Jean Baudrillard
([1981] 1994) proposes that postmodernism means the ‘loss of
the real’—that ‘history and reality’ have become ‘textualised’
in our hyper-real world of images and simulations, and
replaced by ‘simulacra’ (things, the dictionary tells us, ‘made
to resemble some other thing, an inferior or deceptive likeness’)
—then knowing anything in the sense that historia implies
becomes deeply problematic. As Dick Hebdige has suggested,
the conspicuous consumerism and advanced technologies of
late-twentieth-century postmodern monopoly capitalism
replace all meaning with parody and style:‘we are left in a
world of radically “empty” signifiers. No meaning. No classes.
No history. Just a ceaseless procession of simulacra’ (Hebdige
[1985] 1989:269). The fundamental political and cultural pes-
simism this implies nonetheless signals a ‘condition that does
coincide with aspects of late-millenial life: Baudrillard may
have been tastelessly outré in suggesting that the Gulf War was
‘unreal’, but his perception of it as a media event, a TV simula-
tion, is not without point (Baudrillard 1991, 1995).
One of the primary problems of the postmodern world,
then, is that of how to know. The information explosion is an
irresistible and potentially beneficial feature of our society, but
as anyone who watches much television (particularly ‘News’
programmes) or regularly visits web-sites on the Internet will
appreciate, the more knowledge we apparently receive, the
more an eerie sense of unknowing comes upon us. Henry
James once remarked on ‘the fatal futility of Fact’ ([1907]
1962:122); and it is indeed the amount of information we
have, without the attendant ‘narratives’ to explain, interpret
and make sense of it, which is central to postmodern experi-
ence. ‘The literary’, I am claiming—precisely by way of its
‘forming’ and ‘fashioning’ properties, its ‘sense of subject’, its
identification of ‘patterns’ and ‘knowable communities…

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 153
creatively known…for the first time in this way’—gives us
insight into the complex interactive relations which comprise
our culture. Cutting in vertical section, as it were, into the
‘Chaos of Being’ which is the experience of lived history as it is
being lived, it helps solve Carlyle’s problem with the ‘linear
narrative’ of written history by providing a history which is
otherwise inarticulate: it accesses the ‘to-be-known in our own
‘community’ (see pp. 104–6), and in particular, how we are
textualised by ideological narratives which traverse, construct
and position us. If a central problem of postmodernity is the
failure of the ‘grand narratives’ of contemporary history, poli-
tics and culture in helping us to ‘know’ anything for certain,
then some degree of empowerment in this ‘condition’ may be
achieved if we understand how narrative works, how text con-
structs, how histories (and herstories) get written. The ‘little
[new] stories’ of contemporary literature, I would argue, at
once give form to flux, if only temporarily and provisionally,
shape a (textual) ‘community’ which we can comprehend, and
thus simultaneously proffer us a ‘way of knowing’ our own
culture and how it determines us. ‘The literary’, in this respect,
gives us the news that ‘The News’—by which I mean all osten-
sibly authoritative knowledge-sources—are also themselves
narrative, text, and thereby the potent fictions (‘telling stories’)
which script our lives.
Arguably, each and every piece of contemporary literary
writing offers us some form of defamiliarising perspective on
our own culture, and can therefore be regarded as helping to
compose a ‘history’ of the post-war period. But while our main
focus in the following sections will be on texts which have a self-
conscious sense of writing a kind of history, not all contempo-
rary ‘newstories’, of course, necessarily have any explicit
historical inflection at all. Let me give some diverse examples,
from a broad range of the latter variety, of the types of insights

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154 LITERATURE
about the present which seem to me to be ‘held’ in their consti-
tutive textuality.
Harold Pinter’s plays, so disturbing in their uncanny repro-
duction of the rhythms and silences of everyday speech, reveal
the libidinal menace (of power and sex) lurking within the
ordinary, the familiar and the ‘civilized’—what he himself once
memorably called ‘the weasel under the cocktail cabinet’.2 Ron
Hutchinson’s play, Rat in the Skull, gives stark expression to
the corrosive violence fostered by the prejudice and ignorance
which fuel the ‘terrorist’/‘security forces’ relationship in North-
ern Ireland. Brian Moore’s ‘thriller’, Lies of Silence, offers an
entrée to the moral and psychological quandries incident on
the ‘circle of violence’ prevalent in Ireland. The novel does so
in part by its own involuntary textual confirmation of the
detachment from, and despair at, any solution to ‘the North-
ern Ireland problem’ felt by those not directly involved, which
is itself a crucial component of that problem. Barrie Keefe’s
ferocious play, Sus, whose action is set as the results of the
1979 General Election are coming through, anatomises the
bigotry and violence in race relations—most particularly in the
language of the sadistic police officer, Karn—which was to be
a subtext of the ‘Thatcher Revolution’. Joan Riley’s The Unbe-
longing, a novel by a British-based Caribbean woman, offers a
telling account of the displacement and double exploitation of
a black adolescent female immigrant to England—not least in
the unremittingly alienated tone of her narrative; while Mau-
reen Ismay, also Caribbean-British, in her poem ‘Frailty Is Not
My Name’, articulates the simplifying ease with which a black
woman can be bounced, ping-pong-like, from one stereotype
to another. In rejecting the white patriarchal labelling first
enunciated by Hamlet—‘Frailty thy name is woman’—she fur-
ther rejects the new ‘mythology’ that she must therefore be ‘a
big strong, black woman/iron hard and carrying/all the sor-
rows of the world on my back’ (Ismay: 1987). Caribbean poets

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 155
also explore their consciousness of the complex implications of
being postcolonial/multicultural ‘subjects’ (in both senses) by
expanding the possible poetic languages available. In the
retrieval of the culturally ‘non-accredited’ patois and rhythms
of West Indian speech and music, a ‘counter-cultural’ dis-
course is recuperated which is not already ‘owned’ by the
dominant culture. So, for example, Linton Kwesi Johnson is
able to write of racial and social injustice in ‘Inglan Is a Bitch’
with a resonance ‘standard English’ would not catch:
well mi dhu day wok an’ mi dhu nite wok
mi dhu clean wok an’ mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if y’u si how mi wok y’u woulda seh mi crazy
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u bettah face up to it
(Johnson [1980] 1991)
And so, too, of a sexual relationship, is Lillian Allen in ‘Belly
Woman’s Lament’:
A likkle seed
Of her love fe a man
Germinates in her gut
She dah breed
Cool breeze
It did nice
Im nuh waan no wife
just life
Wey fe do!
(Allen [1982] 1986)

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156 LITERATURE
(‘Cool breeze’ is proverbial for ‘good while it
lasted’.)
John Le Carré’s spy thrillers offer credible access to the other-
wise secret world of espionage—which may just as well be as
‘true to’ or as ‘real as’ the world they purport to describe since
we have no way of knowing otherwise. But they also reveal the
ideological dilemma at the heart of Le Carré’s own liberal-
humanist attempt to establish a ‘neutral’ space into which
‘free’ human subjects who retain the capacity for love can
struggle as individuals out of the wrecked world of double-
bluff and betrayal fostered by the politics of international
confrontation. Rosie Thomas’s bestseller, the aptly-titled A
Woman of our Times, and Julie Burchill’s ‘bonkbuster’, Ambi-
tion (which can be read as either formulaic exploitation or
deconstructive parody of the genre), in their different ways
reflect the problems within the so-called ‘yuppie feminism’ and
ruthless entrepreneurialism spawned by the Reaganite and
Thatcherite ‘new economies’ of the 1980s. Similarly, Caryl
Churchill’s play, Top Girls, and her rumbustious verse-drama,
Serious Money, explore the complex ethical and political issues
thrown up by de-regulated sexual and financial ‘freedom’.
A list of examples of the ‘front-line’ news that contemporary
‘newstories’ offer us could go on and on, so I now want to
focus on a selection of texts which have a more than contin-
gent relation to the writing of history. That these are them-
selves numerous and diverse tends to confirm that a self-
conscious correlation between history and ‘the literary’ is
indeed a dominant trope in contemporary literature. Whether
this recycling of history through the merging of the factual and
the fictive is helpfully defined as ‘postmodernist’ depends on
whether you see postmodernism as wilfully playful and politi-
cally irresponsible, or as a serious attempt to dismantle the
dominant ‘truths’ of past cultural knowledge.
Once again, there are many ways in which ‘the literary’ uses

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history, and many ends to which it is put. So let us again
briefly survey a broad, if partial, range of these, before
focussing on a few chosen texts in more detail. Arthur Miller,
for example, by basing his play, The Crucible, on the Salem
witch trials of the early 1690s, circumvented censorship in
1950s America when Macarthyite ‘witch-hunts’ represented a
real threat to freedom of expression, and anatomised the very
mindset which engendered the censorship in the first place.
While self-consciously admitting, in ‘A Note on the Historical
Accuracy of this Play’, that it ‘is not history in the sense in
which the word is used by the academic historian’ (Miller
[1953] 1959: xvii), Miller, in his ‘commentary’ in Act One on
the (historical) characters on which his own are based, makes
a passing comment of central relevance to my argument here
for ‘the literary’. He says: ‘No one can really know what their
lives were like. They had no novelists…’ (2). The implication
here is that ‘novels’ (or dramatic fictions) are the historical
source for knowing what past lives were ‘really…like’, rather,
perhaps, than the history of ‘the academic historian’. Based
only on hints from the scant historical records of the trials and
their participants, Miller imaginatively recreates the characters
and their motives in order to reveal to a modern audience (and
the play remains deeply compelling, way beyond its
Macarthyite context) the unstable mixture of religious, sexual
and materialistic elements that cause an entire community to
be racked by a contagious madness which effectively parades
‘vengeance’ (74) as true righteousness. At the most immediate
level, Miller’s play shows how American society has, in its his-
torical genes, the illiberal potential for ‘outing’ and destroying
those who, on others’ hearsay evidence, are not considered fit
to ‘live in a Christian country’ (135).
More recently, Timberlake Wertenbaker sets her play, Our
Country’s Good, two hundred years ago in a convict colony in
New South Wales in 1788, in order to depict, and hence

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158 LITERATURE
remind a modern audience of, the brutality of which English
law has been capable; the punishment regime the convicts had
to undergo; and the original circumstances, therefore, out of
which the new state of Australia emerged. However, prompted
by the civilising mission of the colony’s liberal Governor-in-
Chief, who recognises that the convicts will in time ‘help to
create a new society in this colony’ and should therefore be
‘encourage [d]… to think in a free and responsible manner’
(Wertenbaker [1988] 1995:21), and under the direction of an
increasingly humanised Second Lieutenant, the convicts—some
of whom are sentenced to hang—are led to rehearse a play:
George Farquhar’s early-eighteenth-century comedy, The
Recruiting Officer. In the course of this exposure to ‘refined,
literate language’ (ibid.), to high comedy, and to the structural
irony of performing that play in these circumstances, the con-
victs do indeed find some ‘redemption’: they discover their
‘humanity [which] lies hidden under the rags and filth of a
mangled life’ (58). So, Our Country’s Good is also about the
civilising and redemptive power of the theatre; and in the con-
text of late-1980s cuts in arts funding in Britain, by which the
theatre was seriously threatened, this too was a timely warn-
ing. As the Governor-in-Chief puts it: ‘The theatre is an expres-
sion of civilisation’, and watching a play ‘require[s] attention,
judgement, patience, all social virtues’ (21–2). Barbarity,
Wertenbaker’s play reminds us, is not only represented by
penal colonies, flogging and the gallows, but also by those
who fear that ‘the theatre leads to threatening theory’ or who
regard it only as ‘fandangl[ing] about with a lewdy play’ (25).
The white South African novelist, J.M.Coetzee, set his alle-
goric novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, in an outpost of an
unnamed ‘Empire’ in an historically unlocated time in order to
avoid the censorship of the then apartheid regime in South
Africa. In this way, Coetzee could analyse its strategies and
techniques of oppression, expose the inherent weaknesses

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which would result in its eventual demise, and put ‘in the his-
tory books’ a history which the custodians of ‘the Empire’
would erase (‘“There will be no history, the affair is too
trivial’” (Coetzee [1980] 1982:114). But he could further indi-
cate at once a white liberal’s (‘the Magistrate’, but also Coet-
zee’s own) complicity in, and the limits of his opposition to,
that regime, and his inability to ‘speak for’ the truly oppressed
native inhabitants (the ‘barbarians’). His sense of the inade-
quacy of ‘white’ words to articulate that oppression is repre-
sented both by the Magistrate’s failure to read the ‘script’ of
the painted wooden slips he finds in the buried ruins of a pre-
vious civilisation, and by Coetzee’s own deployment of the
inscribed body as a form of expression which enunciates the
silence of those prohibited from speaking for themselves (we
will see this again in his novel, Foe, on p. 171). The most sig-
nificant instance of this is the native girl whom the Magistrate
exploits sexually, and whose body shows ‘the marks her tortur-
ers have left upon her’—marks which the Magistrate contradic-
torily both wishes were ‘erased’, so that ‘she is restored to
herself’, and finds ‘do not go deep enough’ because he cannot
interpret their significance: ‘is it she I want or the traces of a
history her body bears?’ The only answer to this question that
he can come up with is: ‘whatever can be articulated is falsely
put’, but even these ‘words grow more and more opaque
before me; soon they have lost all meaning’ (64–5). Neither the
Magistrate nor the novel can ‘articulate’ in ‘words’—or only
‘falsely’—the ‘history’ the girl’s body bears witness to. All they
can do is give an account of the failure to be able to do so.
Nevetheless, this in itself is a kind of truth-telling which we
need to face up to: that in order to ‘begin to tell the truth’
(154) there is a kind of ‘living through’ (65) which lies beyond
‘the locutions of a civil servant with literary aspirations’ (like
Coetzee himself; 154).
Again, we might observe how Seamus Heaney explores the

