The scope of literature

Folk and elite literatures

In preliterate societies oral literature was widely shared; it saturated the society and was as much a part of living as food, clothing, shelter, or religion. Many tribal societies remained primarily oral cultures until the 19th century. In early societies the minstrel might be a courtier of the king or chieftain, and the poet who composed liturgies might be a priest. But the oral performance itself was accessible to the whole community. As society evolved its various social layers, or classes, an “elite” literature began to be distinguishable from the “folk” literature of the people. With the invention of writing, this separation was accelerated until finally literature was being experienced individually by the elite (reading a book), while folklore and folk song were experienced orally and more or less collectively by the illiterate common people.

Elite literature continuously refreshes itself with materials drawn from the popular. Almost all poetic revivals, for instance, include in their programs a new appreciation of folk song, together with a demand for greater objectivity. On the other hand folk literature borrows themes and, very rarely, patterns from elite literature. Many of the English and Scottish ballads that date from the end of the Middle Ages and have been preserved by oral tradition share plots and even turns of phrase with written literature. A very large percentage of these ballads contain elements that are common to folk ballads from all over western Europe; central themes of folklore, indeed, are found all over the world. Whether these common elements are the result of diffusion is a matter for dispute. They do, however, represent great psychological constants, archetypes of experience common to the human species, and so these constants are used again and again by elite literature as it discovers them in folklore.

Modern popular literature

There is a marked difference between true popular literature, that of folklore and folk song, and the popular literature of modern times. Popular literature today is produced either to be read by a literate audience or to be enacted on television or in the cinema; it is produced by writers who are members, however “lowly,” of an elite corps of professional literates. Thus, popular literature no longer springs from the people; it is handed to them. Their role is passive. At the best they are permitted a limited selectivity as consumers.

Certain theorists once believed that folk songs and even long, narrative ballads were produced collectively. This idea is very much out of date. Folk songs and folk tales began somewhere in one human mind. They were developed and shaped into the forms in which they are now found by hundreds of other minds as they were passed down through the centuries. Only in this sense were they “collectively” produced. During the 20th century, folklore and folk speech had a great influence on elite literature—on writers as different as Franz Kafka and Carl Sandburg, Selma Lagerlöf and Kawabata Yasunari, Martin Buber and Zora Neale Hurston, or Chinua Achebe and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The fairy tale has become a subject of serious critical analysis for both its psychology and its art. While the works of Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen have been mined for the purpose of producing bowdlerized stories that strip fairy tales of their dark meaning, these same authors have inspired powerful contemporary interpretations by Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. The fairy tale’s complex truth and beauty also fueled the fantastical—and history-laden—narratives of the magical realists of 20th-century Latin American literature, as readers of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Isabel Allende undoubtedly recognize.

Folk song has always been popular with bohemian intellectuals, especially political radicals (who certainly are an elite). Since World War II the influence of folk song upon popular song has not just been great; it has been determinative. Notwithstanding the technical innovations and aesthetic experimentations in popular music, many contemporary hit songs continue to draw from the storytelling tradition of folk songs.

(Read Britannica’s essay “Are Song Lyrics Poetry?”)

Popular fiction and drama, westerns and detective stories, films and television serials, all deal with the same great archetypal themes as folktales and ballads, though this is seldom due to direct influence; these are simply the limits within which the human mind works. Some writers have elevated the formulas of popular fiction to a higher literary level. Examples are the science fiction of H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert, and Kazuo Ishiguro, the western stories of Gordon Young, Ernest Haycox, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy, and the detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler.

The latter half of the 20th century witnessed an even greater change in popular literature. Writing is a static medium: That is to say, a book is read by one person at a time; it permits recollection and anticipation; the reader can go back to check a point or move ahead to find out how the story ends. In radio, television, and the cinema, the medium is fluent; the audience is a collectivity and is at the mercy of time. It cannot pause to reflect or to understand more fully without missing another part of the action, nor can it go back or forward. Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media (1964) became famous for erecting a whole structure of aesthetic, sociological, and philosophical theory upon this fact. But it remains to be seen whether the new, fluent materials of communication are going to make so very many changes in civilization, let alone in the human mind—humankind has, after all, been influenced for thousands of years by the popular, fluent arts of music and drama. Even the most transitory television serial was written down before it was performed, and the script can be consulted in the files. Before the invention of writing, all literature was fluent because it was contained in people’s memory. In a sense it was more fluent than music, because it was harder to remember. In mass society humans have increasingly become creatures of the moment, but the reasons for this are undoubtedly more fundamental than humanity’s forms of entertainment.

Social and economic conditions

Literature, like all other human activities, necessarily reflects current social and economic conditions. Class stratification was reflected in literature as soon as it had appeared in life. Among Native Americans, for instance, the chants of the shaman, or medicine man, differ from the secret, personal songs of the individual, and these likewise differ from the group songs of ritual or entertainment sung in community. In the “heroic age,” the epic tales of kings and chiefs that were sung or told in their courts differed from the folktales that were told in rural cottages.

The more cohesive a society, the more the elements—and even attitudes—evolved in the different class strata are interchangeable at all levels. In the tight clan organization that existed in late medieval times at the Scottish border, for example, heroic ballads telling of the deeds of lords and ladies were preserved in the songs of the common people. But where class divisions are unbridgeable, elite literature is liable to be totally separated from popular culture. An extreme example is the Classical literature of the Roman Empire. Its forms and its sources were largely Greek—it even adopted its laws of verse patterning from Greek models, even though these were antagonistic to the natural patterns of the Latin language—and most of the sophisticated works of the major Latin authors were completely closed to the overwhelming majority of people of the Roman Empire.

Printing has made all the difference in the negotiability of ideas. The writings of the 18th-century French writers Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot were produced from and for almost as narrow a caste as the Roman elite, but they were printed. Within a generation they had penetrated the entire society and were of vital importance in revolutionizing it.

Class distinctions in the literature of modern times exist more in the works themselves than in their audience. Although Henry James wrote about the upper classes and Émile Zola about working people, both were, in fact, members of an elite and were read by members of an elite. Moreover, in their day, those who read Zola certainly considered themselves more of an elite than did the readers of James. The ordinary people preferred sentimental romances and “penny dreadfuls.” Popular literature had already become commercially produced entertainment literature, a type that today is also provided by television and film scripts as well as comic books, graphic novels, anime, and manga.

The elite who read serious literature are not necessarily members of a social or economic upper class. It has been said of the most ethereal 19th-century French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, that in every French small town there was a youth who carried his poems in his heart. These poems are perhaps the most “elite” product of western European civilization, but the “youths” referred to were hardly the sons of dukes or millionaires. Since the middle of the 18th century in Europe and in the United States, the majority of readers of serious literature—as well as of entertainment literature—have been women. The extent of the influence that this audience has exerted on literature itself must be immense.

National and group literature

Hippolyte Taine, the 19th-century French critic, evolved an ecological theory of literature. He looked first and foremost to the national characteristics of western European literatures, and he found the source of these characteristics in the climate and soil of each respective nation. His History of English Literature (5 vol., 1863–69) is an extensive elaboration of these ideas. It is doubtful that anyone today would agree with the simplistic terms in which Taine states his thesis. It is obvious that Russian literature differs from English or French from German. English books are written by English authors, their scenes are commonly laid in England, they are usually about English characters and they are designed to be read by English people—at least in the first instance. But modern civilization becomes more and more a world civilization, wherein works of all peoples flow into a general fund of literature. It is not unusual to read a novel by a Japanese author one week and one by a Kenyan writer the next. Writers are themselves affected by this cross-fertilization. Certainly, the work of the great 19th-century Russian novelists had more influence on 20th-century American writers than had the work of their own literary ancestors. Poetry does not circulate so readily, because catching its true significance in translation is so very difficult to accomplish. Nevertheless, through the mid-20th century, the influence of French poetry was not just important; it was preeminent. The tendentious elements of literature—propaganda for race, nation, or religion—have been more and more eroded in this process of wholesale cultural exchange.

Popular literature is habitually tendentious both deliberately and unconsciously. It reflects and stimulates the prejudices and parochialism of its audience. Most of the literary conflicts that seized the totalitarian countries during the 20th century stemmed directly from relentless efforts by the state to reduce elite literature to the level of the popular. The great proletarian novels of our time have been produced not by Russians but by African Americans, Japanese, Germans, and—perhaps most proletarian of all—a German American living in Mexico, B. Traven. Government control and censorship can inhibit literary development, perhaps deform it a little, and can destroy authors outright; but, whether in the France of Louis XIV or in the Soviet Union of the 20th century, it cannot be said to have a fundamental effect upon the course of literature.

The writer’s position in society

A distinguishing characteristic of modern literature is the peculiar elite which it has itself evolved. In earlier cultures artists, though they may have felt themselves alienated at times, thought of themselves as part of society and shared its values and attitudes. Usually the clerkly caste played a personal, important role in society. In the modern industrial civilization, however, “scribes” became simply a category of skilled hired hands. The writer shared few of the values of the merchant or the entrepreneur or manager. And so the literary and artistic world came to have a subculture of its own. The antagonism between the two resultant sets of values is the source of what we call alienation—among the intellectuals at least (the alienation of common people in urban, industrial civilization from their work, from their individual selves, and from their fellows is another matter, although its results are reflected and intensified in the alienation of the elite).

For about 200 years, the artistic environment of the writer has not usually been shared with the general populace. The subculture known as bohemia and the literary and artistic movements generated in its little special society have often been more important—at least in the minds of many writers—than the historical, social, and economic movements of the culture as a whole. Even massive historical change is translated into these terms—the Russian Revolution, for instance, into Communist-Futurism, Constructivism, Socialist Realism. Western European literature could be viewed as a parade of movements—Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Futurism, Structuralism, and so on indefinitely. Some of the more journalistic critics, indeed, have delighted to regard it in such a way. But after the manifestos have been swept away, the meetings adjourned, the literary cafés of the moment lost their popularity, the turmoil is seen not to have made so very much difference. The Romantic Théophile Gautier and the Naturalist Émile Zola have more in common than they have differences, and their differences are rather because of changes in society as a whole than because of conflicting literary principles.

At first, changes in literary values are appreciated only at the upper levels of the literary elite itself, but often, within a generation, works once thought esoteric are being taught as part of a school syllabus. Most cultivated people once thought James Joyce’s Ulysses incomprehensible or, where it was not, obscene. Today his methods and subject matter are commonplace in the commercial fiction of the mass culture. A few writers remain confined to the elite. Stéphane Mallarmé is a good example—but he would have been just as ethereal had he written in the simplest French of direct communication. His subtleties are ultimately grounded in his personality.