Meaning doesn’t often exist in the Pre-Lapsarian state we looked at in the previous section. Sooner or later in most societies LITERACY arrives in the form of written language, bringing LITERATURE in its wake. Storytellers are replaced by WRITERS, who commit their tales to cloth, parchment, vellum or paper. And literary meaning is born, along with its twin brother, literary criticism.

This has its good and bad points, of course - but mainly bad.

Advantage (A): is that by physically recording stories, you can both stabilize and disseminate them, thereby improving their chances of survival; thus, for example, a sizable body of extant plays, poems and philosophy has allowed us to construct a fairly detailed but frustratingly incomplete picture of Ancient Greek culture as it existed two-and-a-half millennia ago. If ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ hadn’t been written down, they’d have been lost to posterity, and we couldn’t have shared them.

But then there’s three interlocking disadvantages:

Disadvantage (A): Telling stories out loud is a transaction between the storyteller and the listener. While the storyteller retains the same basic plotlines each time the story’s told, a good storyteller will read the reaction of the audience, and alter the tale to their response as he’s going along. The story is adaptable, so the listener can influence its composition, and, maybe without necessarily knowing it, become an active participant in its evolution. This is a connection that’s inevitably lost when the story is read from a text. Like it or not, meaning transmitted from book-to-human can never be as vivid or involving as human-to-human transmission. Now comes:

Disadvantage (B): In his essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin  explores the effects of replication on the nature of artistic meaning. In the attempt to preserve stories and make them appeal to a wider audience, the writer may try to universalize their meaning by erasing local references, thereby diluting local flavour.

For instance, the appearance of the landscape around Katoomba may not be considered key to the meaning of tribal myths. A writer re-telling the stories of the sisters could use any rocks anywhere. And so a decision may be made to retain key story elements and sacrifice what Benjamin calls textual "accessories,"  or what we might call ‘local colour’. Meaning is therefore disconnected from the source of its inspiration.

Disadvantage (C): Any meaning suggested by stories is effectively frozen in time when it’s recorded. In this form, the element of play is necessarily removed, as if the creative flame that kept the story bubbling has been taken away from under it during the transition from the oral to the written medium. Robbed of this kinetic energy, it ceases to be a living, constantly-evolving entity, and becomes an artifact. Somehow, seeing something written down makes it look more ‘official’ and even serious, no matter what the nature of the writing might be. And this, put simply, opens the gateway not only to the whole concept of ‘literature’ but to literary criticism, a discipline which the Greeks, with their passion for philosophical disputation, embraced wholeheartedly. So it’s all their fault. It’s the price you pay for writing things down.

Let’s use our Meaning Line in anger for the second time to plot a related set of ideas surrounding oral vs written media:

MEANING--------------------------SIGNIFICANCE

Written                       Oral                 

Stability                      Change

Stasis                         Development

Official                        Playful

Form                          Formless

Permanent                  Temporary

Study                          Enjoyment

Enlightenment             Pleasure

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and so on.                                                                                                                                                   

Stories were taking a step leftwards as they gradually emerged from their oral state and were transcribed into a written body of literature. So‘The Iliad’ whose origins we’re almost sure were orally-transmitted stories, was now turned into a book, it’s reckoned, at the command of the Athenian ruler Pisistratos, who feared they were being forgotten. He made a law: any singer or bard who came to Athens had to recite all they knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now call the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. Once the text was relatively stable, it began to be distributed, and we know for certain that ‘The Iliad’ was being taught in Greek schools by the 4th Century BC. So Lit Crate had begun. And by the time Plato arrived, it was reasonably well developed.        

Plato (427-347 BC) was the first great literary critic - in fact he’s the daddy of lit crate -  and he was a troubled man. Although he was a poet and hence a creator of literature, he was also a philosopher who wrote copiously on the theory and practice of his craft. In fact, he’s wholly or partly responsible for several of the Big Themes we’re looking at now, so his influence is not inconsiderable.

All his chief concerns center on the cultural value of art - he rarely passed any judgment on the subject which removed art from its social context, and his major worry was the fundamental untruth that lay at the heart of his chosen profession. He was worried he was a liar.

