I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
Billy Collins, Introduction to
Poetry
There is nothing called literature. What exists is a type of writing called literary writing that can be
found in other media that may not be considered literature. But what does being
literary mean? Is it a distinct style that needs to be adopted by the author?
But different types of writing – journalistic pieces, poems, historical
accounts, sociological theories – have their own motives and hence their own
styles. Then how do we define a quality called literary that could be common to
the various types of writing that we encounter?
The first and foremost quality of
literary writing is the primacy of description over narration. These are two
interdependent elements of any piece of writing that seeks to tell a story in
the broader sense of the term. Description freezes a moment in time while
narration moves the story forward. Take the following lins from Thomas Hardy’s Under The Greenwood Tree :
To
dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its
feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less
distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the
ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise
and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as they shed their
leaves, does not destroy their individuality.
On
a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane
towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus
distinctively to his intelligence.
The first paragraph
is a meditation on different species of trees found in the region. The plot is
yet to unfold (or may be, in other instances, does not move forward even if it
has already unfolded) and the reader is invited to appreciate the image brought
alive by the description. There is neither chronology nor event but words that
concretize the image called up by the intricate play between word and matter.
But the second
paragraph means business. A man moves through the landscape and with him, the
reader. The narration unfolds; the plot is no longer held back by words. Yet
the quiescence of the first paragraph seeps into the second and briefly arrests
its movement “in the darkness of a
plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence.”
Narration is never
completely free from description, at least in good literature. And it is
primarily description that constitutes the type of writing known as literature.
Description is
achieved by the specific way in which a litterateur deals with language. In
non-literary writing, a cry of loneliness is a sign of the loneliness which
provokes it, but literature about loneliness is both loneliness itself and
something other than loneliness. The conversion of emotion into literature causes
a transmutation that extricates
literature from the despondency of the lonely state. The reader appreciates
literature on loneliness without being drowned in the state of loneliness. He
would never want to be in such a state himself but nonetheless appreciates the
literature provoked by such a state. This appreciation of an undesired state of being is the something other created by literature.
