LITERATURE IS INHERENTLY DISRESPECTFUL

It’s taken for granted in ‘The Republic’ that the writer, being a citizen of a city-state, is fully politicized and must therefore play a full and active role in the efficient and appropriate governance of the state. He’d have none of the notion that the artist somehow needs to gain perspective through irony, alienation or whatever, to be necessarily apart from society in order to function: if that was your game, he thought, you might as well leave, since you’re of no use. Meaning should be meant, not distorted by perspective, smoke and mirrors.

So not only was it the writer’s duty to obey the laws of Reason, he should also refrain from any kind of writing that could harm the state’s stability. And that translated as:

a) always portraying the Gods respectfully; and

b) emphasizing only the best qualities in humanity

This is Socrates’ big gripe with Homer - he’s always depicting the deities, from the top down, as all-too human, venal and flawed; and creating characters who aren’t exactly role models for the young. Whether he appreciated this or not, the writer was weakening the state by sowing the seeds of disrespect and focusing on mankind’s sins and foibles. Why not show both groups at their best? (1) And so Socrates concludes:

Therefore, Glaucoma . . . whenever you meet with any of the eulogizers of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honor those who say these things--they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.

For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

Great news for the poetry fan, then; an unadulterated diet of hymns to the gods and philosophical biography. But then, you wouldn’t want to be part of the “promiscuous crowd” demanding interesting stuff, would you?

So literature is subversive on these three counts, all of which compromise its meaning. But note, it’s a very different kind of meaning to the quality we were looking at in the last section. It’s suddenly got useful. And not just useful, but politically useful. And if it isn’t politically useful, it’s no good. End of story. Out with the writer. Tricksters not allowed. Responsible men of sobriety in.

But let’s return for a moment to the cave scene, and use our Meaning Line again.

Plato’s triple-Decker concept of reality is a far remove from the sort of oral culture where stories are casually created, embellished and exchanged like cigarette cards. With the advent of literature as a recognizable discipline with sets of rules and regulations attached to it, it’s all got a lot more serious - and complicated. Plato is saying that there are actually three types of meaning: the top layer (the Ideal) is the benchmark against which the other two (the Real and the Artistic) are to be measured, and always to their disadvantage since the relationship is hierarchical. If we plot this model on our Meaning Line, strictly speaking we should have to rotate it 90 degrees so it becomes a vertical axis - thus:

MEANING                 THE IDEAL                Accurate/Truth/Public

___________________________________________________________

                               THE REAL

___________________________________________________________

SIGNIFICANCE        THE ARTISTIC                      Inaccurate/Lies/Personal

So the story of the girl with the bear’s ears would not be judged on the basis of its entertainment value, but because it never happened - and, more importantly, could not have happened (and this from a man who believed in the Olympian Gods). As such, literary meaning had no place in educating the future guardians of Athens to respect the truth, and was therefore exiled not just for reasons of its mendacity, but for its lack of political utility (which is the standard by which every philosophical concept in ‘The Republic’ is judged). This politically-motivated distrust of literature has proved hard to shake off, and is still very much with us; in fact, it influences how many still conceive of its status and function. I was reading the other day some politician complaining that Jane Austin shouldn’t have been writing fripperies like ‘Pride & Prejudice’ while her country was at was with Napoleon. And he was being serious.

A knock-on argument from this theme is ‘Where does the writer fit in society? Are its practitioners mere scribblers, or, as Shelley described them, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’? Once again, this is fodder for later in the series, when we look at the way the writer operates. For now, though, it’s worth quoting the adjacent passage from ‘The Defense of Poetry’ to set us on our way:

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.

Shelley’s impassioned PR job on behalf of his fellow scribes is a clear illustration of his belief that imaginative practice and political activism are inextricably intertwined. Thus far, then, he would have agreed with Plato. Both are convinced that the writer belongs at the very heart of society. Where they would disagree, probably violently, is in their respective conceptions that meaning is ultimately the servant of the state, or an independent barometer the state’s spiritual health (which Shelly  argues is the greatest public service you could conceive or perform). So Plato, in ‘The Republic’ argues an absolute loyalty to the state governed by reason (2), whereas Shelley was convinced that the poet should only be loyal to himself and his muse, that shadowy “power which is seated on the throne of their own soul” which even he himself doesn’t always fully understand.

So, to conclude this section of the argument, these first three Big Themes are loosely grouped around the concepts of the historical origins and status of meaning, and we’ve actually covered a whole heap of ground - from oral cultures (and don’t think you’ve seen the last of them) to a society where philosophers have begun to debate the whys and wherefores of literature, what it’s for and how it achieves those ends. We’ve also noted the paradoxical nature of meaning, of lies that can seemingly be truer than truth. For our next few Big Themes, we’ll be moving on to the human origins of meaning within the writer, and the various ways it can be organized within a text. So the first question we need to ask is whether meaning is intentional or accidental.

No one really knows the full story of what goes on inside a writer’s head, least of all the writer - so we’ll never be able to say with certainty how much of his meaning is part of a pre-planned scheme or how much it’s the product of subsconscious influences. But that hasn’t stopped us trying to find out - and that’s Big Theme #4. In fact, it’s a theme that has run and run for well over two millennia, so you can probably gather that it hasn’t been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction - yet.

How you approach the issue depends on your conception of where art comes from - the rational or the irrational bit of the brain. Perspiration or Inspiration. Or, as Aristotle has it, from  “a man of great natural ability” or “one not entirely sane”. Let’s plot them on our Meaning Line:

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

Perspiration            `             Inspiration

Conscious                             Unconscious

Planned                                Spontaneous

Human                                 Divine

Rational                                Irrational

Art                                       Nature

So what we’ll be addressing in this section is essentially the image of the writer - do you picture him sitting at his typewriter with a green eye shade, surrounded by balled-up pieces of failed manuscript, sweating and swearing and shaking slightly from the ingestion of too much caffeine, trying to nail down that elusive mot juste? Or is he reclining  on the chaise-longue dressed in velvet, the back of his hand raised to his forehead, awaiting the call of his capricious Muse? Does meaning get into literature through a rational struggle, or an irrational effusion?

1. Plato would have found a sympathetic ear in St Augustine, writing almost 1000 years later, who, in his ‘Confessions’, noted that classical literature tended to make the divide between Gods and men uncomfortably narrow: "These were Homer's fictions, transferring things human to the gods; would he had brought down things divine to us!" Yet more truly had he [Augustine’s teacher] said, "These are indeed his fictions; but attributing a divine nature to wicked men, that crimes might be no longer crimes, and whoso commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods."