So I like the idea that literature performs. It was asked in class if this is true, and I would like to offer an answer to that question. In literature, there are many instances where performance is in play. In that vein, I find it interesting to think of literature as a play, and of the author or narrator as actors.
Several of the authors we have read in class so far have been interested in the role of the audience and the speaker. Aristotle is certainly interested in this relationship. He said, "[There is persuasion] through the hearers when they're led to feel emotion [pathos], by the speech; for we do not give the same judgment when grieving and rejoicing or when being friendly and hostile." (Aristotle 38) Here I find a really fascinating implication of performance. The element of emotion makes me think of watching a play or a movie. The audience of a play or movie is compelled by the performers through their performance of the speech to feel emotion and sometimes even experience persuasion. This same phenomenon also occurs with a reader of literature. The work of literature itself performs what has been created by its author, and the audience is then influenced by the performance. The strength of this performance depends on the kind of audience, author, and literature, as well as the relationship between the three of them.
So I know I went a little far into the past here with Aristotle, but I thought it would be a good example of this performance of literature. Though the performance of every work of literature differs, I think that the main concept of performance and performers remains the same. To answer the question of whether literature performs, I have to say, yes. What does it perform? Well, I think that depends on the author's purpose, as well as his/her effectiveness in writing.
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Maybe this should be a separate post, but this got me thinking about theatre.
Rather than visualizing literature as a play, one could look at plays as a genre of literature. What puts them in that category? A script is language performed via spoken word, acting, and symbology. Theatre seems to diminish the ambiguity of language through this performance.
In decreasing the amount of information to be signified (by transforming character descriptions into living people, written conversations into interpreted acting, and vague stage directions into organized cues), the performance of the script increases accuracy of the signs. By 'accuracy' I simply mean that more audience members will similar mental images than readers. This is accomplished when the aforementioned transformations convert some of the scripts signifiers into signs.
At first it sounds as if this ties up some loose ends with language. Unfortunately, I left a few steps out, and the steps I didn't include all revolve around the director (and her staff). Although, theatre can function as a metaphor for how language performs, it can't function as an explicit performance. This is because the director is usually the person deciding how to decrease the signified with costumes, set, tone, lighting, etc. The decrease in ambiguity between the readers and live audience comes from the director's interpretations of the scripts signifiers.
Is the script's ambiguity or the director's interpretations a more accurate or helpful display of language?
I've also been really interested in the relationship between the speaker and the audience, especially in Ong's piece on audience construction. The essay we read for today though looks the manipulative effects of that certain speech can have if one is familiar with his audience. Hitler had a good grasp on what the German people desired-- a sense of unity in a turbulent time. This was one of the only unifying factors of the people, since they were at this point fragmented into various groups.
I think it's important too that his speeches were televized and broadcast, since the performance of the words and the conviction he put forth in his speeches comes through in a way that it wouldn't on paper. It seems the proliferation of his ideology would not have occurred (or at least maybe not as rapidly) without this catalyst. It reminds me too of Aristotle's notion that the rhetor should avoid emotional manipulation in their speeches and writes of it to warn readers of its effects. It's essentially what Burke puts forth near the end of this essay, that, "our job... is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle" (219). The only way to defeat the emotional trickery of rhetoric of any sort is to recognize the techniques of manipulation, however subtle and charming they be.
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