The scope of literature

Literature has an obvious kinship with the other arts. Presented, a play is drama; read, a play is literature. Most important films have been based upon written literature, usually novels, although all the great epics and most of the great plays have been filmed at some time and thus have stimulated the younger medium’s growth. Conversely, the techniques required in writing for film have influenced many writers in structuring their novels and have affected their style. Most popular fiction is written with “movie rights” in mind, and these are certainly a consideration with most modern publishers. Yet another offshoot of this kinship is the number of writers who worked as scriptwriters or successfully straddled careers in both print and film or television, among them William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Parker, Joan Didion, Kazuo Ishiguro, László Krasznahorkai, and George R.R. Martin.

Some contemporary dramatists have worked in film (beyond consenting to the standard adaptation of a stage hit to the big screen), as in the case of Martin McDonagh. Although his plays’ ultraviolent (and fiercely funny) scenarios seemed tailor-made for cinema, his success as a film director and screenwriter may come down to his roots in the theater. His best movies, such as In Bruges (2008) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), refuse to forgo the richness of traditional drama, such as vibrant dialogue, for the sake of a purely visual storytelling.

As for the performing arts, literature provides the libretto for operas, the theme for tone poems—even so anomalous a form as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was interpreted in music by Richard Strauss—and of course it provides the lyrics of songs. Conversely, the poetry and fiction of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes and Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac were profoundly influenced by popular music, in particular blues and jazz. Many ballets and modern dances are based on stories or poems. Sometimes, music and dance are accompanied by a text read by a speaker or chanted by a chorus; some would say the perfect amalgamation of these art forms is found in hip-hop, as evidenced by the spoken-word recordings of its founders, including Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets.

The mid-19th century was the heyday of literary, historical, and anecdotal painting: Artists began to focus less on biblical, mythological, and historical subjects and more on everyday life. Many visual artists and writers of this era were good friends and worked closely together; this is especially true for Édouard Manet with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Zola in Paris. They met frequently to talk about ideas, and they all shared the goal of representing modern everyday life in their work (i.e., Realism). Surrealist artists and writers also worked closely together and shared a similar goal—to connect the real world with the dream world. In the mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist artist Grace Hartigan and poet Frank O’Hara created several pieces together, notably Oranges, a suite of figurative paintings that incorporate passages from his 1949 poem series. The cross-fertilization of literature and the arts can also take place in the use of parallel techniques—the rational dissociation of the Cubists or the spontaneous action painting of the Abstract Expressionists, for example, which flourished at the same time as the free-flowing uncorrected narratives of some novelists in the 1950s and ’60s.

Since the late 20th century, there have been many examples of text-based art, such as that of Glenn Ligon, whose work pulls from the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, or Shirin Neshat, whose photographs in Women of Allah (1993–97) depict a woman wearing a chador with Farsi script based on contemporary Iranian poetry written on her skin. The Pop artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein, famously used images and text from comic books. Some contemporary artists, notably Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, have explored words themselves as an art form. Kruger often combines pithy statements with images, as in her 1989 piece Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), while Holzer makes art out of declarative statements, such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” from her Truisms series (1977–79), which presented her phrases on anonymous posters and later on T-shirts, billboards, and electronic signs. Ed Ruscha is somewhat similar; he explores the visual impact of words in such works as OOF and Honk (both 1962).

Epic

The true heroic epic never evolved far from its preliterate origins, and it arose only in the heroic age that preceded a settled civilization. The conditions reflected in, say, the Iliad and Odyssey are much the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, or the Irish stories of Cú Chulainn. The literary epic is another matter altogether. Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, or John Milton’s Paradise Lost are products of highly sophisticated literary cultures. Many long poems sometimes classified as epic literature are no such thing—Dante’s La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), for example, is a long theological, philosophical, political, moral, and mystical poem. Dante considered it to be a kind of drama that obeyed the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Goethe’s Faust is in dramatic form and is sometimes even staged—but it is really a philosophical poetic novel. Modern critics have described long poems such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos as “philosophical epics.” There is nothing epic about them; they are reveries, more or less philosophical.

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry never gets far from its origins, except that some of its finest examples—Medieval Latin, Provençal, Middle High German, Middle French, Renaissance—which today are only read, were actually written to be sung. In the 20th century, however, popular songs of great literary merit became increasingly common—for example, the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in German, of Georges Brassens and Anne Sylvestre in French, and of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. (In the case of Dylan, the Nobel Prize committee concurred, awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.) It is interesting to note that, in periods when the culture values artificiality, the lyric becomes stereotyped. Then, after a while, the poets revolt and, usually turning to folk origins, restore to lyric poetry at least the appearance of naturalness and spontaneity.

Satire

The forms of satire are as manifold as those of literature itself—from those of the mock-epic to the biting epigram. A great many social and political novels of today would have been regarded as satire by the ancients. Many of the great works of all time are satires, but in each case they have risen far above their immediate satirical objectives. The 16th-century medieval satire on civilization, the Gargantua and Pantagruel of François Rabelais, grew under the hand of its author into a great archetypal myth of the lust for life. Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, often called the greatest work of prose fiction in the West, is superficially a satire of the sentimental romance of knightly adventure. But, again, it is an archetypal myth, telling the adventures of the soul of the individual in the long struggle with what is called the human condition. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu has sometimes been considered by obtuse critics as no more than a satire on the sexual escapades of the Heian court. In fact, it is a profoundly philosophical, religious, and mystical novel.

Prose fiction

Extended prose fiction is the latest of the literary forms to develop. We have romances from Classical Greek times that are as long as short novels; but they are really tales of adventure—vastly extended anecdotes. The first prose fiction of any psychological depth is the Satyricon, almost certainly attributed to Petronius Arbiter (died 65/66 ce). Though it survives only in fragments, supposedly one-eleventh of the whole, even these would indicate that it is one of the greatest picaresque novels, composed of loosely connected episodes of robust and often erotic adventure. The other great surviving fiction of Classical times is the Metamorphoses (known as The Golden Ass) by Lucius Apuleius (2nd century ce). In addition to being a picaresque adventure story, it is a criticism of Roman society, a celebration of the religion of Isis, and an allegory of the progress of the soul. It contains the justly celebrated story of Cupid and Psyche, a myth retold with psychological subtlety. Style has much to do with the value and hence the survival of these two works. They are written in prose of extraordinary beauty, although it is by no means of “Classical” purity. The prose romances of the Middle Ages are closely related to earlier heroic literature. Some, like Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte Darthur, are retellings of heroic legend in terms of the romantic chivalry of the early Renaissance, a combination of barbaric, medieval, and Renaissance sensibility which, in the tales of Tristram and Iseult and Launcelot and Guinevere, produced something not unlike modern novels of tragic love.

The Western novel is a product of modern civilization, although in East Asia novels began a separate development as early as the 10th century. Extended prose works of complex interpersonal relations and motivations begin in 17th-century France with The Princess of Cleves (1678) by Madame de La Fayette. Eighteenth-century France produced an immense number of novels dealing with love analysis but none to compare with Madame de La Fayette’s until Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). This was, in form, an exchange of letters between two corrupters of youth; but, in intent, it was a savage satire of the ancien régime and a heartrending psychological study. The English novel of the 18th century was less subtle, more robust—vulgar in the best sense—and is exemplified by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The 19th century was the golden age of the novel, producing the masterpieces of such authors as Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Mark Twain, to name but a few. The novel became ever more profound, complex, and subtle (or, on the other hand, more popular, eventful, and sentimental). By the beginning of the 20th century it had become the most common form of thoughtful reading matter and had replaced, for most educated people, religious, philosophical, and scientific works as a medium for the interpretation of life.

Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, the novel by and large retained its traditional framework, even as many authors introduced to the form new narrative styles: the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and Louise Erdrich, the witty (and sometimes alarming) metafictional works of Flann O’Brien, Fernando Pessoa, Kathy Acker, and David Foster Wallace, and the idiosyncratic experimentation of László Krasznahorkai, Can Xue, Gerald Murnane, and Han Kang.

Drama and modern poetry

Like lyric poetry, drama has been an exceptionally stable literary form. Given a little leeway, most plays written by the beginning of the 20th century could be adjusted to the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Before World War I, however, all traditional art forms, led by painting, began to disintegrate, and new forms evolved to take their place. In drama the most radical innovator was the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912), and from that day to this, drama (forced to compete with the cinema) has become ever more experimental, constantly striving for new methods, materials, and, especially, ways to establish a close relationship with the audience. All this activity has profoundly modified drama as literature.

In the 20th century the methods of poetry changed drastically, although the “innovator” here might be said to have been Charles Baudelaire. The disassociation and recombination of ideas of the Cubists, the free association of ideas of the Surrealists, dreams, trance states, the poetry of early oral traditions—all have been absorbed into the practice of modern poetry. This proliferation of form is not likely to end. Effort that once was applied to perfecting a single pattern in a single form may in the future be more and more directed toward the elaboration of entirely new multimedia forms, employing the resources of all the established arts as well as the innovations of modern technology. At the same time, writers may prefer to simplify and polish the forms of the past with a rigorous, Neoclassicist discipline.