I apologize to Julie for responding to her as if she had said what Lawrence said (yesterday) when he wrote
And this is a case in point despite Paul’s not having joined in my search for literature. Look here, did someone really steal David's nip? Why would someone doubt it you might ask? Didn't he say they did? Well, I say in response, he's in the habit of writing what I might call literature and he might have done it again.
The implication here is that if someone really stole David's nip, his writing about it would not be literature, no matter how well crafted. This seems wrong to me, for the reasons I gave in my response to Julie which was really a response to Lawrence, namely, that not all literature is prose fiction, and moreover, even if it were, the occurrence in it of references to 'real' events, persons, places, and medium sized pieces of dry goods such as easy chairs, would not count against its being either fiction or literature. There really is a Mississippi River, and there really are events like the abdication of Edward VIII. And so on. The injunction that 'this is a work of fiction and any reference to real persons, etc., is purely coincidental,' is false insofar as it applies to War and Peace, Kim, All Quiet on the Western Front, and many thousands of other literary (and allegedly fictional works).
"Wait," you will say, "he mentions Walter and a real incident.” "But," I will ask another question by way of response, "didn't Dante mention real people and real incidents? And didn't people round about think he had really gone down into Purgatory and the Inferno and then subsequently written about them -- from first hand experience; which would have precluded/ The Divine Comedy/ from being literature and reduced it to mere reportage; for reality can't be literature, or can it? We really haven't settled what literature is, have we?
No, we haven't, but there's no requirement that literature be fictional—I'll mention again 'memoirs,' and works of history, where the writing transcends mere autobiography and mere reportage.
As for swords, they're better left to the experts. Robert Paul rpaul@xxxxxxxx ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
