纳博科夫的园地

This, in effect, was the definition of the ‘literature’ advanced by the Russian formalists, who includes in their ranks Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum, and Boris Tomashevsky. The formalists emerged in Russia in the years before 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism. A militant, polemical group of critics, they rejected the quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines which had influenced literary criticism before them, and in a practical, scientific spirit shifted attention to the material reality of the literary text itself. Criticism should dissociate art from mystery and concern itself with how literary texts actually worked: literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine. It was made of words, not of objects or feelings, and it was a mistake to see it as the expression of an author’s mind. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin had not lived.

Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature; and because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind, concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary ‘content’(where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. For from seeing from as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the ‘motivation’ of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote is not ‘about’ the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. It was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists; and though they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality – indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks – they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic’s business.

By Terry Eagleton

If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?

There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as ‘imaginative’ writing in the sense of fiction – writing which is not literally true. But then the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes’s Leviathan or Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, Bossuet’s funeral speeches, Boileau’s treatise on poetry, Madame de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb(though not Bentham), Macaulay(but not Marx), Mill(but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).

A distinction between ‘fact’ and "fiction", then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between ‘historical’ and ‘artistic’ truth does not apply at all to early Icelandic sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word ‘novel’ seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as ‘fact’ by some and ‘fiction’ by others; Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but they are now for many readers ‘literature’. Moreover, if ‘literature’ includes much ‘factual’ writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ true, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?

Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative’, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ‘thou still unravished bride of quietness,’ then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning-or, as the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and signifieds. Your language draw attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statement like ‘Don’t you know the drivers are on strike?’ do not.