Interpreter of Literature

It seems inevitable that everything in this world has to have beneficial value inside. Whether the thing takes form of action or static object, benefits seem have to be present in those things, perhaps because we have necessity to be fulfilled. Literature also cannot escape from this obvious, but, at the same time it can be, doubtful ‘law.’ If people do not need to fulfill the need to express his doubt, and other things, then they do not have to write, then there will be no need for literature to exist although, to determine whether literature has to be existing or not cannot solely depend on such assessment. To get the benefits of literature one can depend on himself or one can voluntarily, or if he is in need to, ‘distribute’ the benefit, the usefulness of a literary work. However, the latter should have enough knowledge and understanding of literature since he has the responsibility of distributing the beneficial value in literature to a lot more individuals.

There are two “interpreters” of literature with their own believes and ideas about literature and how it should be beneficial to the public, for the purpose of this essay Horace and Northrop Frye and their writings are used to analyze, more or less, what is literature to them and what benefit or usefulness a literature has to have, also, according to them.

Horace, to me, directly stated everything he believes a literature should be in his Art of Poetry.

“The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life.”

The above quotation clearly saying that, a good poet, and perhaps a good poem, must be informative or delightful “to life.” I believe, whether it’s correct or not, he means “to life” means to the people. It can be said that only humans that can understand literature since we are the being that has brighter and broader mind, compared to other being on earth, and of course because literature is written in human language as a result of the advantage we got of brighter mind among other being.

“In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality.”

Even to make sure that the informative and delightful value be presented flawlessly, Horace gave details what a poet, a writer has to do and, perhaps, how a literary work should be. He said that the work, “what you say”, has to be “brief” so that the readers grasp it “quickly and retain it faithfully.” To me, what he meant about this is that a literary work, in its organization, must be efficient in terms of delivering the usefulness the work has or designed to have. Now, why a literature has to be efficient in its organization, especially of words. I can’t think or imagine anything other than that literature is a product that must be useful to the public, and, in terms of Horace’s ideas, it has to give “pleasure and applicability to life.”

“He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend the fame of the author.”

 On the next quotation Horace’s ideas, again, seemingly suggesting the literature not only be beneficial to the public but also to the creator. A “good poet” delights the public with his works’ usefulness and benefit, then the “good poet” will get something from his works which one of it, according to Horace, “money.” Now, this matter confuses me. It is whether the work that gives benefit to the creator or it is just a take-and-give relation, which means the benefit the creator gets is coming from the public that is delighted by his work. But, nonetheless, if the case was the former, then the lines I quoted can be some kind of persuasion for the people in general to write the “good poetry”, or to writers to prefer the “good poetry”, for no other reason than prosperity and fame.

“At a pleasant banquet, poor music, cheap perfume, and poppy seeds mixed with Sardinian honey, are offensive; the banquet could have done very well without them. And in a similar way, a poem, born and created in order to give the soul delight, if once it falls short of the highest excellence, sinks to the lowest level”

So far, the idea of what poetry is according to Homer, by the interpretation of mine, a product that is made to be useful “to life.” The next idea I got about what literature is in Art of Poetry, is that literature or in this case poem, something that could commonly be considered as beautiful, artistic, and delightful, belongs to certain social class, the upper social class. I see “a pleasant banquet” as an analogy to “a poem”, especially the good one. A banquet is not an ordinary feast, it’s formal and usually luxurious, attended by the upper class individuals. A poem, dare me to say, dictated as and should be delightful so far in the work, when connected by the phrase “in a similar way” the two then became related, and thus “a poem” is like “a pleasant banquet” to an upper class individuals.

My interpretation of Art of Poetry, about what is literature and its benefit in Horace ended by my suggestion of the place of literature in terms of social class. Now, I’d like to move on to the second “interpreter” I have previously mentioned in the beginning, Northrop Frye.

Unlike Horace, the ideas about what is literature and what is its benefit that I got after reading Frye came from a rather indirect way. It is true that it is indirect because Frye discussed the matter of criticism and not about literature, but there are some lines that show Frye’s idea of what literature is and how it should be beneficial.