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implications, contradictions and complexities of the political
situation in Northern Ireland by way of the preserved corpses
of prehistoric people recovered from the bogs. In the poem
‘Punishment’, for instance, after the initial third-person descrip-
tion of a young woman’s body, and exactly in the middle of
the poem, the ‘Little adulteress’ is addressed directly (‘before
they punished you’), and she becomes ‘My poor scapegoat‘
(my emphases). The poem continues:
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilised outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
(Heaney 1975)
Once we realise that your betraying sisters,/cauled in tar,’ are
the victims of contemporary factional violence (‘punished’ for
dating someone of the ‘wrong’ religion or a British soldier), the
oscillation between the remote past and the immediate present
washes back through the poem so that the whole earlier
description, from the opening lines, ‘I can feel the tug/of the

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 161
halter at the nape/of her neck’ to ‘her shaved head’, now res-
onates with the historical (and eroticised) analogy. But it is the
passive complicity in the event(s) of the poet—‘the artful
voyeur’—which becomes the poem’s main theme: ‘I…would
have cast, I know,/the stones of silence’; would also, of course,
‘have stood dumb’ in the present troubles; or worse, would
connive/in civilised outrage’. The poet, in other words, would
have participated both in the execution by not speaking out
against it and in the furtive horror of the civilised at such bar-
barity, while in fact being implicated in the basic atavism of
the act: ‘intimate revenge’ suggesting the fundamental sexual
fear of a ‘betrayal’ across ‘tribal’ (male/female) lines. What we
have here is at once the sense that the present is no less bar-
barous than the past, that no one is innocent in a political
situation like that of Northern Ireland, and that the ‘little
scapegoat’ is a figure for the overdetermining complicity of the
male poet as ‘artful voyeur’ in the (sexual/political) barbarity
he observes.
Explicit and ‘telling’ instances of the literary as history, espe-
cially in their capacity to alert us to our construction within
narrative, are Graham Swift’s novels, Waterland and Out of
this World. In respect of what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historio-
graphic metafiction’ (Hutcheon [1989] 1993:14; i.e. self-
reflexive postmodernist fiction, like Swift’s, which explores a
history and a society represented principally by ‘realist’ narra-
tives), she proposes that ‘formalist self-reflexivity and parody’
confront ‘documentary historical actuality’ (7). So that: ‘a
study of representation becomes…an exploration of the way in
which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves
and how we construct our notions of self, in the present and in
the past’ (ibid.). To put it another way: if much of our history
right up to the present has been based on an essentially realist
paradigm (‘telling things as they really are’), demystifying such
realist forms and ideologies shows us at the very least how we

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have been constructed and thus how we might reconstruct our
understanding of how we live.
The epigraph to Waterland is a dictionary definition of the
word historia (see p. 133) and its main narrator is a history
teacher who substitutes a history of his own family and of the
Fens over a 200-year period for the school history syllabus. It
continually foregrounds the consonance between the public
and private worlds of historical account and ‘telling stories’—
with all the fabrication that goes into both—thus ‘baring the
device’ of its own textual fabrication. The novel’s main thrust
is how narratives/stories/histories are made, and how all our
lives (or is it ‘lies’?) are woven of and in them. In its defamil-
iarisation of its own processes, then, it admits complicity with
the discourses it critiques, but simultaneously offers us a ‘way
of knowing’ how those processes construct and contain us too.
But let me concentrate on the undeservedly less admired Out
of this World, which is an equally ‘telling’ attempt to write a
large-scale history in full view of the reader: this time of the
contaminations implicit in twentieth-century warfare, as repre-
sented by the Beech family whose fortune was made in arma-
ments. All the main characters have had their emotional lives
atrophied by violence in one way or another, and the novel is
an account by flashbacks of that process. The dominant motif
of this twentieth-century alienation is the century’s own main
form of self-representation, of ‘knowing itself’: photography.
The novel is, indeed, a meditation on the truthfulness or not of
representation, using various forms of photographic ‘picturing’
as its focus. These are presented as a form of mechanical
dehumanisation, a form of truth-telling, a form of lying—and
an analogy, in all these respects, for the novel’s own attempts
to ‘capture’ how it was, to ‘record’ twentieth-century reality,
to offer a ‘portrait’ or ‘snapshot’ of a family, as though all its
hidden past would be visible in the image presented to the
world.

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Harry Beech, the son, and one of the novel’s two main narra-
tors (the other is his daughter, Sophie), has been an RAF aerial
photographer in World War II; he has ‘covered’ the Nurem-
berg trials; and later he becomes a famous war-photographer:
‘this new kind of hero…a hero without a gun…but flinching at
nothing to bring back the truth’ (Swift 1988:118). Later still,
living in rural Wiltshire and working as a peacetime aerial pho-
tographer, his ‘shots’ of Bronze Age field-systems nevertheless
still show up MOD installations. All this, of course, is, a ‘true’
representation of twentieth-century experience, which does
indeed dehumanise and brutalise; and as Harry says: ‘Someone
has to be witness, someone has to see’—although he signifi-
cantly poses his following remark as a question: ‘And tell? And
tell?’ (163). But the question the novel poses (of a realist pho-
tography and of itself), as it tries to expose the secrets and lies
of the family history, to ‘tell’ the truth behind the reified and
blank postures of the main characters, is: just how ‘true’ is real-
istic ‘representation’? How neutral and objective is it ever?
From first believing that ‘the camera doesn’t manufacture’
(13), Harry, just back from Vietnam and watching the first
moon-landing in 1969, now reflects: ‘the camera first, then the
event. The whole world is waiting just to get turned into film’
(ibid.). Later, thinking about the claim of photography that it
‘can show you how the world really is’ (‘telling things as they
really are’ is also the central claim of realist fiction), he realises
that the ‘witness standing there looking al it is changing the
way the world is anyway. If you’re going to tell us how things
are, then maybe we should start with you’ (119; my emphasis).
What the novel itself is doing, by way of its own ‘unreliable’
first-person narrators, is showing us the parallax which the
‘witness’, the hand that holds the camera, introduces. But
Harry adds a further (postmodern) perception:
Have you noticed how the whole world has changed? It’s

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164 LITERATURE
become this vast display of evidence, this exhibition of
recorded data, this continuously running movie.
The problem is what you don’t see… The problem is
selection…the frame, the separation of the image from the
thing. The extraction of the world from the world.
(ibid.)
This, of course, is the experience of living in and through simu-
lacra (such as realism). A key event at the moment the novel is
set is the Falklands War. Pre-empting Jean Baudrillard on the
Gulf War (Baudrillard 1991), Harry observes that the Falk-
lands ‘is going to be the TV event of the year’ (185)—‘As if
without [the cameras there] it could not take place’ (189)
—‘because nowadays TV can never have enough “real life”
footage…it’s no longer easy to distinguish the real from the
fake, or the world on the screen from the world off it’ (188):
the camera no longer recorded but conferred reality…. As
if the world wanted to be claimed and possessed by the
camera. To translate itself, as if afraid it might otherwise
vanish, into the new myth of its own authentic-synthetic
memory.
(189)
A central feature of the postmodern condition, the novel pro-
poses, is that rather than dispelling myths, which the recording
camera might have seemed to have the potential to do, it ‘con-
fers’ a specious ‘reality’ (or simulacrum), ‘selected’ and
‘framed’ by the angle of vision—since ‘the world always wants
another world, a shadow, an echo, a model of itself’ (187). But
a photograph, which, as we have heard, is ‘the separation of
the image from the thing. The extraction of the world from the
world’, is an object formally detached from its experiential ref-
erent: ‘it becomes an icon, a totem, a curio. A piece of reality?

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 165
A fragment of the truth?’ (120). Earlier, and this will return us
to stories and histories, Harry has reflected:
People want stories. They don’t want facts…. Of the news
photo [journalists] say: Every picture tells a story…. But
supposing it doesn’t tell a story? Supposing it shows only
unaccommodatable fact? Supposing it shows the point at
which the story breaks down. The point at which narrative
goes dumb.
(92)
What Swift seems to be suggesting here, faced with James’s
‘fatal futility of Fact’, is that ‘stories’ are the only things by
which people make sense of their lives. As Waterland had
already posited, such [hi] stories may be ‘untrue’ and incom-
plete, but they are our only way of knowing how we have
come to be what we are.
Indeed, ‘telling (stories)’ is set in counterpoint to the domi-
nant and factitious ‘realism’ of news photography. It is
Sophie’s psychiatrist significantly, to whom she is telling her
story, who makes the comparison most sharply: ‘An image, my
dear Sophie, is something without knowledge or memory. Do
we see the truth or tell it?’ (76). But it is the novel itself, of
course, which is the overall ‘telling’: the ‘story’ which gets
behind the ‘dumb narrative’ of ‘unaccommodatable fact’ in
order to write a ‘history’ of the postmodern world. Does this,
then, make the novel ‘true’—or even ‘truer’—than news stories
and news photography? One reviewer of the novel turned its
central perception about photography onto itself, praising it
for ‘not only recording reality but conferring it’.3 The irony is
that what the novel ‘confers’ is not, of course, ‘reality’, but a
way of perceiving how notions of ‘reality’ are foisted upon us.
The notion of ‘a true story’ is a fiction, just as is ‘the camera
cannot lie’, for there is always another image behind the pho-

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166 LITERATURE
tograph, another story behind the story, another history
behind the history—it all depends on who the ‘witness’ is. The
bottom line, here, is that there is no bottom line: we construct
narratives as narratives construct us. But an historiographic
metafiction like Out of this World helps us to see how this
happens, not least in its self-consciousness of complicity in the
fashioning of narratives.
For example: Sophie’s husband Joe, a travel-agent in New
York, specialises in ‘sell [ing] dreams’ in the form of tours to
England: ‘golden memories of the Old World. Thatched cot-
tages and stately homes…. Sweet, green visions’ (15–16).
When Sophie is herself flying home, she tells her sons that they
will ‘see all the things [they had] only seen so far, in pictures…
So it will seem that England is really only a toy country. But
you mustn’t believe that’ (192). Sophie knows that Joe has ‘the
knack…of ignoring what he knows and endorsing only the
image’ (77). The reader knows, however, that the ‘image’ of a
‘toy’ England belies the fact that it is on its way to the Falk-
land Islands, that MOD installations lurk in the rural idyll of
the countryside, that arms manufacturers own ‘stately homes’
and get assassinated by the IRA. But the England Harry now
inhabits is indeed that of Joe’s dream-world: ‘I was’, he says,
‘facing up to life in a picture-book cottage’ (59)—although he
adds: ‘Picture-books aren’t real? The fairy-tales all got discred-
ited long ago, didn’t they?’ (79). It is within this pastoral
retreat—‘out of this world’—that he lives with Jenny, 40 years
his junior and ‘beautiful. She’s incredible. She’s out of this
world’ (36). Harry, on an aerial photography flying trip, think-
ing of his cottage and the pregnant Jenny down below, muses
that he ‘could almost be guilty of believing…the rest of the
world doesn’t matter’ (39). Is this an optimistic, if minimalist,
affirmation of love in the grisly twentieth-century world of
warfare and simulacra—a beneficent pastoral to defeat the
‘real’ narratives of history? Or does the novel both sustain and

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 167
disavow the ‘guilty’ fantasy of escaping ‘out of this world’: a
pastoral narrative, that is to say, just as specious as that ‘true’
one of photographic news? The novel does not tell us, of
course, because it is itself composed of the ‘stories’ it has con-
structed and related. How, then, do we get behind those of
Harry and Sophie? How, indeed, do we get behind the novel’s
own constitutive narrative? The short answer is: we don’t. All
we are left with is a sense of their potency and a suspicion of
all narratives claiming to ‘record’ reality. But equally, without
its ‘made up’ [hi] story—its self-deconstructing recognition of
its own textualisation of ‘reality’—we would be deprived of
the insight it provides of how our own knowledge of the world
is composed of narratives which purport to be ‘true’. Out of
this World is a ‘newstory’ which suggests that ‘telling stories’
may be just as (or as little) truthful as news-stories.
An important sub-set of contemporary ‘historiographic’ meta-
literature is ‘re-visionary’ writing, which focuses on those
formative textualising narratives that have been central to the
construction of ‘our’, that is to say, European-male, conscious-
ness. The term ‘re-vision’ deploys a strategic ambiguity
between the word revise: ‘to examine and correct; to make a
new, improved version of; to study anew’, and re-vision: to see
in another light; to re-envision or perceive differently; and thus
to recast and re-evaluate the ‘original’. It was given currency
by the American lesbian-feminist poet, Adrienne Rich, who
uses it to signal a politicised feminist poetics which would help
to counter the domination of patriarchal culture by way of
refashioning its (canonic) texts. In her essay, ‘When the Dead
Awaken: Writing as Re-vision’, Rich defines the project thus:
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction….

