The last piece of the Sapir feature. We have gone from the overview to phonology; here is the book’s final chapter — language and literature.
1. The material resists
As the sculptor has marble, the writer has a language as material. “In great art there is the illusion of absolute freedom.” But the material “disappears” only when the artist has “intuitively surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material” and fused its brute nature with the conception.
No sooner does the artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a medium to obey. (ch. 11)
Every language has its own peculiarities, so “the innate formal limitations and possibilities of one literature are never quite the same as those of another.”
2. Literature has two layers
- The lower layer is “the intuitive record of experience.” It can be carried into another medium. Literature that draws mainly on it — a play of Shakespeare’s — “is translatable without too great a loss of character.”
- The upper layer is “the particular conformation of a given language.” Literature that moves in it — a lyric of Swinburne’s — “is as good as untranslatable.”
Croce said “a work of literary art can never be translated.” And yet literature does get translated, “sometimes with astonishing adequacy” — because the lower layer is itself a translation “from a generalized language … a symbolic algebra of which all known languages are translations.” Just as a scientific truth can deliver its message in Chinese as in English.
3. Those who fuse the two layers, and those who lean
Whitman and Browning “impress us rather by the greatness of their spirit than the felicity of their art.” Straining for “a generalized art language,” they get themselves expressed only with effort inside the fixed terms of their idiom — the verse “sounds at times like a translation from an unknown original — which, indeed, is precisely what it is.”
Shakespeare and Heine, by contrast, fuse the two layers perfectly.
With Heine … one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German. The material “disappears.” (ch. 11)
4. Style runs in the language’s grooves
“Every language is itself a collective art of expression.” Style is not something imposed on a language from Greek or Latin models.
Style … is not an absolute … but merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves. (ch. 11)
A great style does not oppose the form-patterns of the language; it builds on them. The merit of a style like W. H. Hudson’s or George Moore’s is that it “does with ease and economy what the language is always trying to do.” Carlylese, by contrast, “is not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism,” and Milton’s prose is “semi-Latin done into magnificent English words.” “What is effective and beautiful in one language is a vice in another.”
5. Prosody comes from a language’s dynamics
Sapir sums up prosody in four:
Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches. (ch. 11)
Casting English verse in Greek quantitative moulds “has never been successful,” because English’s “dynamic basis … is not quantity, but stress.” French, with weak stress and weak syllabic weight, had to develop on “unit syllable-groups,” which is why rhyme “came later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.” “Study carefully the phonetic system of a language, above all its dynamic features, and you can tell what kind of verse it has developed — or … some day will.”
6. The connection to L/LAB’s essays
This chapter is, in 1921, already the theory behind what L/LAB has been doing in its readings of the opening of Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, the first sentence of Sōseki’s Kokoro, the long sentence that opens Ōgai’s The Abe Family and the opening of Kawabata’s Snow Country — reading an opening against the “grooves” of its own language. Head-final order, wa / ga, -te ita, subject ellipsis are exactly the form-patterns that a Japanese style “builds on” rather than opposing.
In sum
| Sapir on literature | |
|---|---|
| The material (a language) resists | “the moment the artist breaks the law, we realize there is a medium” |
| Literature has two layers — a lower one that translates, an upper one that does not | the lower layer is a translation from “a symbolic algebra” |
| Some writers fuse the layers (Shakespeare, Heine); some lean (Swinburne, Whitman) | “the universe speaks German” / “a translation from an unknown original” |
| Style runs in a language’s natural grooves | Carlylese = mannerism; Milton = semi-Latin |
| Prosody comes from a language’s sound dynamics | weight / stress / number and echo / pitch |
The book closes: “Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
The Sapir feature: overview / explained one, two / drift / language, race and culture / the sound pattern and the phoneme / this essay. His contemporary Saussure is here.