“On this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both power to produce it and the money to patronize it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public … there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition.”

To me, the direct statement of Horace which I acknowledge as his view on how a literature should be is rather hedonic when it’s compared to Frye’s. On the above quotation, Frye didn’t state a single thing about what a literature is or should be, but about, more or less, what a critic is. I interpret, a critic is a “distributor of culture” and also, there Frye directly said, “the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition.” From those lines, in my opinion, Frye sees literature as something that can deliver things such as culture and education to the people. Literature can also, according to my interpretation, shape cultural tradition, however this interpretation of mine about literature, seemingly, can only be valid when a critic “distribute” it to the public and not from the literature alone.

“Rhetorical value-judgements usually turn on questions of decorum, and the central conception of decorum is the difference between high, middle, and low styles. These styles are suggested by the class structure of society, and criticism, if it is not to reject half the tacts of literary experience, obviously has to look at art from the standpoint of an ideally classless society.”

If Horace place a literary, a poem, on certain social class, Frye, while examining rhetorical value-judgements, gave hints to me that everything in literature must not be related to certain class. The reason why it must not be done so, literature may be following the conception of decorum which then may make literature easier to be judge in rhetorical value-judgment wise. This is important because, to me, what is a literature if it only gives values to be admired and not ideas about culture, for example.

“The original experience is like the direct vision of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics "explains" in what, from the point of view of the experience itself, is a quite irrelevant way. However disciplined by taste and skill, the experience of literature is, like literature itself, unable to speak.”

I agree, if I could, to the idea of direct experience in reading literature. What I interpret about direct experience on Frye’s Polemical Introduction, is the reading of literature without being influenced by anything, even to knowledge, the experience we have, and our subjective judgment. By doing so, there will be only experience and benefits we get purely from reading literature. Though a good idea, like Frye stated, it is hard to get such experience.

To end the examination of Frye about literature, I’d like to argue about the problem in examining literature, i.e. to criticize, and the usefulness of a literature according to the struggle for criticism for becoming on par with exact science. Throughout the Polemical Introduction, especially from the beginning until the middle part of it, Frye constantly compared criticism with exact sciences (such as physics and biology), but for what? What is he trying to display? In my opinion he tried to display, first, the problem in examining literature, or to criticize it. The problem, to me, concerns about the believe of the people about the importance and validity of criticism when it is compared to exact sciences. Like the name suggests, exact science gives exacts results because they got the basis of their knowledge or for Frye is “philosophy of life with its center of gravity in something else”. Without it, criticism, to me, along with its findings, is being denied by the people, or so from what I got from Frye. Then, according to Frye, criticism also in need of “a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.”

I’ll try to explain both factors that exact sciences have, but criticism has not and why criticism in need of it. I guess, it is hard for people to accept something, to embrace something, to get the benefit of something when that something’s existence is being denied, and that is what happening to criticism according to Frye, being denied. Then, how can one get something if he or she can’t observe? Nothing. Criticism needs “a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis” to start its action.

Then, not only the problem, which I firstly mentioned, but Frye, in my opinion, tried to show that literary can be useful and of a more important matters to the society, and that is, as I have mentioned it in the beginning, to educate, to introduce new/different culture (perhaps?), and to shape culture, with the help of the distributor, the critic, and that is why it is worth fighting for.

So, to conclude, both have their own view about literature that had already been shared throughout the world. Horace seems to me saw literature as being useful hedonically, for the public and, perhaps for the creator. Frye, seems to me, saw literature as something that could make the public a better public by introducing (different/better?) culture and education through literature, and for me, Frye has better definition and benefit, about and of, literature. To end this, I’d like to state my view on “interpreters” like them, that they are the ones that can change, influence the public about what literature is and what literature can give them, and therefore change the public whether for better or for worse.

works cited:

Horace. Art of Poetry. 2004. in Adams, Hazard and Searle, Leroy. Critical Theory since Plato (3rd edition). United States: Wadsworth Publishing.

Frye, Northrop. 1957. Polemical Introduction. in Anatomy of Criticism (pp. 3 -29). Woodstock: Princeton University Press.