Literature Definition

What is Literature?

A Definition Based on Prototypes
Jim Meyer

Most definitions of literature have been criterial definitions, definitions based on a list of
criteria which all literary works must meet. However, more current theories of meaning
take the view that definitions are based on prototypes: there is broad agreement about
good examples that meet all of the prototypical characteristics, and other examples are
related to the prototypes by family resemblance. For literary works, prototypical
characteristics include careful use of language, being written in a literary genre (poetry,
prose fiction, or drama), being read aesthetically, and containing many weak
implicatures.

What is literature?

The Golden Gate

It’s hard to believe that only 73 years ago, the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist. The airplane is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. The particle accelerator is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Betty White is older than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yet today, the structure rises like “a natural, even an inevitable, entity,” as Kevin Starr, the California historian and author of over a dozen volumes on his home state, writes in “Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge.”

This is an exultant, discursive and strange little book. Starr is not older than the bridge; at his birth, people had already been shuttling across it for three years. But his narrative tour does evoke a grandfatherly ramble. Imagine setting off over the Golden Gate and being forced to stop every few feet not only to greet each passer-by, but also to endure a cursory biography or windy tangent. It gets difficult to enjoy the view.

Starr harks back — way back — “one hundred million years” back, to the “eons of geological time” it took to form the strait that his subject spans. After a brief lesson on ice ages and sediment formation, he’s on to the nearsighted Spanish, whose galleons cruised the waters off the West Coast for over 200 years until finally, in 1769, an expedition moving on foot from the south ascended the hills and reported back with the “exciting news” that they had spotted what would become known as San Francisco Bay.

Starr zips through the railroad era to the quake of 1906 to the mid-1920s, when a resurgent city and the rise of the automobile combined to create a crucial stimulus for bridging the Gate: horrific gridlock. Fifty thousand commuters were ferrying to and from San Francisco every weekday. On weekends, those who had floated their cars northward for woods and relaxation returned only to endure waits of “one, two, even three hours” for a boat ride home. Something had to be done.

So ensued a decade of political and architectural wrangling. The bridge was designed and redesigned (an early version resembled an “upside-down rat trap”). Money was promised. Wary constituents were wooed, including those “of a certain vintage” who feared that the bridge would “profane its site.” But this is hardly a suspense story (behold: bridge), and Starr’s dutiful recounting of civic process, wanting drama, grows tedious.

Players large and small come and go, with few save Joseph Strauss (a “P. T. Barnum of public works” and the bridge’s chief engineer) and Charles Alton Ellis (a professor of engineering and armchair classicist who transports Starr into a bizarre digression on Pythagoras) coming into relief. There is also unintentional comedy at critical moments: “Enter Frank Doyle . . . ” a segue goes; “Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini . . . ”; “Enter Leon Moisseif . . . ” — the effect is one of vaudeville characters tap-dancing onto the stage just in the nick of time.

Things pick up when the bridge does. Deep-sea divers plunge to inky depths to dynamite wells for the south pier; towers rise and cables are spun “more than 700 feet above the surging sea”; a geologist descends with his trusty hammer “into the very core” of a site pumped clear of water to “bang on the rock walls” and test their strength.

Starr’s structure, alas, is more rickety, his text marred by repetition and clumsy phrasing. We read at least three times that the Golden Gate was named after the Golden Horn of the Bosporus. Joseph Strauss is “dapper,” and so, on the next page, is the civic leader Frank Doyle. Then there are circularities like this: “There was only one way for Ellis to test his conclusions — through mathematics. A bridge could not be built to see if it worked. It would have to be tested through mathematics before it was built.”

The best writing concerns the courage of construction workers — “scaffolding and ladder men, painters aloft in their bosun’s chairs . . . willing to risk the high steel at a time when millions of Americans were out of work” — 11 of whom died just three months before the bridge was complete. In describing them Starr summons a reverence untainted by unfortunate juxtaposition, which is not so in his chapter on suicides, where the dead include “the poet, the political fixer, the founder of Victoria’s Secret.”

The bridge is a worthy object of adoration. But here, I was hoping for a little more polish, a little more insight (a discussion of the bridge as art directs us to “the Web site art.com”), a little more fact-checking (the “tunnels through Twin Peaks” are not “on Stockton and Irving Streets”), a little less sentimentality (“So hail and farewell, Golden Gate Bridge!”). Then again, perhaps it’s unfair to nitpick a love letter.

As Darkness Falls

For busy, harried or distractible readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius.
First published in the Netherlands in 1947, “Comedy in a Minor Key” is only now appearing in English, in an eloquent translation by Damion Searls. “The Death of the Adversary” (skillfully translated by Ivo Jarosy) appeared here in 1962, but has long been out of print. Born in 1909, their author, the centenarian Keilson, lives with his wife in a village near Amsterdam where until recently he practiced medicine, a profession he followed in his native Germany until the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee to the Netherlands. There he was active in the Dutch resistance and later became known for his work with children traumatized by the war.

Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author’s eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for story­telling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect they share is the formal daring of the relationship between subject matter and tone. Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name.

This unusual strategy is employed throughout “The Death of the Adversary,” whose narrator, a young man growing up during the ascendance of National Socialism, is at once obsessed with Hitler and unable to speak or even think the name of the Führer, whom he can refer to only as “my enemy” or, occasionally, “B.” The word “Nazi” is never mentioned, and only the most coded allusions are made to the fact that the protagonist is Jewish.

The challenges and rewards of this technique are most striking in a pivotal, devastating scene. Our hero is visiting a young woman with whom he works at a department store, and on whom he has a crush, when their pleasant evening is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of her brother and his friends. Almost instantly, without much being said, the narrator and the reader grasp that the intruders are Nazi thugs, just as it is obvious to the intruders that the narrator is a Jew. After a strained, abstract conversation about the burden of having a conscience and the relief of shedding that burden, the youngest of the goons is encouraged to describe a “secret assignment” in which he has participated. His story is long, gripping and almost unbearably horrific, though no one is hurt in the commission of this crime but a few of its inept perpetrators.

Listening, the narrator analyzes his own reactions with a characteristic detachment that is at once coolly clinical, incantatory and overwrought: “You’re a swine, I thought, not to get up and put an end to this disgusting and disgraceful performance. It did me good to call myself a swine, and at the same time I suffered under it. His story aroused all the fury and hatred hidden within me, I suffered under it and at the same time it did me good to suffer. I could have wept, and at the same time it did me good, like a father who is beating his child with tears in his eyes and experiences the twofold delight of being able to beat it and to suffer under it at the same time.”

With seeming effortlessness, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception. To say that reading this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of ­Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range. In fact the novel shows us how human beings, in any place, at any time, protectively shield themselves from the most frightening truths of their private lives and their historical moment.