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168 LITERATURE
Until [women] can understand the assumptions in which
we are drenched we cannot know ourselves…. A radical
critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the
work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have
been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves,
how our language has trapped as well as liberated us….
We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differ-
ently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition
but to break its hold over us.
(Rich [1971] 1992:369)
Such a ‘re-visioning’ can be a purely critical activity, of the fem-
inist and postcolonial kinds we encountered in Chapter 3, but
the act of ‘seeing with fresh eyes’ and of ‘entering an old text
from a different…direction’, also relates to various elements of
my definition of ‘the literary’ itself, and especially its ‘defamil-
iarising’ effects. So that as a literary practice, it means the ‘re-
writing’ of texts which have been constructed and owned by
another (usually dominant) interest such as cultural, patriar-
chal, or imperial/colonial power.
The principal characteristics of ‘re-visionary’ works are:
1 that they tend to ‘re-write’ canonic texts—those ‘classics’
which have a high profile of admiration and popularity in
our literary heritage;
2 that they keep the original text in clear view, so that it is
not just the ‘source’ of a new modern version but a con-
stantly invoked intertext for it;
3 that, in this way, they denaturalise the original in exposing
those discourses which we no longer see in it because we
have learnt to read it in restricted and conventional ways;
4 that they not only re-write the original as a different, sepa-
rate, new work, but re-cast, and thus repossess and liber-
ate, the original as itself a ‘new’ text to be read newly—

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 169
enabling us to ‘see’ a different one to that we thought we
knew as, say, JaneEyre, Robinson Crusoe, King Lear, The
Tempest or ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’;
5 that they make us see parallels (or contrasts) between the
period of the original text’s production and that of the
modern work;
6 that they invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust,
especially on behalf of those exploited, marginalised and
silenced by dominant ideologies, in demanding that the
political inscription and cultural complicity in oppression
of past texts be revised and re-visioned as part of the pro-
cess of restoring a voice, a history or an identity to the
erstwhile oppressed.
‘Re-visionary’ writing, then, is a crucial component of ‘the lit-
erary’ as a contemporary ‘counter-culture of the imagination’,
which in ‘writing back’ to historical texts, and to the historical
conjunctures which shaped them, re-writes Authorised History
by way of revising its ‘master-narratives’.
Examples of such re-visionary works would include: Sue
Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations (1982), which rewrites
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations as the story of Miss Hav-
isham’s vengeance child, hence giving a voice to the repressed
and largely silent ‘heroine’ of Dickens’s novel; Marina
Warner’s Indigo (1992), which explores the story of Sycorax,
Caliban and Ariel in a modern re-vision of Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest; and Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London:
The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989). A wittily
‘exact’ re-writing of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous original
tale, this novella reappropriates a by now pervasive myth and
redeploys it on behalf of contemporary women. For this is
now an analysis of the effects on women of living through that
perverse inflection of patriarchy known as Thatcherism, where
Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde—respectively the ‘rich poor’ and the

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170 LITERATURE
‘poor poor’—are the ‘same’ woman exploited by capitalism
and patriarchy. The immediate cause of her transformation
between ‘yuppie’ and ‘slattern’ is a reliance on drugs, which
start out as ‘little helpers’ but become, combined with other
substances unscrupulously prescribed by male doctors, a
destructive chemistry which causes her to be both (inauthentic)
women at once, and so unable, as one of the story’s multiple
narrators puts it, ‘to find herself’ (Tennant 1989:119). And the
rapist, who for much of the story we think Mrs Hyde has mur-
dered, is a blurred amalgam in Jekyll/Hyde’s mind of all the
men who control and destroy her. Tennant’s later novel, Tess,
recasts Thomas Hardy’s ‘masterpiece’, Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, to reveal that in presenting his heroine in the
way he does, as a desirable sex-object to the male gaze, Hardy
is directly implicated in the patriarchal exploitation Tess suf-
fers, even when the novel purports to be on her side. Beginning
in the 1950s, Tennant’s re-vision also suggests that the
exploitation of women by men, and the difficulties women
face in fulfilling their own sexuality freely, have not signifi-
cantly changed since Hardy’s time. Equally, Jane Smiley’s
novel, A Thousand Acres ([1991] 1992), relocates
Shakespeare’s King Lear in a modern American context, as a
tale narrated by Goneril (‘Ginny’). Unlike Edward Bond, in his
play Lear, which merely represents a different (even more
bleakly violent) version of the story rather than a ‘writing-
back’ to the original, Smiley at once underlines the continuing
destructive ‘madness’ of patriarchal and capitalist ‘monopoly’
in modern America, and, in the light of this, re-visions the
‘good/evil’ binary of Goneril-Reagan/ Cordelia affirmed so
potently by Shakespeare’s play. The ‘unvoiced’ story of
Goneril and Regan’s behaviour in King Lear is thus retrieved
and ‘explained’ (were they indeed victims of abuse?), so that
our experiencing of the canonic play itself is also subversively
redirected.

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Perhaps the best-known and prototypical re-visionary texts,
however, are the novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
(1966) and Foe by J.M.Coetzee ([1986] 1987). The former re-
tells Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre as the story of Bertha
Mason, Mr.Rochester’s first wife and the now famous ‘mad-
woman in the attic’ of feminist criticism. Told in the first-
person narratives of Antoinette/Bertha and her husband during
their time in the West Indies before their return to England
and Thornfield Hall’, the novel forces us to understand why
Bertha might have become a madwoman in the first place, and
who indeed—from ‘Rochester’s’ narrative—is really mad,
hence forcing us to reconsider Jane Eyre’s naturalised charac-
terisation of Bertha. In so doing, it further causes us to see
how patriarchy worked in the early-nineteenth century, and
what the position of women might have been within it, whilst
also leading us to reassess the pointedly racial bias of Brontë’s
presentation of Bertha as a ‘savage’ who appears, in her physi-
cal representation, to be negroid but who, as a ‘creole’, is in
fact a white West Indian. Jean Rhys’s novel, in other words,
redirects our attention to the latent racism of a text which has
a central place both in ‘The Canon’ and in the contemporary
feminist canon (see Spivak 1985, on p. 66).
Likewise, Coetzee’s Foe is an explicit ‘writing-back’ to
Daniel Defoe’s fundamentally formative novel, Robinson Cru-
soe. Not only is the latter one of the first and most famous
novels in English, arguably establishing the model for fictional
realism—Defoe, as ‘editor’ of what purport to be Crusoe's
authentic memoirs, writes in the preface that he ‘believes the
thing to be just a history of fact; neither is there any appear-
ance of fiction in it’—but its story, at a number of levels, also
rapidly acquired a pervasive mythic force. Crusoe himself, in
Coleridge’s phrase, became ‘the universal representative, the
person, for whom every reader could substitute himself’
(quoted in Watt [1957] 1970:81; my emphasis). But he also

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172 LITERATURE
became a figuration both of (especially male) bourgeois indi-
vidualism in all its manifestations: religious, social, political
and economic, and of European colonialism. Coetzee’s novel
addresses all these elements of Robinson Crusoe’s potently tex-
tualising narrative.
Until the sixth and final section, the first-person ‘voice’ is
that of Susan Barton, a woman who was also shipwrecked on
Crusoe’s island but who, it is implied, Defoe silenced by ‘writ-
ing out’ of his-story. Significantly, it is Susan (not Cruso—
Coetzee’s spelling) who writes the account of their sojourn on
the island with Friday, who brings it home to London, who
seeks out the professional writer, Mr Foe, and who offers him
her story to be transformed by ‘the magic of words’ (Coetzee
[1986] 1987:58) into a publishable text. What is implied, of
course, is that Foe’s ‘art’, in the making of his novel, fiction-
alises and distorts Susan’s ‘true’ account in order to create a
good story, not least by removing Susan herself from it. A con-
tinuous refrain in Coetzee’s novel, therefore, is the factitious-
ness of realistic fiction (indeed of any written discourse which
purports to be ‘telling the truth’); so that where an early critic
(1718) of Defoe himself wrote of ‘the little art he is truly mas-
ter of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the world for
truth’,4 the words ‘art’, ‘master’, ‘forging’ and ‘truth’ all now
resonate in Coetzee’s theme. At one level, then, Foe restores a
voice to Susan and her-story, although, even here, it questions
the truthfulness of this narrator by the strategy—adapted from
another of Defoe’s novels, Roxana, whose eponymous heroine
also turns out to be called Susan—of never resolving whether
she is or is not the mother of the daughter who claims her to
be so. Indeed, on the final page of the novel, it is implied that
Susan had drowned in the slave ship before she ever got onto
Cruso s island (see p. 171 below).
But the novel also has as a central figure the black slave, Fri-
day, whom Susan brings back to London with her as a kind of

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 173
possession (even a white European woman is complicit in
colonisation). In Coetzee’s version, however, Friday is not the
‘noble savage’ of Defoe’s tale but a thoroughly alien ‘Other’,
who, pointedly, has had his tongue cut out. Where Defoe’s Fri-
day learns his master’s language and is thus ‘voiced’, albeit
with his own ‘tongue’ silenced by the acquisition of the
coloniser’s language, Coetzee’s becomes, most emphatically, a
symbol of the European ‘unvoicing’ of the colonised. How-
ever, two points should be noted here. First, it is never made
clear who has brutalised Friday in this way: the slave-traders
who leave him on the island, Cruso, or, indeed, Susan Barton
herself, since all the written accounts (including, by implica-
tion, the novel itself) are suspect in their ‘truthfulness’ and are
not by Friday himself. In this respect, all the Europeans are
complicit in silencing Friday. The second point is that, para-
doxically, removing Friday’s tongue does not deprive him of
his own language in the way that the imposition of the
coloniser’s ‘tongue’ erases a native language. It merely means
that he cannot speak. And indeed, Friday has his own forms of
self-expression, namely his singing and dancing, which the
novel can only inadequately represent in its written discourse.
Thus, he has not lost his own powers of articulating his con-
sciousness; they are simply beyond the powers of ‘magic’ white
words to represent and contain. Significantly, too, at the end
of Susan’s narrative, she (and Mr Foe) are beginning to teach
Friday how to write, although all he can manage at that point
is the letter ‘o’. This is clearly the gaping hole of his mouth,
‘nothing’, and a space which waits to be filled.
The final section of the novel is an enigmatic chapter, again
told as an ‘I’ narrative, but set in the present (the house ‘I’ vis-
its has ‘a plaque…bolted to the wall. Daniel Defoe, Author,
are the words, white on blue’; 155). ‘I’ (the author?) envisions
a scene back in the eighteenth century in which the corpses of
Foe, Susan and Friday lie in the room they inhabited at the

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174 LITERATURE
time the ‘original’ story/(ies) were written. But Friday is not
quite dead, and ‘the author’, ‘with an ear to his mouth’, is lis-
tening to ‘the faintest faraway roar’ emanating from it: ‘From
his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island’: ‘I
enter the hole’ (154)—which is both Friday’s mouth and the
silent, as yet unpenetrated, hull of the wrecked slave-ship on
which Friday and thousands of other slaves were transported.
This is significantly, a ‘black space’ (my emphasis) where ‘the
water is still and dead, the same water as yesterday, as last
year, as three hundred years ago’ (156–7). The author ‘crawl
[s] beneath the bodies of Susan Barton and her dead captain,
fat as pigs’, and comes upon Friday with ‘the chain about his
throat’, a chain which is the mark of his enslavement. He asks
him: ‘Friday…what is this ship?’ But the novels answer is,
indeed has to be ‘But this is not a place of words…. This is a
place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Fri-
day’ (157); and it ends with Friday’s mouth opening:
From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath,
without interruption. It flows up through his body and out
upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck;
washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs north-
ward and southward to the ends of the earth….’
This reversed allusion to the last line of Joseph Conrad’s
novella, Heart of Darkness (1898), where, from the river of
the imperial metropolis (‘leading to the uttermost ends of the
earth’), Marlow’s ’inconclusive‘ Eurocentric [hi]story has
sought to penetrate ‘into the heart of an immense darkness’,
suggests that the silenced ‘true’ story of colonialism and slav-
ery still waits to be written. It also implies that it has every
chance of being so, but only when the language of the silenced
can ‘crawl from beneath’ the corpus of Western texts which, in
constructing their [hi] story, have been centrally complicit in

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 175
rendering ‘tongue’-less the subjects of colonial power. As in
Waiting for the Barbarians (see p. 156), white ‘words’ are
specious—‘whatever can be articulated is falsely put’—and
only pass off fictions as ‘the truth’: ‘forging a story and impos-
ing it on the world for truth’, indeed. In the ‘black space’ and
silence of the ‘true’ history of colonialism, as yet only ‘bodies
are their own signs’. But the positive message of Coetzee’s
novel is that it can in itself both reveal the fabrication which
words/stories/histories promote in textualising our lives, espe-
cially those of the oppressed, and affirm the possibility that
when Friday finds his ‘tongue’ once more by substituting it for
the gaping silent hole (‘o’) at the centre of colonial discourse,
he will be able to articulate the signs of the bodies as his own
history of the last ‘three hundred years’. Fundamentally, then,
Foe is about language and how it works simultaneously to rep-
resent and misrepresent ourselves to ourselves.
Derek Walcott’s ‘Castaway poems also write back’ to
Defoe’s novel, and the power of language is again a central
concern. In the title-poem itself, while, as it were, ‘casting’ him-
self as Crusoe surveying ‘his’ island (in the Caribbean), the ‘I’
of the poem (the Caribbean poet?) observes ‘a wrecked ship./
Clenched sea-wood nailed and white as a man’s hand’, where
the assumption that a man’s hand is ‘white’ implies the cul-
tural imperialism of Defoe’s myth (all quotations here and
below from Walcott [1965] 1992). In ‘Crusoe's Island’, the
poetic ‘I’, meditating on a modern island, sees ‘Friday’s
progeny,/The brood of Crusoe's slave’ as ‘Black little girls in
pink/Organdy, crinolines’, this being the Europeanised result,
again, of the culture which Robinson Crusoe so pervasively
has helped to sustain. And in ‘Crusoe's Journal’, which is pref-
aced by a quotation from the novel, the poet reflects on the
power of Defoe’s writing in creating the consciousness at once
of coloniser and of colonised:

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…even the bare necessities
of style are turned to use,
like those plain iron tools he salvages
from shipwreck, hewing a prose
as odorous as raw wood to the adze;
out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose…
It is ‘our first book’ because it is a founding document of the
‘three-hundred-year’ history which is to follow. Defoe/Crusoe
…bears
in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s
the Word to savages,
its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s
whose sprinkling alters us
into good Fridays who recite His praise,
parroting our master’s
style and voice, we make his language ours,
converted cannibals
we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ.
All shapes, all objects multiplied from his,
our ocean’s Proteus…
Here again, it is language which is the primary creating force,
insofar as it is Defoe’s prose which shapes the whole world-
view of those (the ‘good Fridays’) it gives form to in the first
place. Walcott is, in effect, defining ‘the literary’ in ways which
are clearly cognate with my own:
…his journals
assume a household use;

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 177
we learn to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race…
(my emphasis)
It would be quite wrong to represent Walcott’s poems here as
an unequivocal and negative rebuttal of the colonising dis-
course of Robinson Crusoe, since, amongst other things, the
latter represents ‘those fantasies of innocence’ which ‘all of us/
yearn for’. Rather, Walcott is drawing attention to the power
of language, ‘hewn’ into literary form, which is such a funda-
mental constituent of our perception of the world. Neverthe-
less, his poetry, like Coetzee’s Foe, also suggests how centrally
power-relations in the colonial situation are determined by
whose language constructs them (‘to shape…the language of a
race’), and how we live inside the [hi]stories so articulated,
whether they are true or false. Indeed, what such literature
establishes is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive
of a state of being which is not determined by narratives com-
posed of language.
My final example of re-visionary writing is another work
which has the deteminate and exclusive powers of language as
its central concern. Tony Harrison’s long poem V. is, amongst
other things, a re-vision of Thomas Gray’s famous eighteenth-
century poem ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’.
V. uses the same stanza form and rhyme-scheme as Gray’s
‘Elegy’ (quatrains rhyming ab ab), is set in a graveyard, is a
meditation on death, and also ends with an epitaph to the poet
himself. But Harrison’s graveyard is on a hill overlooking
Leeds rather than in the pastoral setting of the ‘Elegy’, and is
composed during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 (with the Gulf
War and the National Front also in mind), rather than in the
rural peace of mid-eighteenth-century England. It has a jaunty
emphatic rhythm which accentuates the ‘snap’ of the rhyme-
scheme, unlike Gray’s meditative and elegaic measure which
mellifluously disguises it, and, crucially, it is full of the crudest

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178 LITERATURE
four-letter words (‘CUNT’, ‘FUCK’, ‘SHIT’, ‘PISS’), in con-
tradistinction to Gray’s orotund poetic diction. Where Gray’s
epitaph, for example, ends with the solemnly valedictory lines
requesting the visitor to leave the poet to his quiet ‘repose’ in
‘The bosom of his father and his God’ (Gray [1750] 1973:179–
82), Harrison’s jokes:
Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
how poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.
(Harrison [1985] 1991: p. 33)
‘Those words’, of course, caused the furore which greeted the
poem when it was televised in a film version, and the reaction
of those on the right of the cultural establishment (as
announced, for instance, by ‘the riff-raff takes over’5) ironi-
cally confirmed what we shall see to be one of its principal
themes: the exclusiveness of a literary culture based on deco-
rous canonic poems like Gray’s ‘Elegy’.
To what end and to what effect, then, is V. a re-vision of the
earlier poem? While it is considerably longer than the ‘Elegy’
and makes little explicit reference to it, once we perceive
Gray’s poem to be its intertext, a cross-historical irony is set
up between then and now: the meditative peace of Gray’s eigh-
teenth-century pastoral is shattered by the graffitti which
decorate late-twentieth-century gravestones. But where one
might expect uncompromising outrage on the part of the mod-
ern poet, and a bemoaning of the loss of innocence and deco-
rum which is held to characterise the eighteenth-century past,
V. goes in another direction. Gray’s ‘Elegy’ purports to speak
for ‘The rude forefathers of the hamlet’ (does Harrison tacitly
recast the word ‘rude’ into its modern sense with regard to his
skinhead football fans?), for ‘Some village-Hampden’, ‘Some

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 179
Cromwell’ or ‘Some mute inglorious Milton’. But, in effect, it
patronises and silences them by way of the smooth poetic dic-
tion such countrymen would never have used (being ‘mute’
and ‘inglorious’): so that, as no more than cyphers in the
poem, ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life/They kept the
noiseless tenor of their way’. All that these ordinary ‘flowers’
of the village have to remember them by is: ‘Some frail memo-
rial’ made up of ‘uncouth rhymes’ (note once more the shift in
sense from the eighteenth-century to the modern) where ‘Their
name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse,/The place of
fame and elegy supply’. In fact, of course, they now have
immortal ‘fame’ in the ‘elegy’ written by Thomas Gray: but as
what? Not as the ‘rude’ men they were (and they do indeed
seem to have all been men), but as the ‘mute’, ‘noiseless’ lin-
guistic cyphers of Gray’s meditation. Conversely, Harrison’s
poem does give his ‘skins’ a voice—hence the strategically
unpoetic ‘CUNTS’ and ‘FUCKS’ etc. However, the poem itself
is conscious of the dangers of a patronising as bad as Gray’s
silencing, so that when it explicitly claims to speak for the
yobs’ in the poet’s imaginary conversation with one of them, it
immediately undercuts its own claim:
‘…the reason why I want this in a book
‘s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!’
A book, yer stupid cunt, ’s not worth a fuck!
‘The only reason why I write this poem at all
on yobs like you who do the dirt on death
‘s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’
Don’t fucking bother, cunt! Don’t waste your breath!
(19)
The ‘yob’ also says ‘Don’t treat me like I’m dumb’ (or ‘mute’?
ibid.). Nevertheless, the poem does encode the skin’s discourse,

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180 LITERATURE
however ‘uncouth’ and senseless it may appear to be; and
willynilly, in a poem, it becomes an element of poetic diction. I
need hardly add that this is diction which, while extensively
prevalent in spoken discourse, seldom if ever finds its place in
poetry. But the four-letter words are, in a sense, only there as
emblems of a discourse which lies behind them. What the
poem also voices on behalf of the yob is the rage and frustra-
tion at being out of work in an unjust capitalist society, part of
‘the unending violence of US and THEM’(11):
Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke.
It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did
…Me, I’ll croak
doing t’ same nowt ah do now as a kid.
…Death after life on t’ dole won’t seem as ’ard!
(18)
It is small wonder that the yob feels ‘it’s not poetry we need in
this class war’ (22), since he is entirely excluded from a culture
which has at its heart poems like Gray’s ‘Elegy’. What the
poem is in part about, then, is the responsibility of a divisive
and exclusive culture for the formulaic knee-jerk emptiness of
‘CUNT’, ‘SHIT’, ‘PAKI GIT’, ‘NIGGER’ etc.: ‘It isn’t all his
fault though. Much is ours’ (13). ‘Ours’, here, identifies the
stakeholders (the poet amongst them) in a bourgeois capitalist
society which makes its money out of arms and ‘HARP’ (lager)
—another four-letter word on which the ‘HARPoholic yob’
(23) gets ‘pissed’—and which admires poetry as part of ‘the
national culture’. Equally, the poet recognises that it is only his
ability to climb out of the ‘class yer were born into’ (22) which
differentiates him from the ‘skin’: under the skin, we might
say, the poet remains his alter ego. As the yob prepares to sign
the ‘UNITED’ he has sprayed on the graves of the poet’s par-

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 181
ents, ‘He aerosolled his name. And it was mine’ (ibid). Under-
standing at once that, as poet, he can no longer ‘represent’ the
class he was born into, that ‘poet’ is, for some, also ‘a crude
four-letter word’ (19), but that ‘This pen’s all I have of magic
wand’ (15—with its echoes of Prospero), all the poet can do is
to compose a poem which attempts to ‘UNITE’ elements of
himself in a hybrid mix of high cultural reference (Gray, Mar-
vell, Rimbaud, Hamlet) and the language of the yob, but
which is constantly and endemically pulled apart by ‘all the
versuses of life’ (11).
It is here that we may bring in the poem’s title, for V., of
course, means a number of things, as the poem implies:
‘versus’, as we have heard; ‘V-sign, as in ‘fuck off’ and/or ‘Vic-
tory’; ‘cunt’, as in ‘he added a middle slit to one daubed V.’
(22); and the abbreviation for ‘Verses’ (‘versus’ and ‘Verses’
can also sound identical). For the poem is fundamentally con-
cerned with language, its ambiguities and its protean nature
depending on where it is located socially. ‘SHIT’ and ‘poem’
are both ‘four-letter words’, but they seem to belong to differ-
ent cultural registers: to be another ‘Versus’. But in the ‘Verses’
of the poem V., ‘SHIT’ takes its place in the poetic register as
just as much a part of it as are the ‘fame’ and ‘elegy’ of Gray’s
poem, and the word has as much, if not more, poetic reso-
nance in establishing the presence of the ‘mute’ and ‘inglori-
ous’ as Gray’s culturally acceptable verses do. In this respect if
no other, Harrison’s poem at once indicates the limits of the
famous ‘Elegy’ and the possibilities of an expanded poetic dis-
course which accomodates the shifting and potent language of
social reality. The yob, in other words, needs to be incorpo-
rated in a poetry which attempts to contain the fundamental
contradictions of life, and which in so doing hopes to render
them ‘UNITED’.
In one respect, however, V. does not revise Gray’s ‘Elegy’.
The only woman in the latter is ‘the busy housewife’ who will

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182 LITERATURE
‘no more…ply her evening care’ for the departed ‘rude forefa-
thers of the village’ (‘For them no more the blazing hearth
shall burn’). While recognising that one of ‘all the versuses of
life’ is ‘man v.wife’(l 1), the only women in Harrison’s poem
are his dead mother and the one invoked by the lines: ‘Home,
home to my woman, where the fire’s lit/these still chilly mid-
May evenings, home to you’ (29), and ‘the bride/I feel united
to, my bride is coming into the bedroom, naked, to my side’
(31). The ‘busy housewife’ and ‘my woman’ seem remarkably
similar in their presence merely as comfort for the males
voiced by the poems. But what Harrison’s poem furthermore
seems symptomatically to be unconscious of is the fact that his
imported yob’s language—and especially ‘CUNT’—is pro-
foundly sexist. This is male language from a predominantly
male culture (football, lager, war, coal-mining), and in this
case, it is not transmuted by becoming a component of the
poetic discourse of Harrison’s poem. The poem, in other
words, and however subversive of conventional attitudes it
may otherwise be, remains locked within and by the sexist lan-
guage it simultaneously deploys and fails to deconstruct. In
this subliminal textualised alerting of us to the persistence of
language as a ubiquitous form of male sexism, V., I would sug-
gest, reveals yet another—albeit only negative—aspect of the
‘re-visioning’ which ‘the literary’ makes available to us.
Perhaps the most innovative ‘use’ by which contemporary liter-
ature contributes to history, however, is by writing it as fic-
tion. We saw earlier how an historical novel, Adam Bede,
offers us a ‘social history’ at both the conscious and the uncon-
scious levels. But in the contemporary period, ‘the literary’ has
strategically attempted to penetrate into that empty ‘space’ or
echoing ‘silence’ which is the history of a people who have
been vanquished and/or colonised by victors of one son or

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 183
another, not least by way of the victors’ ‘history’ becoming the
Authorised History of what occurred. In many such cases, the
history of the vanquished has no, or very little, written docu-
mentation to sustain contemporary acts of restitution. There-
fore, the only way in which a people’s past can be retrieved
and restored is by an imaginative reconstruction of the com-
plex processes of survival and opposition which the dominant
power would have written out of its own history of victory
and control. A particularly telling instance of this is ‘Holo-
caust’ writing, where fiction, amongst other forms, becomes
precisely a defeating of the ‘silence’ the Nazis intended by the
total extermination of the Jewish people. The victims of the
‘final solution’ were told that none of them would be left to
bear witness, and that there would be no certainty about what
had happened because the evidence would be destroyed
together with the victims. In ‘testifying’ to the things they had
seen and experienced, Primo Levi and other writers attempted
to reconstruct a ‘real’ history to counterbalance the fiction that
nothing had happened, to controvert an ‘official’ silence which
would have written the extermination of the Jews out of his-
tory. To record became the motivating impulse; for while the
liquidation of the Jews could not be halted by writing, it could
at least be chronicled and remembered. The fact that fiction is
a primary form in which this ‘real history’ gets recorded—in
the potential absence of it from ‘official history’—lies at the
heart of my argument here.
Raymond Williams’s last major project, People of the Block
Mountains, a trilogy of novels of which only two were com-
pleted before his death, focuses my point even more explicitly.
In an interview in 1983, while reflecting on the writing of the
‘real history’ of a people, Williams suggests that ‘the ruling
class…in its own time above all control[s] the tradition…[in
which process] certain important things are read out, simply
excluded…This is the process I call the selective tradition’

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184 LITERATURE
(Williams [1983] 1989:168–9). In the first volume of his novel,
apropos of the history which existed prior to the written
record, the idea is taken up again:
After ten thousand generations of conscious life and mem-
ory, these written traces, by convention, would be called
the beginning of history: the true, because recorded, story
of the land.
Actual stories are told by both winners and losers. Yet
what becomes history is a selection by the winners.
(Williams 1989:325; my emphases)
We may register in passing here—so that I can return to it—
Williams’s strategic slippage from ‘history’ to ‘story’. In a sec-
ond interview (1987), he presses the fact that the trilogy of
novels presents a history written very much…from below’
(Williams 1987:7; the phrase, pointedly, is E.P.Thompson’s, in
the preface to his radically innovative history, The Making of
the English Working Class, 1963). The rulers, Williams says,
dominate history (and hence most conventional ‘historical nov-
els’), whereas his novel attempts to reintroduce the lives of the
‘anonymous’ working people (ibid.) who had to relate to the
different forms of power (he never disputes their reality) of
that minority of rulers (‘the winners’) whose own ‘selective
tradition’ nevertheless then writes’ the ‘true…[hi]story of the
land’. The history of the people, barely literate over thousands
of years, has been ‘read out, simply excluded’, silenced by the
official ‘false history’ (8) of the ruling classes. Most historical
novels, because of the abundance of such records, are also
‘written from the level of the dominant class, and the others
are…off stage’ (7; Williams’s emphasis), whereas his own ‘true
historical novel’ (3) aims to reverse this emphasis. But the
important thing, he says, is that he is ‘not writing a history: it
is a novel, and I claim imaginative rights over it’ (8), the rea-

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 185
son being that ‘there is a sense…in which history which is both
recorded and unrecorded can only find its way through to per-
sonal substance if it then becomes a novel, becomes a story’
(13; my emphasis). The novel form, with its ‘imaginative’
(Williams uses the word repeatedly) freedom, can ‘put back
these actual lives [of the people] into what would otherwise be
a generalised history’ (10) by reconstituting their history from
even the most vestigial ‘traces’. Thus, as the novel itself has it,
it can recover ‘a living memory’ to defeat ‘a long forgetting’
(1989:10) by reaching ‘a wider common flow, where touch
and breath replaced record and analysis: not history as narra-
tive but stories as lives’ (12; my emphasis). ‘The literary as
history’, I would argue, functions precisely as a way at once of
obviating ‘a long forgetting’ and of giving ‘personal substance’
to occluded historical knowledge.
But the nub of my argument is that Williams has to write a
novel in order to retrieve the unwritten, unrecorded history of
the Welsh people. In these circumstances, a history has to be
invented, or imaginatively reconstructed (‘there is nothing in
[the novel] which goes against what is factually known’
[Williams 1987:8]), since there is no other way of knowing,
say, what a cave-dweller, hunting horses in 23,000 BC (when
the novel opens), would have thought, said and done, nor how
an eleventh-century smith in the Border Country navigated the
continually shifting relations of authority and loyalty at that
time and place. And if the official ‘winners’ history’ comprises
an account of its successful dominance and control, which
would, of course, ‘read out’ its actual repressiveness, then the
novel can release and restore a sense of the challenges and resis-
tances which that power would have met at all points. So that
Williams can ‘fabricate’, as potent and ‘enduring symbol[s] of
resistance’ (1990:4), Derco, the renegade British slave, and
Owain Glyndŵr, the Welsh hero. Of Derco, people say: ‘it is
not known …whether Derco lives or indeed whether there ever

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186 LITERATURE
was such a man. When the men of Menhebog are asked they
say only that he is not here but will come’ (19); and of
Glyndŵr, that ‘he will never make his submission’ (302): he
“‘will get a new banner.… He will lead us to victory. He is a
magician. He appears everywhere there is fighting”. “Have
you seen this magician?” …“No. But I have seen his banner”’
(1990:300). Their ‘magical’ protean absence also means that
neither folk-hero has to submit—which a ‘winners’ history’
would no doubt require them to do.
It may be stretching it to claim Williams for the fictional
subgenre of ‘magic realism’, but it is fair to note that in his
attempt to subvert orthodox history in novel-form, such a
combination of elements is present. For in addition to writing
a ‘losers’ history’ which proclaims resistance and difference,
People of the Black Mountains also subverts expectations and
evaluations of what a novel—more particularly a ‘realist’ fic-
tion—should be. Conventional literary-critical criteria of value
and decorum are placed beside the point here. For example,
how do we discuss a coherent plot in a novel whose first vol-
ume begins in 23,000 BC and reaches 51 AD in 358 pages;
how do we evaluate the ‘characterisation’ of a stone-age shep-
herd, or the representation of the penetration of modernity’
(1990:63) into fifth-century Wales; how do we judge the tone
and style of a novel which has, as it were, to invent a language
in order to articulate an unvoiced people? Even sympathetic
reviewers of the novel when it was first published felt the need
to criticise its ‘infelicities’ of style, tone and structure (‘infelici-
ties’, and the ability to spot them instinctively and unerringly,
surely take us back to the naturalised and received culture of
‘Literature’), and of damning it with faint praise: ‘we can’t
deny that in fiction…we want something more than even good
and true ideas’.6 The presumptive ‘we’ here means that ‘we’
remain firmly imprisoned within a conventional paradigm of
‘the good novel’, upset by the ‘tensions in the writing’ and ‘the

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 187
crisis of idioms’ the book reveals. Hence, ‘we’ are unable to
respond positively to Williams’s heterodox fictional ‘fabrica-
tion’ of the means and methods for an alternative political and
social history of the relations between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
Indeed, throughout his work, creative and critical, Williams’s
definition of realism was complex. For it included the notion
of a proleptic realism which could be deployed to project
beyond the commonsense realisms of existing determinations
and forms; so that realising the unwritten past, as does the
imag[in]ing of the experiential history of the silenced Welsh
people in People of the Black Mountains, is a form of such a
realism. To put it another way: Williams’s cultural-materialist
project rests, paradoxically, on imagination, on the ability, as
we heard him say of George Eliot on p. 106, to ‘think beyond,
feel beyond’ the limits and limitations of the dominant ortho-
doxies and authorities, of cultural and political hegemony, of
an Authorised (‘winners’) History. And if nothing else, his
novel poses the question: how do we write even a fictional
redressing of the received account if we are held within the ide-
ology of existing generic modes, and if the language and forms
of such are effectively geared (in the name of ‘taste’ and ‘plau-
sibility’) to excluding the experience of ‘the others’ (see p.
181)? It is one of the principal uses of ‘the literary’ that its
imaginative or ‘magical’ properties can transgress the quotid-
ian and the naturalised.
In its concern to retrieve a ‘disappeared’ history by way of
its unstable combination of grainy realism and the ‘magical’,
Williams’s late work does seem to have something in common
with other, rather more radical, examples of ‘magic realism’, a
mode of writing which is comprised of a matter-of-fact juxta-
posing of a recognisable material reality with the fantastical
and supernatural. Itself a product and figuration of the ‘hybrid-
ity’ of colonial and now postcolonial cultures, magic realism
has been crucial in the process of moving, in Michael Dash’s

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188 LITERATURE
phrase, ‘Towards a Redefinition of History’ (Dash [1974]
1995:199). Drawing on the work of the Haitian novelist,
Jacques Stephen Aléxis, and the Guyanese writer, Wilson Har-
ris, Dash’s notion of ‘a counter-culture of the imagination’,
quoted earlier, allows for ‘a more speculative vision of history
in which the consciousness of the dominated culture would
predominate’ (200). This involves ‘so reorder[ing] their reality
as to reach beyond the tangible and concrete to acquire a new
re-creative sensibility’, one which is articulated by ‘the myths,
legends and superstitions of the folk…traces of a complex cul-
ture of survival which was the response of the dominated to
their oppressors’ (ibid.). As we shall see, this recuperation of
‘non-rational’ discourses to express what Aléxis calls a
people’s ‘whole consciousness of reality by the use of the Mar-
vellous’ (Aléxis [1956] 1995:195) is very much what Toni
Morrison also means when she talks of the restitution of
African-Americans’ ‘discredited knowledge’ (see pp. 200–01).
The blending, in contemporary writing, of such ‘figurative’
systems with ‘the tangible and concrete’ signifies, says Dash,
‘an adoption of the positive imaginative reconstruction of real-
ity developed in the consciousness of the folk’ (Dash [1974]
1995:200–1), hence ‘engaging in a conception of the past
which would shatter the myths of “historylessness” or “non-
achievement”’ (200).
Perhaps the best-known example of magic realism is the
South American novelist, Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal
work in the genre, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which,
amongst many other things, represents an ‘unofficial’ history
of Columbia. Here, the ‘marvellous’ or ‘magical’ is employed
to capture states of mind in a remote country emerging into
modernity; to realise the impact of the ‘secondary’ colonialism
of American capitalism (the banana farming); and the conse-
quential development of a repressive modern state, which, for
example, erases the massacre of three thousand striking work-

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 189
ers (its own citizens) from the historical record. ‘The official
version…was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied
workers had gone back to their families’ (Márquez [1967]
1972:315); so that only ‘a hallucinated version’ remains (that
of the novel itself) ‘because it was radically opposed to the
false one that historians had created and consecrated in the
schoolbooks’ (355). Echoes of Kafka and Orwell are evident
here. It is by way of the magic realism (and other forms of ‘fan-
tasy’ made available by ‘the literary’), in other words, that the
‘unreality’ of the real can be brought into view. In so doing,
such modes help to solve the problem, once identified by
Christopher Isherwood, as to how the modern writer can
address the ‘fantastic realities’ of ‘the everyday world’ (Isher-
wood 1972:33).
Similarly, Isabel Allende, in The House of the Spirits, uses
magic realism to compose her ‘history’ of modern Chile,
emphasising especially the subversive ‘counter-culture of the
imagination of the ‘extraordinary women of this story’, to
whom the novel is dedicated. The women exist in a repres-
sively patriarchal culture where the quintessential patriarch,
Clara’s husband, Estaban Trueba, regards ‘magic, like cooking
and religion, [as] a particularly feminine affair’ (Allende
[1985] 1986:162). Of Clara’s fantastical notebooks ‘that bore
witness to life’ (138 and passim), Alba, her grand-daughter
who ‘writes’ the novel, observes: ‘She filled innumerable note-
books with her private observations, recording the events of
those years, thanks to which they were not erased by the mists
of forgetfulness and I can now use them to reclaim her mem-
ory’ (95). Equally, the letters between Clara and her daughter
Blanca have ‘salvaged events from the mists of improbable
facts’ (283; my emphasis). Since it is Alba/Allende who sorts
through her inherited materials, in ‘the silence of the dead and
disappeared’, in order to ‘construct this story’ (39), it is, of
course, the novel itself which actually provides the notebooks

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190 LITERATURE
and letters, and so ‘reclaims’ a ‘herstory’ for the benefit of con-
temporary readers that would otherwise have been ‘erased’ by
the ‘improbable facts’ of his-story.
Apropos, and following Márquez, Allende also deploys
magic realism to devastating effect in ‘realistically’ writing a
‘losers’ history’ of the fall of President Allende’s (her uncle’s)
government and the nightmare of the subsequent military ter-
ror in Chile. The ferocious, Orwellian regime of General
Pinochet replaces reality with unreality in the name of reality:
‘with a stroke of the pen the military changed world history,
erasing every incident, ideology, and historical figure of which
the regime disapproved’; introduced blanket censorship,
‘swept… from the lexicon’ words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘jus-
tice’; and closed the school of philosophy in the university,
which ‘like many others…open the gateway of the mind’ (435–
6). Allende’s imaginative reconstruction, on the other hand,
accesses the ‘unreal’ reality behind the ‘real’ unreality. During
the euphoric and doomed chaos of Allende’s revolution, short-
ages of goods meant that ‘shoe polish, needles, and coffee
became luxury items to be gift-wrapped and given as presents
for birthdays and other special occasions’, while ‘people who
had never smoked wound up paying an exorbitant sum for a
pack of cigarettes, and those without children found them-
selves fighting over cans of baby food’ (396–7). In Pinochet’s
Chile, squalor, poverty and violence are hidden away to ‘create
the illusion’ of peace and prosperity, so that ‘the [capital] city
had never looked more beautiful’ (434); but ‘in the silence of
the night…the city lost its stage-set normality and operetta
peace’ (442). It is, of course, ‘the silence of the night’ which
Allende’s novel seeks to break, in which a significant element
of the unreality of the time is the way those who benefit from,
and thus collaborate with, the military regime preferred ‘not…
to know what was going on’ in order to preserve the ‘precari-
ous stability’ of their world (458, 453). Sustained by the

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 191
women in the concentration camp whose spirit the authorities
‘have not been able to destroy’ (487), and inspired by the
ghostly presence of her grandmother, Clara, Alba begins to
keep a notebook ‘to escape from the doghouse and live’ (470).
Clara, in a key passage, suggests that she
write a testimony that might one day call attention to the
terrible secret she was living through, so that the world
would know about this horror that was taking place parallel
to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to
know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life…who
could deny …despite all evidence, that only blocks away
from their happy world there were others, these others
who live or the on the dark side.
(ibid.)
Like the Holocaust writers mentioned earlier, Alba’s ‘testi-
mony’ (and Allende’s novel) are an attempt to speak for those
others who are ‘disappeared’ out of history, and to controvert
the blind and deaf ‘forgetting’ of those who live in a ‘neigh-
bourhood…like another country’ (487). Clara’s and Alba’s
‘notebooks’, retrieved by the magic realism of the novel—
which, of course, creates them ‘out of nothing…for the first
time’—defeats the fact ‘that memory is fragile’ and allows
Alba/Allende to ‘reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my
own’ (11). In so doing, she offers those of us who are contem-
porary readers, and who literally and metaphorically inhabit
‘another country’, a ‘newstory’ without which the reality/
unreality of history would remain opaque. Most significantly,
however, for my attempt to exemplify the ‘uses of the literary’,
Alba closes the novel by commenting on what it has done, not-
ing the way she has had to organise the ‘incomprehensible’
‘jigsaw puzzle’ of all its constituent elements, so that ‘the sepa-
rate parts would each have meaning and the whole be harmo-

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192 LITERATURE
nious’: ‘The space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly
that we never get a chance to see the relationship between
events…. That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her
notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and
to defy her own poor memory’ (490–1). And that too is the
reason for the ‘magic’ of the novel: for it is this which shapes a
‘sense of subject’ (‘seeing the relationship between events…
seeing things in their true dimension’) out of ‘improbable
facts’, real ‘unrealities’ and the ‘long forgetting’ of the ‘Chaos
of Being’. The House of the Spirits is a [hi] story which his-
story would not have written.
A prime example of this, too, is Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, in which, as the narrator, Saleem Sinai
(whose Tristram-Shandy-like ‘autobiography’ the novel pur-
ports to be), puts it: ‘the great work of preserving Memory, as
well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks’
([1981] 1982:38). Hence, Saleem’s present occupation of mak-
ing pickles or, rather, of testing ‘the feasibility of the chutnifica-
tion of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I,
however, have pickled chapters’ (459). But in writing his life,
Saleem has simultaneously to write an inclusive history of
India since independence (and then of the foundation of Pak-
istan and Bangladesh), for as he says: ‘To understand just one
life, you have to swallow the world’ (109), and later:
I am the sum total of everything that went before me….
Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’,
every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, con-
tains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to under-
stand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.
(383)
And to do this, the author must invent, amongst many other
‘marvellous’ characters and events, both his ‘muse’, Padma,

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 193
‘with her [significantly, in the context of magic realism] down-
to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradic-
tory love of the fabulous’ (38), and the ‘fabulous’ figure of Tai
the boatman as the representative of the age-old oral tradition
of legends, myths and tall-tales in Indian culture, which press
down onto the present and must be included if the whole pic-
ture is to be given. His ‘magical talk’ (15), ‘fantastic, grandilo-
quent and ceaseless’ (14), ‘represents’ the immense and ancient
pre-history of modern India, in which Saleem’s ‘history’ is ‘no
more than one fleeting instant’(194).
One of the novel’s principal themes, which is summed up in
the sentence: “‘What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily
the same”’ (79), is indeed the status of the ‘fabulous’ and the
‘fantastic’. For Saleem/Rushdie, the ‘true’ is as likely to be
found in ‘stories’ (ibid.) and the (apparently) ‘fantastic’ as in
‘real’ history. Hence the invention of the ‘MCC’ (Midnight
Children’s Conference—an acronym reclaimed from the home
of imperial cricket): those ‘fabulous beings’7 born on the
stroke of midnight (‘August 15th, 1947’ [9]) after which
India’s independence from British colonial rule would begin.
They represent the multiplex and contradictory elements
bequeathed to the new India (Saleem himself, it transpires, has
a British father)—‘in truth, a mirror of the nation’ (255): ‘the
children of midnight were also the children of the time:
fathered…by history. It can happen. Especially in a country
which is itself a sort of dream’ (118; Rushdie’s emphasis).
Hence, too, the recurrent motif in the novel of the cinema/film
as a metaphor for the truthfulness/ reality of composing (espe-
cially contemporary) history:
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get
from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—
but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more
and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema,

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194 LITERATURE
sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up,
row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the
screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing
grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illu-
sion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion
itself is reality…we have come from 1915 to 1956, so
we’re a good deal closer to the screen…
(166)
And by 1976 (shortly before the novel ends), during Indira
Ghandhi s repressive ‘Emergency’ when the Midnight’s Chil-
dren are ‘disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth’ (435): ‘right
now we’re too close to the cinema-screen, the picture is break-
ing up into dots, only subjective judgements are possible’
(ibid.). ‘Illusion’ has indeed become ‘reality’.
The novel itself, however, is obsessively concerned with its
own capacity for error, while at the same time in pursuit of
telling ‘the whole truth’ of the history it is writing. Saleem dis-
covers ‘an error in chronology’ (he has given the wrong date
on which Mahatma Ghandi was assassinated, so that ‘in my
India, Ghandi will continue to the at the wrong time’ [166]).8
That neither he (nor Rushdie) correct the errors, which they
could easily have done, is at once an admission of any [hi]
story’s ability to falsify and of how historical errors in effect
become ‘true’. But still, Saleem asks:
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far
gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I am pre-
pared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of
my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?
(ibid.)
The answer is surely ‘No’; but it remains a salutary reminder

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 195
that text and discourse, however truthful, construct reality—as
Saleem also acknowledges when he says:
the feeling came upon me that I was somehow creating a
world...I was somehow making [things] happen…which is
to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and
thought of the multifarious realities of the land as the raw
unshaped material of my gift
(174; my emphases)
The echoes here of Stephen Dedalus al the very end of James
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man cannot be for-
tuitous (see above, p. 101). The phrases emphasised above
coincide with what I am claiming is the distinguishing feature
of ‘the literary’, and Saleem/Rushdie do not renege on that.
Rather the opposite: for while offering a warning (‘in autobiog-
raphy, as in all literature, what actually happened is less impor-
tant than what the author can manage to persuade his audi-
ence to believe…’ [270–1]), they actually see the ‘illusion of
the artist’ as more nearly approaching ‘the whole truth’ than
the partiality (in both senses) of a ‘real’ record ever can. For
one thing, the magic realism of the text can incorporate those
(apparently) ‘irrational’ or ‘fabulous’ areas of experience
which a rational and ‘realistic’ discourse, by definition, cannot:
‘Reality can have a metaphorical content; that does not make
it less real’ (200). For another, it represents ‘the greatest talent
of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men’
(ibid.); and for another, in the (fictive) ‘great work of preserv-
ing Memory’: ‘Memory [i]s truth, because memory has its own
special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, min-
imises, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its
own reality, its heterogeneous but usually correct version of
events’ (211; my emphases).
In ‘creating its own reality, its…usually correct version of

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196 LITERATURE
events’, the magic realism of Midnight’s Children, like that of
Márquez and Allende, is deployed to refute the ‘true’ history
of ‘real’ events which warfaring and repressive regimes engen-
der in becoming the proud owners of a ‘winners’ history’.
Apropos of the consolidation of the ‘President of Pakistan’s’
power, Saleem comments that the process proved to him:
that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to
be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything
becomes possible except what we are told is the case… I
was adrift, disorientated, amid an…infinite number of false-
nesses, unrealities and lies.
(326)
On the dates of a border skirmish between India and Pakistan
in 1965, Saleem reflects:
That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed
behind the doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe
which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially
all events in the phantasmagoric Rann…so that the story I
am going to tell…is as likely to be true as anything; as any-
thing, that is to say, except what we were officially told.
(335; my emphases)
Of course, the fantastic ‘unreality’ of the story the novel tells is
a countering of the ‘real history’ put out by government propa-
ganda machines (‘I saw many things which were not true,
which were not possible…it was not true because it could not
have been true’ [375]). But this is most effectively seen in the
novel’s culminating event: Mrs Ghandhi’s ‘Emergency’, which
signals to Saleem the final elimination of the potentialities the
Midnight’s Children—who are rounded up and rendered impo-
tent in the government’s repression—had represented for the

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 197
emergent modern India. The novel, here, conveys the unreal
‘reality’ of the time and attempts to reveal from beneath it, in
the real ‘unreality’ of its own textuality, a true history of those
events: ‘she had white hair on one side and black on the other;
the Emergency, too, had a white part—public, visible, docu-
mented, a matter for historians—and a black part which, being
secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us’ (421; my
emphases). What I am claiming for ‘the literary’ as a ‘counter-
culture of the imagination’ could scarcely be more exactly put:
not that it necessarily tells ‘the truth’, but that it at once coun-
ters the official ‘truths’ which envelop our lives, and shows us,
in its own self-conscious textual ‘making’, how those [hi] sto-
ries are fabricated too.
In this context, it is worth drawing attention to the novel’s
self-consciousness of form as the medium in which the ‘chutni-
fication of history’ is preserved. Reflecting on what he sees as a
‘national longing for form’, Saleem thinks of it as ‘perhaps
simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden
within reality, that meaning reveals itself only in flashes’ (300;
my emphases). It is indeed the ability to see pattern within the
flux of life, and to reveal ‘flashes of meaning’ (‘moments of
vision’, ‘insight’), which I am arguing constitute literature’s
continuing claim for attention. Towards the end of the novel,
Saleem observes: ‘Form—once again, recurrence and shape!—
no escape from it’; and as it closes, thinking about the ‘immor-
tality’ pickling gives, he says: ‘The art is to change the flavour
[of the ‘raw materials’] in degree, but not in kind; and above
all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form—that
is to say, meaning’ (461). Such is the effect of the ‘art’ of ‘the
literary’, too.
The ‘thirty jars’ mentioned above are the thirty chapters of
the thirty-year-old (soon to be thirty-one) Saleem’s ‘autobiog-
raphy’ (and of the novel itself). The non-existent thirty-first jar
—‘and a jar’—is, however, crucial, since it represents the possi-

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198 LITERATURE
bility of a future: the door to the future is kept ‘ajar’. For
despite ‘the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discom-
bobulation of the children of midnight’ (427), and the acceler-
ating decomposition of the narrator himself as Midnight’s
Children reaches its conclusion, Saleem does have a son who
can now speak, and whose first words are the magic ones
which are the title of the novel’s own final chapter: ‘Abra-
cadabra’ (459). When Saleem is trapped in the timeless dark-
ness, ‘the isolating, artificial night’, of the postmodern ‘Mid-
nite-Confidential Club’—‘that place outside time, that nega-
tion of history’—the eyes of his son Aadam (a new first man to
replace the first modern man, Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam
Aziz) shine with light, and he is presented as ‘a member of a
second generation of magical children who would grow up far
tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or
the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their
wills’ (447). The unwritten thirty-first chapter, in other words,
is available for Aadam’s generation, because ‘the future cannot
be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty…’ (462).
Even Rushdie’s magic realism cannot pickle the future, because
it ‘has not taken place’ (ibid.); but it does, nevertheless, leave it
‘a/jar’—preserving it as a space as yet unspiced.
My final two examples of ‘the uses of the literary’—in tribute
to the re-energising of literature brought about by the enfran-
chising of erstwhile marginalised voices—are both by black
women writers, and both use it to reinstate a history ‘hidden
from history’. The first is the sequence of poems, i is a long
memoried woman by the Caribbean poet, Grace Nichols
(Nichols 1983). Charting the consciousness of an African
woman transported by slavery to ‘the new world’, the poems
register her resistance to, and gradual independence from, the
‘double colonisation’ of being a black woman. The first poem,

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 199
‘One Continent/ To Another’, begins with the simultaneously
unknowable and unforgettable experience of the ‘Middle Pas-
sage’ (i.e. on the slave ships crossing from Africa to the Ameri-
cas; see also Toni Morrison’s Beloved, on pp. 199–200 below):
‘Child of the middle passage womb/…bleeding memories in
the darkness’. But the woman nevertheless believes that ‘We
must hold fast to dreams/…all revolutions are rooted in
dreams’ (‘Days That Fell’). This she does by invoking her
‘Mother’ and other legendary ‘goddesses’, and by affirming the
pride and strength of women who voices go unheard’ (‘We
The Women’). She asserts their sexuality:
woman
clad
in her loveliest woman
skin gleaming faintly
with oils breasts nippling
the wind
(‘…Like Clamouring Ghosts’)
And she never forgets either her African origins; her betrayal
by men, even those ‘the colour of my own skin’: ‘No it isn’t
easy to forget/what we refuse to remember’ (an ambiguous atti-
tude to memory analagous to that in Beloved, too); or the
appalling treatment handed out by the slave-owners to ‘all us
rebel/ women’ (‘Ala’). But it is in the section pointedly entitled
‘The
Sorcery’ that black women’s ‘magic’ announces their
‘revolution:
I coming back “Massa”
I coming back
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200 LITERATURE
I coming back
colour and shape
of all that is evil
I coming back
(‘I Coming Back’)
In this way, the poems’ persona can envisage a ‘Return’ in
which freedom from racial and sexual oppression is possible:
let them sleep
they happy white sleep
Yes, Wind a change
keep yuh coming fire
secret
(‘Wind A Change’)
What she seeks, as ‘a woman…with all my lives/strung out like
beads/before me’, is
the power to be what I am/a woman
charting my own futures/a woman
holding my beads in my hand
(‘Holding My Beads’)
An essential part of the process of achieving this, as the ‘Epi-
logue’ indicates, is to restore a voice and a history of their own
to black women, which is, of course, what i is a long memo-
ried woman itself is doing:
I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old
one

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 201
a new one has sprung
The parallels with Coetzee’s Friday, and his excised ‘tongue’
from which ‘a new one’ waits to ‘spring’, are inescapable.
My final example of the usefulness of ‘the literary’ in restor-
ing a ‘tongue’ is Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. If this may
seem a predictable choice, because of the way the novel has so
rapidly become both hugely popular and a ‘new canon’ text,
this very phenomenon also underwrites my view that ‘fiction
as history’ continues to fulfill a pressing need in late-twentieth-
century societies. An attempt to map imaginatively the history
of African-Americans (one continued in the two later novels in
this loose trilogy, Jazz [1992] and Paradise [1998]), the pri-
mary historical focus of Beloved is that of the immediate
aftermath of slavery. It charts the lives of a group of freed
slaves in 1873 in post-bellum America, i.e. ten years after
emancipation and eight years after the end of the Civil War,
although it also articulates, by way of the ‘rememorying’ (Mor-
rison’s word) of Sethe and Paul D, the earlier experience of
being a slave proper. And behind that history again, it
attempts to give a voice, as we shall see, to the whole folk-
memory of the ‘Sixty Million and more’ (to whom the novel is
dedicated) who died throughout the appalling history of slav-
ery, and especially during the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ (the
sea-crossing from Africa to America). Thus, it seeks to restore
a voice to a past which has few written documents to sustain
it. In this, it is another ‘losers’ history’: one which seeks to get
behind the double oppression of black women by ‘speaking’
‘the thoughts of the women of 124 [Bluestone Road], unspeak-
able thoughts, unspoken’ (Morrison [1987] 1988:199), where
the double sense of ‘unspeakable’ is telling. In so doing, it
focuses on the problematics of freedom: ‘Freeing yourself was
one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another’
(95). In addition, and as a crucial aspect of this, the novel

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202 LITERATURE
offers an extended meditation on the interpenetration of the
past in the present—of what Raymond Williams called ‘the
pressure of the past…a sense almost of the presence of the
past’ (Williams 1987:4; his emphasis); on the processes and
effects of memory; and on the question of how determinate the
past is, or, more importantly, should be, on the present. For
Morrison (in an interview entitled ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor
as Foundation’), the novel-form is a crucial contemporary
resource:
new information has got to get out, and there are several
ways to do it. One is in the novel.
…It should have something in it that enlightens; some-
thing in it that opens the door and points the way. Some-
thing in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the
problems are. But it need not solve those problems
because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe.
(Morrison [1983] 1985:340–1; my emphases)
I have italicised the phrases above because they seem to me to
be consonant with my definition of ‘the literary’, in the sense
that they imply the transmission of ‘news’ by way of bringing
into view, ‘for the first time in this way, a ‘sense of subject’
(‘conflicts’ and ‘problems’) otherwise obscured in the undiffer-
entiated flux of lived experience: they ‘enlighten’.
There are a number of ‘enlightening’ narrative strategies
employed in Morrison’s own novel to get the several receding
histories written, and to establish what it recognises itself is
ultimately impossible: ‘what really happened’. In one of its
many disguised self-reflexivities, the novel notes: ‘Denver
spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to
create what really happened, how it really was, something only
Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time
afterward to shape it’ (78; my emphases). The paradoxical

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 203
notion of ‘creating what really happened’ is central to my
notion of ‘the literary’; but even more so is the recognition that
only Sethe, in ‘shaping it’, could get at ‘how it really was’:
which, of course, is exactly what the novel is doing in order to
get its [hi] story told. The disturbed chronology, which cuts
backwards and forwards between the past and the present,
intermingling the two in the process of ‘rememorying’, itself
represents the presence of the past in the present and its hold
on it: Sethe’s sense that ‘nothing ever dies’ (36). A particularly
powerful instance of this narrative chronology is the extremely
slow unfolding of ‘what really happened’ in Paul D’s and
Sethe’s past, and most particularly Sethe’s killing of Beloved.
This is slipped in for the first time almost exactly halfway
through the book (104), and is only actually described some
40 pages later. The effect is to prepare us for the event: know-
ing so much about Sethe’s atrocious treatment in the past has
created sympathy for her, so that what otherwise would have
seemed a monstrous act, while not being justified, is nevether-
less explained.
A second feature of the narration is its disconcerting blend
of harsh ‘historical’ realism and the supernatural, the most
obvious instance being the character of Beloved herself, who is
at once presented as humanly real and as a ghost. Her function
as the latter, amongst other things, is to allow Morrison to rep-
resent in her [hi] story the unretrievable experience of the
slaves on the slave-ships as they undergo the ‘Middle Passage’.
Within the four sections towards the end of the novel where
Sethe’s, Denver’s and Beloved’s minds weave into a stream of
consciousness that articulates ‘the thoughts of the women of
124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken’ (the closing sentence of
the preceding chapter), Beloved ‘rememories’ the conditions in
the hold of a slave-ship:
I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his

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204 LITERATURE
face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are
locked some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the
men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we
have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face
(210)
As for Williams in his ‘pre-historic’ re-enactments, only the
imaginative projection of ‘the literary’ can retrieve a past so
occluded that it may be said simply not to exist. Realising—in
both senses—its existence is, of course, exactly what I am want-
ing to claim literature uniquely does.
In the interview with Morrison quoted earlier, she makes a
crucial statement about what ‘the literary’ can indeed do in its
‘making’ of ‘poietic realities’. Reflecting on her earlier novel,
Song of Solomon, she notes how it
blend[s] the acceptance of the supernatural and a pro-
found rootedness in the real world at the same time with
neither taking precedence over the other. It is indicative of
the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at
the world. We are very practical people, very down-to-
earth…. But within that practicality we also accepted what
I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is
another way of knowing things. But to blend those two
worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limit-
ing. And some of those things were ‘discredited knowl-
edge’ that Black people had; discredited only because
Black people were discredited therefore what they knew
was ‘discredited’. And also because the press toward
upward social mobility would mean to get as far away from
that kind of knowledge as possible. That kind of knowl-
edge has a very strong place in my work.
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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 205
What Morrison is describing is, of course, a version of ‘magic
realism’ (see pp. 184–5). But the important thing to recognise
is that it is only by way of ‘story’ as ‘history’ that ‘another way
of knowing things’ can be articulated: some things can only get
said through an imaginative agency which ruptures common-
sense, rational ‘realism’. This is especially the case with ‘dis-
credited knowledge’—that of ‘the losers’, which, as Williams
puts it, has been ‘read out’ of history. Morrison’s novel, in
other words, legitimates Black ‘discredited knowledge’ by giv-
ing it a voice, by presenting it as part of the experiential reality
of Black lives. That it also enables her to get the ‘unspeakable’
spoken—what we might call the psycho-history of slavery—is
a further ‘enhancement’ which would otherwise be left mute.
But what is equally important for my argument here, too, is
the fact that Morrison is acutely aware that she is writing 100
years after the end of slavery for people who may well be for-
getting, or even trying to forget, that past and that kind of
‘discredited knowledge’: those for whom ‘the press of upward
social mobility’, for example, means ridding themselves of any
trace of ‘discreditedness’. The novel, therefore, is a means of
‘rememorying’ a history which, in Williams’s phrase again, is
in process of ‘a long forgetting’.
But even this is to simplify the kind of ‘newstory for the con-
temporary world that Beloved is. For it is a novel structured
by profound ambivalences: ambivalences, for instance, about
the nature of whitefolks’ (it does not seem unequivocally to
underwrite Baby Suggs’s utterance that ‘there’s no bad luck in
the world but whitefolks’ [89]), and about the effects of slav-
ery (slavery degrades and dehumanises not just its victims but
also its perpetrators). Both of these challenges to received posi-
tions have made it a contentiously political novel. Indeed,
Morrison is on the record as believing that novel-writing ‘must
be political. … That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now:
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206 LITERATURE
tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is
tainted’ (Morrison [1983] 1985:344–5). But the novel’s most
important structuring ambivalence is its stance to the past and
to the ‘rememorying’ of it, and hence to Sethe (right or
wrong?) and to Beloved (good or bad?). While its own primary
theme and strategy is indeed to recreate the past in the present
—albeit aware that ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts’
(35), and that Sethe and Paul D are constantly battling at ‘keep-
ing the past at bay’ (42), al ‘the serious work of beating back
the past’ (73)—the question it nevertheless poses is: is ‘remem-
orying’ good or bad, helpful or disabling, liberating or impris-
oning? Rather than ‘solving’ such a question, however, (it is
not ‘a recipe’) the novel merely suggests in complex fashion
what the conflicts are, what the problems are’, and so gives the
answer: Both.
Sethe is so obsessed by the past, hence the presence of the
murdered Beloved, that even Paul D sees her as dehumanised:
“‘You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” he said’ (165). She is
about to commit another murder—of the ‘good white’ Mr
Bodwin—but is stopped, significantly, by her daughter Denver,
Ella and other black women who see her as ‘crazy’ (265). It is
the down-to-earth Ella who, despite having herself suffered
extreme humiliation at the hands of‘“the lowest yet”’, articu-
lates the opposition to Sethe’s paranoia:
Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past
errors taking possession of the present…. Daily life took
as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past
something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind,
well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life—
every day was a test and a trial.
(256)
Denver is important in this context. Born ‘free’, she represents

