O p e n i n g s3way. It would simply mean paying close attention to the workings
of its language. For some literary theorists, this would be enough
to turn it into a work of literature, though probably not one to
rival King Lear.
Part of what we mean by a ‘literary’ work is one in which what
is said is to be taken in terms of how it is said. It is the kind of
writing in which the content is inseparable from the language
in which it is presented. Language is constitutive of the reality or
experience, rather than simply a vehicle for it. Take a road sign
reading ‘Roadworks: Expect Long Delays on the Ramsbottom
Bypass for the Next Twenty- Three Years’. Here, the language is
simply a vehicle for a thought that could be expressed in a whole
variety of ways. An enterprising local authority might even put it in
verse. If they were unsure of how long the bypass would be out of
action, they might always rhyme ‘Close’ with ‘God knows’. ‘Lillies
that fester smell far worse than weeds,’ by contrast, is a lot harder to
paraphrase, at least without ruining the line altogether. And this is
one of several things we mean by calling it poetry.
To say that we should look at what is done in a literary work
in terms of how it is done is not to claim that the two always
slot neatly together. You could, for example, recount the life-
history of a field mouse in Miltonic blank verse. Or you could
write about your yearning to be free in a strict, straitjacketing
kind of metre. In cases like this, the form would be interestingly at
odds with the content. In his novel Animal Farm, George Orwell
casts the complex history of the Bolshevik Revolution into the
form of an apparently simple fable about farmyard animals. In such
cases, critics might want to talk of a tension between form and
content. They might see this discrepancy as part of the meaning
of the work.