Foreign Food ii

I have remembered something from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory that relates directly to the other post (and may, who knows, have been in the back of my mind all along):

‘John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weeds’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the way it behaves, the purpose it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.’

Eagleton goes on to imply that searching for the defining quality of ‘literature’ may be about as fruitful as trying to pin down the essence of weeds. Irrespective of agreement/ disagreement with this particular spin on ‘literature’, the passage usefully suggests those ways in which language ‘congeals’ social relations into things. This in turn underlines one of the principle tasks of critical thought, which is surely to unpack the social relations encoded (and concealed) in our forms of words. It also of course implies that oftentimes the philosophical chasing after essences is utterly misguided, and needs to be replaced by a more ‘sociological’ dissection of those relations and functions which have taken on, through language, the false appearance of fixity.

A somewhat separate point. The previous post on this subject was, to be honest, a bit sloppy. For example, I carelessly added a ‘not’ to Borges’ ‘included in the present classification’. And ‘not included in the present classification’ is obviously a rather more deliciously self-undermining and impossible category than I really recognised. More, hopefully, on this later.