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THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’ 207
a new generation who can leave behind 124 Bluestone Road,
who can begin to accept ‘whitefolks’ (they are offering her edu-
cation), and who can claim a future: it is Denver who grasps
Baby Suggs’s injunction: ‘“Know it, and go on out of the yard.
Go on.”’ (244). This is the politics of ‘claiming ownership of
the freed self’ (95), and the novel seems to propose a kind of
humanistic affirmation, where true ‘freedom’ is associated
with the ability to love, which the novel’s symptomatically
ambiguous title—at once ‘Belovéd’ and the imperative
‘Beloved’—seems to confirm. Scarred by her appalling past,
Sethe is terrified of feeling anything: ‘Would it be all right?
Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and
count on something?’ (38; Morrison’s italics); and Paul D con-
curs: ‘For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that
much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had
settled on to love’ (45; later, in a resonant phrase which Sethe
does not understand, he describes it as ‘her too-thick love’
[164–5]).
However, despite Baby Suggs’s ultimate denial of hope, her
sermon on ‘love’ is a central statement in the novel; Paul D’s
‘red heart’ is restored to him from within the rusted-up
‘tobacco tin buried in his chest’ (72–3)—paradoxically by
Beloved’s ‘shining’ for him; he brings Sethe painfully back to
life when he kisses her mutilated back and they make love; and
it is he too, on returning to offer Sethe his love at the end, who
says:’ “Sethe…me and you, we got more yesterday than any-
body. We need some kind of tomorrow”’ (273). But most
importantly, it is Paul D who associates love with ‘freedom’:
‘He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you
could love anything you chose—not to need permission for
desire—well now, that was freedom’ (162). Such perceptions, I
would suggest, accrue precisely from the imaginative freedom
accorded by ‘the literary’: the affirmative potential it allows, in

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208 LITERATURE
Williams’s phrase, to ‘think beyond, feel beyond’ the material
and the determinate.
What the novel seems to be saying, then—and, importantly,
to enact in its own formal narrative strategies—is that ‘free’
and contemporary African-Americans, but also the ‘whitefolks’
who are complicit in it, must own their own history in order
to be free to develop, to have a future; but also, simultane-
ously, to be free of it: to ‘know it, and go on out of the yard.
Go on’. This seems to be the point of the deeply ambivalent
short last chapter, which at once recommends ‘forgetting’ the
‘disremembered and unaccounted for’ Beloved—because
‘Remembering seemed unwise’ (274)—and continues to affirm
her presence: the need not to forget her because she is their
past, their identity, that which has made them the descendants
of their ‘Sixty Million and more’ ‘Ancestors’ (as the title of her
interview calls them). The ‘upwardly socially mobile’ Denver
and her descendants may forget Beloved—‘the water too and
what is down there’ (275; a reference to the ‘Middle Passage’);
but she (and the Middle Passage) remain ‘real’, if only as ‘an
unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep’ (ibid.), which those
descendants forget at their peril. Hence the novel’s repeated
concluding ambivalence: ‘This is not a story to pass on’ (ibid.),
where the phrase simultaneously means ‘not a story to pass on’
(i.e. to keep repeating) and ‘not a story to pass on’ (i.e. to
ignore). And the novel’s equally ambivalent final word—at
once memorial inscription and present injunction—is:
‘Beloved’. On that note, I rest my case for ‘the uses of the
literary’.

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6
WATCH THIS SPACE
My reiteration throughout this book that ‘the literary’ creates
‘poietic realities’, shaping ‘pattern’ and a ‘sense of subject’ out
of inchoate matter in an original textual ‘making’, implies that
past and present literature writes us, inasmuch as its particular
formulation, which did not exist hitherto and now does, per-
manently changes how we perceive things. Whatever we read
has this capacity to a greater or lesser degree, but try to imag-
ine a world in which Hamlet, say, or Frankenstein or The
Waste Land had never been written, texts which, in effect and
for better or worse, help to configure our consciousness. But
perhaps more importantly, ‘the literary’ also represents a
future, insofar as it offers us, to quote Diane Elam once more,
those ‘spaces for waste, for potential uselessness, for seeming
nothingness, [which] are the very same spaces that create the
possibility for thought’ (Elam 1997:13). Or to put it another
way: literature—always waiting to be both written and read—
is a kind of uncontrolled free space in which unpredictable
things can happen and from which unpredictable effects may
accrue. Salman Rushdie’s thirty-first jar (Rushdie [1981]
1982:461–2)—the one waiting to be filled by what has not yet
happened, the one that keeps the future a/jar—is an apt sym-
209

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210 LITERATURE
bol for what ‘the literary’ represents at any present moment.
For it is always a potentiality, always about to be written as a
text that no one can determine, preclude or proscribe before it
reveals itself to the reader ‘for the first time in this way’.

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NOTES
1 WHAT IS ‘LITERATURE’?
1 For more on Arnold, and further reference to this state-
ment and its variants, see Chapter 2, pp. 37–41.
2 Ben Jonson, 'To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author
Mr.William Shakespeare’, a poem prefixed to the first folio
edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1623); Ezra Pound, ABC
of Reading (1934), ch. 2.
3 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, 15th
edn., 1985, vol. 7: ‘Literature’, p.398.
4 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia, 15th
edn., 1985, vol. 23: 'The Art of Literature’, p. 87. Subse-
quent references to this essay appear as bracketed num-
bers in the text.
5 The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed.
Tom McArthur, Oxford: OUP, 1992: ‘Literature’ (by ‘R. C.’
[Raymond Chapman]). pp. 619–20. Subsequent refer-
ences to this essay appear as bracketed numbers in the
text.
6 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), l. 298.
211

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212 LITERATURE
2 WHAT HAS ‘LITERATURE’ BEEN?
1 W.Webbe, English Poetrie, 1586. Source: OED under
‘Poetry (3.)’.
2 In An Apologiefor Poetrie, written c.1581; published
posthumously, 1595. Source: OED under ‘Poesie’ (1.)
and ‘Maker (5.)’.
3 In An Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the
Mind; quoted in Terry 1997:86.
4 In the Symposium: see Jowett [1871] 1969:537.
5 Quoted under “‘Sublime”’ in Preminger (ed.) [1965] 1974,
p. 819.
6 All the examples given in this paragraph and in the follow-
ing four are taken from the quotations listed in the OED’s
entry under ‘Literature’, unless otherwise stated.
7 In The Arte of English Poesie; quoted in Terry 1997:94.
8 This argument is developed at much greater length in
Eagleton’s philosophical critique, The Ideology of the Aes-
thetic (1990).
9 In ‘On English Literature’ (his introductory lecture as Pro-
fessor of English at the Queen’s College for Women,
London); quoted in Palmer 1965:39.
10 But see also the work of Renée Balibar and Dominique
Laporte on the ideological function of literary texts within
educational institutions in post-revolutionary France: Bal-
ibar 1974, 1978; Balibar and Laporte 1974.
11 As Doyle (1982:21–2) and Terry (1997:90–3) point out,
however, the introduction of literary matter and an associ-
ated pedagogy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth
century was, paradoxically, an earlier and formative factor
both in establishing a national canon of ‘English Litera-
ture’ and in placing it on the education syllabus.
12 I am indebted to Brian Doyle’s work (especially Doyle
1982) for much of the information here.

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NOTES 213
13 The final phrase is Eagleton’s ([1983] 1996:23), but I am
also indebted to Baldick 1983 and Graff 1987 for ele-
ments of my account here. Graff, in his ‘Introduction: The
Humanist Myth’ (12), questions Eagleton’s claim.
14 Quoted in Doyle 1982:23–4, and Palmer 1965:39–40. For
a further quotation from Kingsley’s lecture, see above,
p. 37.
15 The source of the first phrase (quoted in Doyle 1982:24)
is Vera Brittain, The Women of Oxford, London: Harrap,
1960, p. 4on; that of the second (quoted in Palmer
1965:96) is E.A.Freeman, Regius Professor of History at
Oxford, in 1887.
16 Cf.Perry Anderson’s essay, ‘Components of the National
Culture’ (1968), in which it is asserted that Leavisian liter-
ary criticism in mid-century Britain filled the vacuum left
by the failure to develop a British marxism or sociology.
17 In Moore (ed.) 1977:370; but quoted, significantly, in
Brooks ([1947] 1968:124) and Wimsatt and Beardsley
([1946] 1972:335).
18 Quoted without reference in Eagleton ([1983] 1996:172).
3 WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ‘LITERATURE’?
1 For an analysis of Adam Bede as ‘history’, see Chapter 5,
pp. 141–8.
2 See Chapter 2, note 18.
3 The source for some of the information here is the Intro-
duction to Gubar and Kamholz (eds) 1993:1–8.
4 For a fuller account of this ‘scandal’—and a disproving of
its accuracy—see Graff 1992.
5 As Regenia Gagnier has pointed out in a letter to me: ‘the
term “political correctness” was appropriated in the Cul-
ture Wars by cultural reactionaries on the Right and mass
media, but it was originally a term of irony that the Left

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214 LITERATURE
applied to itself. Given an ethically or politically complex
problem, we’d ask ourselves: what would be the politically
correct thing to do?—knowing full well that there was no
easy answer. The reduction of the Left’s irony to its
alleged tendentiousness was itself an irony of the Culture
Wars’.
6 For more extended, but still synoptic, accounts of move-
ments in contemporary literary theory, see Selden/
Widdowson/Brooker (1997) A Reader’s Guide to Contem-
porary Literary Theory, 4th Edition, and the ‘Afterword’ to
the 2nd Edition of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory
([1983] 1996).
7 This notion, in respect of Louis Althusser, will be explored
a little more fully in Chapter 4, pp. 118–19.
8 More recently still, a second Guardian article—entitled
‘Why we still want to read all about it’ (Rebuck 1998), in
celebration of ‘World Book Day’—notes: ‘There are more
books published each year and more books bought than
ever before. We are on the brink of the 21st century, yet
perhaps 98 per cent of human knowledge is still acquired
through reading books’. Of these, a large proportion will
fall within the domain of ‘literature’.
4 WHAT IS ‘THE LITERARY’
1 Respectively, Boris Eichenbaum and Yury Tynyanov,
quoted under ‘Literariness’ in Hawthorn, 1998:188.
2 Gregory Jay, unpublished comment, quoted in Graff
1992:76.
3 Respectively, Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry, 1821, and
Carlyle, in Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1841.
4 I am indebted to Jane Spencer of Exeter University for
pointing out to me that feminist criticism has begun to
deconstruct the male gendering of concepts of creativity.

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NOTES 215
Her own as yet unpublished paper, ‘The Sons of Behn’,
addresses this issue, and also references relevant work
by other feminist critics.
5 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, chapters X and XIII.
6 Williams’s further views about fiction and history—
specifically in relation to his own late novels—are consid-
ered in Chapter 5, pp. 180–4.
7 Rossetti is, in fact, describing a sonnet; in Rossetti 1881:
Part I, Introduction.
8 Examples of contemporary ‘re-visionary writing’ are dis-
cussed in Chapter 5, pp. 164–79.
9 In M.M.Bakhtin and P.M.Medvedev, The Formal Method
in Literary Scholarship, quoted in Dentith 1995:16.
10 For a fuller exemplification of these ideas, see Macherey
[1966] 1978.
11 For further discussion of how The Tempest does this, see
Chapter 5, pp. 137–41.
12 This would not be true of ‘prints’, of course; but these are
seldom produced in large popular editions, and are usu-
ally individually signed by the artist if they are to hold any
‘value’.
13 This is changing: many more film and TV scripts are
being published in cheap and accessible form by Faber,
Penguin and Methuen Drama, for example. Quite what
they are bought and read as and for is an interesting
question:
• as literary texts in themselves;
• simply to see what the script of the film, play or adap-
tation you watched looks like on paper;
• to study scripting techniques;
• because people tend to buy ‘the book’ of something
they have enjoyed watching anyway—and especially if it
has a ‘still’ from the film on the cover.

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216 LITERATURE
5 THE USES OF ‘THE LITERARY’
1 For more on this notion, see pp. 184–5.
2 Quoted, without source, in Seymour-Smith [1973]
1985:275.
3 David Hughes in the Mail on Sunday, quoted on the fly-
sheet of the Penguin edition of the novel (Swift 1988).
4 Quoted, without attribution, in Watt [1957] 1960:206.
5 Quoted from a letter written by a Conservative politician
to Neil Astley (editor of Bloodaxe Books) in the latter’s
brief intoduction of that title to the selection of press cut-
tings included in Harrison [1985] 1991, p. 37. The TV film
of V., directed by Richard Eyre and shown on Channel 4
on 4 November 1987, created a rash of articles and let-
ters in the press for and against the ‘torrent of four-letter
filth’ contained therein, and debating whether a poem
which used such language could indeed be ‘poetry’.
6 Respectively, Terence Hawkes, ‘The Outlandish Voice’,
Times Literary Supplement, 22–28 Sept. 1989, and
Andrew Motion, ‘A Fictional Crisis of Idioms’, The Inde-
pendent on Sunday, 26 August 1990.
7 See their description in Rushdie [1981] 1982:195–200.
8 See also Rushdie [1981] 1982:222, for another ‘error of
chronology’.

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