The Language of Literature

Literature is a myth making activity. It is an expression of the unique human ability to lie, to make counterfactual statements, to mime, to create imaginative yet imaginary worlds. From this ability stems an important convention of interpretation of literary discourses. Much of everyday speech is meant to be taken literally. A literary connoisseur does not take literary language literally but only pretends to do so to receive communication. The literary artist may go against the canons of logical or scientific thought and still pretend that there is no loss of meaning. Events in literary discourse are not subject to the same modes of proof as they will be outside literature. Whether a man can be transformed into an insect (The Metamorphosis) or whether a man can be arrested and executed without any charge (The Trial, Kafka) or whether there is any biological possibility of pint-sized people (Gulliver’s Travels) is largely irrelevant to the novel qua novel .The question is, what does the novelist make of them. Normal everyday discourse does not tolerate exaggeration or deviations from logical reality. Whatever is exploited in literature is potentially a part of the native speaker’s linguistic repertoire. What gives literary discourse its peculiar characteristics identified here – its formcontent inseparability, its non-radical affronting of the selectional restrictions – is the higher level of concentration and the higher level of intensity at which exploration is done. Literary discourse exemplifies the most creative and significant use that language can be put to. This, however, may not be true of every literary utterance. In simple words, the distinguishing characteristics of literary discourse are not exhibited in all sentences found in the literary work of art: all lines of Metamorphosis are not symbolic and it is equally impossible to claim iconicity for all sentences in a novel. Referential use of language in literature and emotive use of language in non-literary discourse is common. This non-pervasiveness and the fact that elusive class by itself can be counted even on the fingers of a mutilated hand makes for skepticism about the discreetness of literary language. Literary discourse is best seen as a point on a continuum, the other varieties of discourses being the language of advertisements, slogans, riddles, mathematics and so on. All good speech has literary energy in it and a literary piece takes off from these into a world of its own.