Peter
I'm very grateful for any discussion that strays onto literary terrain! You
asked:
> what specific role do symbolic forms play in
the stream of activities? How do they mediate? And which activity or
activities
are they the product of? In particular, what activity/activities do literary
works like Hamlet (to take Peters example) mediate and what does this
mediation consist of and how does it work?
Taking Hamlet as an interesting case in point, there are obviously a number
of different 'texts' or 'works' involved. The original 'text' of Hamlet
would have been written down for no other purpose than to mediate the
activity of 'acting Hamlet'. In other words the original 'work' or 'works'
were the instances of production of the play 'Hamlet' - productions which
clearly varied among themselves and in which the 'audience' were more
actively involved than is common in the post-Shakespearean theatre. During
Shakespeare's time it became increasingly common for a 'text' to be written
down which would help the actors to carry out that activity *according to
the wishes of the author*, though the motives for this are mixed, and the
particular economics of the theatre of that time are an imporant
consideration (Shakespeare was one of the first writers to be paid
specifically for his 'works' rather than just for being a waged member of
his theatre company, and the rise of playwrights such as WS and Jonson saw
the decline in the artistry of company members who had been used to
improvising around a plot line or a number of set speeches). The emergence
of the written text of the play from the practices of acting, and the
emergence of those from the practices of carnival, are highly complex and
involved. The fact that it is the written text or the 'poetry' of
Shakespeare which we value to day tends to elide this history - though
anyone who has looked much into the 'authenticity' of these texts
immediately encounters the historical facts of theatrical practice in the
late C17th/early C18th (which cloth-eared employee of the king's men wrote
down the immortal line about the hawk and the hearnshaw? Or was it henshaw?
Or handsaw perhaps?)
We can perhaps take from this the idea that a written 'text' is both the
product of a specific authorial activity (which itself is a historically and
culturally mediated activity) and a particular kind of mediating artefact.
If we think of the novel or textbook as the archetype of the 'text' then the
mediated activity is less obvious, but if we think of the play or the folk
tale as genetically primary, then it is clearer. The written text mediates a
particularly ritualised form of social activity (the performance of a play,
the narration of a tale), which might be thought of as the primary text. It
is only when the scene of reading becomes displaced to the individual, as it
did in the west with the rise of Romanticism and the novel, that the primary
text becomes unclear. And in this case I would argue that the reanimation of
the textual 'voice' through reading, even though it is now an internalised
voice - at least once we have learned to read reasonably proficiently! - is
still originally a social activity. When we read we enter into dialogue with
an imagined other, whether this is the author, narrator or character. What
we have learned on the intermental plane becomes available for reflection on
the intramental, through the mediation of writing. (The idea of the voice is
important to me here - whether the same argument could be held up in
relation to culture which rely on non-phonetic written symbols is another
question.)
I think exactly how these different texts and activities are mediated is a
question of genre, which ties in with the discussion that was sort-of going
on a couple of weeks ago. I have more thoughts about this but will wait to
see if anyone else picks up the thread.
Helen
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