The art of written words, usually called literature, involves using language for practical purposes other than projecting our common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov once told his students that literature was not born on the day someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased that person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear, nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language. By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.) Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language, of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language, a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient because to understand language is not equal to using language creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no literature without literacy. However, language use in literature is not the same as language use in daily life, in the self-constitutive experience of living and surviving.
When human experience is projected in language and language becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages. Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of self-constitution is segmented and various forms of labor division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in turn, determines distinctions in human expression and communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited, of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to another. So does the perceived need to share and expand experience.
In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric, astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of language symbols is structurally identical to the use of astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign processes (generation of new symbols, associations among symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).
Crying wolf started early
Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and space of choice, or in the space and time of language itself. Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris, Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a motivation different from how names were given to real cities, to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become part of our environment, constituting the markers for the context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the experiences from which they result. In each name of a person, place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of human self-constitution creeps in.
When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place, characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something (however limited) about the practical experience involved in constituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in language. They take the world for granted because words describe it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in Jerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with the name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the fiction of fiction, and reality.
There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In the experience of writing, authors constitute themselves by projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map between the world they live in and the world of language. In the experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same world in which writers constitute their identity. The process comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words, ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made possible. The history of literature and language is well known for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode, and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and reading.
The history of literature is connected to the diversification of language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be better understood if we consider the practice of literature in relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and document that various relations between spoken and written language and the language of literature lead to various writing conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the relation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms of language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the self-constitution of the human being through a language that captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.
The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold, conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today whatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is an experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist, philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience of transcending the borders between human practice and establishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seems grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old Testament, Tao) are also examples.
The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf. "Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination. She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts, or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect, rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives.