The literary text should be understood as an act of discovery and transcendence, rather than as a static document or a mechanical reflection of reality.
Souad Khalil | Libya
The literary text is a complex aesthetic entity in whose formation linguistic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions overlap and interact. These dimensions cannot be separated without compromising its essential nature. A literary text is neither merely a vessel conveying an experience nor a direct reflection of external reality or an individual self. Rather, a complex semantic structure emerges from the interaction between language and consciousness, and from the writer’s struggle with the constraints of expression and the limitations of the linguistic medium. This raises the problem of the relationship between the writer’s emotional experience and the linguistic form through which it is presented, as well as the gap that arises between what is felt and lived and what is written and read.
This article begins by examining the nature and aesthetics of the literary text, focusing on the limitations and constraints of language, the differences in impact between the creator and the recipient, and the multiplicity of readings as an inevitable consequence of the particular nature of reception and the differences in cultural and psychological horizons. It also seeks to deconstruct the concept of the text as an organic and integrated whole, one that cannot be reduced to its individual elements and can only be understood through the network of relationships that organize it. In doing so, it draws upon critical, linguistic, and philosophical approaches that have contributed to shaping modern awareness of the nature of literary discourse and its aesthetic function.
During the creative process, the writer attempts to present his or her experience through linguistic formation. Consequently, the appreciation and examination of its elements and components take place through this medium, which possesses its own stylistic characteristics. As for what takes place in the writer’s mind during the creative process and before it, critics cannot trace it as long as the creative work has not yet taken linguistic form. This process, too, has its own particular nature, which is investigated by other scholars, who, at the very least, cannot be classified as literary critics.
Writers make strenuous efforts to ensure that the literary text encompasses their emotional experience, expresses it, and reflects its various dimensions. Yet this is not, in reality, entirely possible, because language becomes an obstacle that prevents the writer from expressing the emotional experience in all its comprehensiveness and wholeness. This is why we often notice writers’ complaints about the existence of a barrier between what they wish to express and what they seek to communicate. Before being given linguistic form, the experience appears clear, evident, and complete. However, when the writer attempts to shape it through language, that clarity becomes fragmented and its coherence begins to dissolve.
In this regard, I was particularly interested in what Dr. Karim Al-Waeli wrote about the nature and aesthetics of the literary text.
First: The Determinism of Language
The writer’s emotional experience is, before its linguistic formation, a complete and unified experience. The writer feels it, becomes conscious of it, and exercises control over it. However, when the writer attempts to present it through a temporal and linguistic context, the comprehensive and unified experience is subjected to fragmentation into limited and partial elements. In other words, the universal is made subject to the temporal, because linguistic formation can only come into existence through the arrangement of words and their organization in a particular manner. It is therefore governed by the phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and semantic rules of language.
The writer attempts to move within the framework of what already exists. In other words, the writer seeks to present an experience characterized by its absolute, universal, and individual nature through the determinism of language: through words and structures that the writer did not create, and through rules whose establishment or generation was not the writer’s responsibility. Consequently, the universal and the absolute become subject to the limited and the particular.
In light of this, linguistic formation remains incapable of fully presenting what the poet seeks to create. Nevertheless, the poet is compelled to accept it because there is no alternative means through which to present an image that expresses his or her own world. This is why the writer senses a gap between the emotional experience itself and what is presented in the literary text as an expression of that experience.
On this basis, the text remains an entity that cannot be entirely faithful in expressing writers’ experiences.
Second: The Variation of Impact
When creating a literary text, the writer interacts with words in particular ways. I use the term interaction metaphorically here, because words are not treated as mere stones or inert objects, but rather as living entities, as though the writer were attempting to recreate them. Words and structures consequently acquire different shades of meaning in accordance with the writer’s vision and experience.
A word radiates and evokes particular associations in the writer’s mind. These associations cannot be identical for another person because of the psychological reservoir, which is undoubtedly individual and personal. Much of this reservoir consists of individual residues connected to the unconscious.
A single event may leave different impressions on two people, depending on the way each interacts with it, on the one hand, and on the differences between their inner worlds, on the other. This is attributable to the latent forces residing deep within each individual. These forces interact with the event and subsequently influence the way it is expressed.
The recipient interacts with the linguistic formation, not with the poet’s emotional experience itself. Since the text cannot faithfully convey that experience, the first misunderstanding of the poet’s experience occurs because of the text, that is, because of its linguistic formation.
Furthermore, if the recipient also possesses an individual identity and particular latent forces deeply rooted within, then encountering the text produces a unique form of interaction. The effect of the text takes shape and acquires its particular character through linguistic stimuli that evoke specific associations in the recipient, thereby generating a new emotional experience.
This experience is certainly not the writer’s own emotional experience. The recipient does not interact directly with the writer’s emotional experience, but rather with a linguistic medium that cannot faithfully transmit it.
Moreover, the words and structures employed by the writer in a particular text evoke specific associations for the writer, which explains why those particular words were chosen. For the recipient, however, the same words may evoke entirely different associations, belonging exclusively to the recipient and in no way identical to those of the writer.
Consequently, the reception of the newly generated emotional experience moves twice away from the writer’s original emotional experience.
Every reading of a text constitutes a new understanding of it. Thus, we are not dealing with a single text except in the sense of its physical existence. Rather, we are confronted with an unlimited number of read texts, because reading transforms the physical existence of the text into another text, which is certainly neither the original physical text nor the writer’s emotional experience, but rather a new experience generated in the recipient by the text.
Therefore, the nature of the text varies according to the differences among recipients, their multiplicity, and the repetition of the reading process.
Third: What Is the Text?
There are multiple readings that interact with a text, each attempting to focus on a particular aspect of it. These readings, however, can be classified into two categories. The first sees the text solely as a linguistic entity, while the second regards it merely as a reflection of social reality. Neither of these approaches is entirely sound.
As Adonis states:
“A poetic work cannot be properly read through what lies outside it, nor can it be read solely through its purely textual existence. Reading it through elements external to it amounts to its negation. The poetic world is neither merely a psychological or subjective reflection nor simply a reflection of social reality. Above all, it is an act of discovery; it is not a document of a particular reality, but rather an act of penetration and transcendence.”
Despite this, the text possesses three essential characteristics, as Yuri Lotman points out: wholeness, organic unity, and integration. Its nature cannot be understood simply by collecting the elements that constitute it. Likewise, fragmenting these elements and examining each separately results in the loss of the integrity of the entire work. Each element acquires its existence only through its relationship with the other elements and, ultimately, through its relationship with the overall structural unity of the literary text.
Although the text and its structure can indeed be studied according to their internal laws, the text is neither independent nor isolated from other structures that may exist alongside it, intersect with it, or influence it. These include other texts, reality, and individual subjects.
The existence of a text is governed by internal components that determine its temporality in both the creative process and the process of reception. It cannot be created and received simultaneously because of the temporal nature of language, through which alone the text can exist. Furthermore, uncovering its structure is merely an abstract theoretical assumption and does not necessarily mean that its true essence has been revealed.
If we imagine that a text consists of three essential components, A, B, and C, these elements alone cannot determine its nature. Defining the essence and structure of a text does not depend solely on identifying the fundamental components without which the text could not exist. Rather, it also depends on the position of these components and their relationships with one another, on the one hand, and with the overall structure, on the other.
Moreover, when the relationships connecting these components change, the nature of the entity itself changes. There is no doubt that an organic relationship among these components, a change in their positions, or an alteration in their connections will inevitably affect the other components. In other words, both the essence and the structure of the text are undoubtedly influenced by such changes.
The nature of a component changes when it is removed from one context and placed within another. Suppose, for example, that we take an image of a horse’s head from a painting and remove it from its original context, then place it within another painting depicting a human being. Its new position and relationship with the other elements will undoubtedly bring about a fundamental change in the nature and structure of that painting.
If we change the position of this component and its relationship with the surrounding elements, it will produce a different effect. The impact becomes more significant when the position it occupies is particularly important and the relationship it establishes is influential.
This is precisely what Claude Lévi-Strauss emphasized when he argued that structure is organic in nature, because the relationships among its constituent elements are such that changing any one element necessarily leads to changes in the remaining elements.
Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani had already drawn attention to this principle when he stated:
“It is inconceivable that thought should concern itself with the meanings of individual words in isolation from grammatical relationships. It is neither imaginable nor intellectually valid for someone to contemplate the meaning of a verb without intending its application to a noun, or to consider the meaning of a noun without intending to connect it to a verb and make it either its subject or its object.”
The text possesses its own particularity and autonomy. However, the material from which it is formed—language, in the Saussurean sense—is not merely an inert substance like stone or colour. Rather, it is distinguished by being a human creation and is therefore charged with cultural heritage, as René Wellek observes.
While the materials of other arts, such as stone and colour, remain socially inert until they come into the artist’s hands, language possesses a high degree of social activity.
In this context, poetic texts should not be viewed merely as entities sharing certain specific characteristics with music. Their nature must also be understood in relation to the process of linguistic formation itself. Words, which constitute the material of literature, although they contain lexical meanings and concepts, generate new meanings and additional associations during the creative process. They also give rise to different patterns of feeling.
In poetry in particular, alternation, repetition, and parallelism contribute to the creation of accompanying meanings and reveal different expressive and emotional levels.
In Firth’s words:
“Every word, when used in a new context, becomes a new word.”
However, this does not eliminate the fixed elements inherent in a word, which it retains regardless of the different contexts in which it is used. The variations within a word may be described as the variables that affect it.
Furthermore, independently meaningful words are not merely symbols existing within contextual situations; they are themselves contexts for one another. Each modifies the other, and together they generate a continuous response.
The meaning of a poem is not simply the sum of the individual meanings of its words. There are additional meanings generated by context and by the rhythm of words, whether through their intrinsic characteristics, through their interaction with one another, or through both processes combined.
The particular solidarity among words within a poem produces a pattern of meaning that those same words could not convey if we altered the arrangement in which they were originally established. This is because ordering and reordering, juxtaposition, similarity, and contrast produce effects that do not exist within the original words themselves, outside their contexts or within different contextual frameworks.
If de Saussure defined the word through two closely interconnected structures—the phonetic structure and the semantic structure—neither of which can be separated from the other, rhythm, in its essential nature, does not arise from either structure independently, but rather emerges from both together.
Nevertheless, the aesthetic value of a word and the nature of its musical qualities are not determined by these two structures alone, whether phonetic or semantic. Context also contributes to determining the aesthetics and rhythm of a word.
As Wellek emphasizes, words do not possess inherently poetic qualities, and no word is intrinsically ugly or beautiful, nor does any word naturally produce pleasure or displeasure. Rather, each word has a range of possible effects depending on the circumstances in which it appears.
Similarly, according to Eliot, an ugly word is one that does not suit the context in which it occurs.
Abdel Moneim Talima also emphasizes that there are no words that are inherently poetic and others that are non-poetic. Nor is there a poetic language, or a language that is naturally poetic, in contrast to another that is not. The poet works with the ordinary words of language, but does not use them according to the ordinary system of that language.
Despite the importance of syntactic formation, certain words are richer than others in their meanings and associations. Some appear more frequently and repeatedly, while others occur less often, owing to their phonetic possibilities and to certain linguistic laws that govern them.
Wellek refers to this phenomenon when discussing smooth and polished words in contrast to rough and unpolished ones. This means that some words, as a result of prolonged usage, may acquire a narrower range of associations than others.
In light of this, the poetic quality of a text is governed by interacting dimensions. These include the inherent characteristics contained within the phonetic and semantic components of a word, as well as its position within its semantic and rhythmic context.
In other words, the poetic quality of a text is not determined by a single characteristic, whether the word itself, context alone, or rhythm in isolation. Rather, all these components interact.
Context does not merely influence the determination of a word’s meaning; it also evokes a range of associated synonyms and connotations suggested by that context. These associations vary according to the nature of the context.
Rhythm, too, contributes to determining the poetic quality of the text and influences the construction of its meaning. Poetic music is therefore considered one of the most delicate means available to language for expressing the shades and nuances of meaning, alongside the meanings conveyed by words and linguistic structures.
The overall rhythm of a poem also contributes to imparting additional and accompanying meanings to the linguistic formation of the text.
This discussion leads us to conclude that the literary text is neither a simple entity nor one with a single meaning. Rather, it is an open structure whose levels multiply according to the different perspectives through which it is approached. Its aesthetics emerge from a complex interaction between language and its phonetic, semantic, and rhythmic contexts, as well as between the creator’s self and the recipient’s self.
Although the determinism of language constitutes an obstacle to conveying the emotional experience in its absolute wholeness, language remains the only possible medium for creative expression. This means that the text is always both less than the experience and more than it at the same time: less because it cannot contain the experience in its entirety, and more because of its ability to generate endless new meanings.
The variation in aesthetic impact also confirms that every reading constitutes a rewriting of the text, and that meaning does not reside exclusively within the text itself or within the creator’s intention. Rather, it emerges in the space of interaction between the linguistic structure and the horizon of reception.
Consequently, understanding a literary text cannot be achieved by fragmenting it into isolated elements, nor by reducing it entirely to an external context. It requires an understanding of its organic unity, its integration, and its dynamic nature, which transform it into a living entity that renews itself with every reading and remains open to endless possibilities of interpretation.
The literary text, therefore, should be understood as an act of discovery and transcendence, rather than as a static document or a mechanical reflection of reality.
Read: Concept of the Very Short Story
________________
Souad Khalil, hailing from Benghazi Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