If he’d heard the story of the caterpillar pile-up, his poetic side might have praised its ingenuity and the aptness of the metaphor (if he could have traveled to Australia to see for himself, that is), but the philosopher in him (who always seems to win) would not have allowed it to pass unchallenged. It didn’t actually happen, which not only robs the story of its empirical value, but also encourages those who enjoy the metaphor to value fiction over fact, a habit that could not contribute to the overall intellectual health of society. Our innocent children’s story therefore becomes actively dangerous in its subversion of the truth.

So what I was trying to argue away as an innocent pastime in the last section could, in Plato’s view, actually bring down civilization as we know it. Because LITERATURE UNDERMINES MEANING. And a society robbed of meaning quickly find Anarchy banging on the door demanding to be let in. An over-reaction? Perhaps. But let’s look at the philosophy behind it.

According to Plato’s  mouthpiece Socrates (who actually taught him, and who features in most of Plato’s works), Literature subverts meaning in three ways:

1) IMITATION. Narration is good, Imitation bad; the former, as Socrates describes it in ‘The Republic’, is when the writer speaks with his own voice. In which case you know who you’re dealing with, and you, as the reader, can agree or disagree as the mood takes you. But when he’s putting words into characters’ mouths, the reader doesn’t usually know who’s actually speaking - the character or the writer. So if a character is based on a figure from history (Odysseus, for example), the reader can’t know whether Odysseus really said what the writer makes him say. Result: confusion, and a dilution of meaning, which, because of this confusion, has been robbed of its authority.

Now put yourself into the position of a writer in Plato’s ideal political set-up. How boring would it be if you could only write in the first person? How dull would your readers find it? The answer is ‘Very’. As Nadine Gordimer notes in her short story ‘Karma’, the authorial creation of character is “the closest a corporeal being can get to . . . living other lives; multiple existence’s that are not the poor little opportunities of a single existence.” So, as a writer, how likely are you to obey Plato’s dictum and swap multiple existence’s for poor little opportunities? The answer is ‘Not Very’. So we arrive at an impasse between literature and philosophy, where Plato decides to park his argument.

So Plato /Socrates (notice he’s not speaking in his own person) knowing the writer’s impatience with reported reality and single perspectives, comes up with his famous cave analogy to trash the idea of imitation, or mimesis.

It’s a hugely long and involved metaphor, and it’s so well-known, we’ll simply summarize it for the record: the problem with art, as we’ve noted, is that imitation is one step removed from reality. Then Plato went one stage further; given that the ‘real’ world we live in is itself an imperfect copy of the ideal world, art is a copy of a copy. And what’s the value in that? Meaning in literature exists at two degrees of separation from the truth.

Then there’s a less familiar argument, which is actually Big Theme #2

2) HIGH/ LOW MEANING

Here Plato starts a discussion that’s still going on today: Does the writer’s choice of subject intrinsically affect the meaning of his work? In short, are there some subjects that are more ‘meaningful’ than others? And the answer is a resolute ‘YES’. Socrates reckons that the writer will always choose emotion (‘”the rebellious principle”) over reason because it not only furnishes more ‘dramatic’ possibilities, it will also appeal to the irrational side of his audience, which is more easily (and cheaply) aroused. And the inference from that is that most theater audiences are only there for spectacle - so they’re actually rather crude and uncouth individuals, because, in Plato’s world view, Rationality, which shuns spectacle, always triumphs over the Irrational, which revels in it. Here’s the crucial passage:

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And does not the . . . rebellious principle . . .  furnish a great variety of materials for imitation? Whereas the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theater. For the feeling represented is one to which they are strangers.

Certainly.

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated?

Clearly.

And now we may fairly [say] his creations have an inferior degree of truth . . .being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small-he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.

So literature tends to appeal to “an inferior part of the soul”, such as exists in inferior people who let their emotions get the better of them. Whenever I read this passage, I get rather disappointed that Socrates’ interlocutor Glaucoma seems content to nod like some Pavlovian dog, since I reckon ‘The Republic’ could have been considerably spiced up with a good old ding-dog on this subject. Socrates is such a crusty old snob, he could make a good living on the TV arts review circuit. But the old patsy remains obligingly supine, allowing the Master to make his third point, which is our Big Theme #3 (they come thick and fast with Plato).  But that's for next time.

Footnotes: