Praise for the Eternal Word

On the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC radio this morning, heard an interview with a couple of filmmakers who've been working on a restoration of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 movie Major Dundee. Describing the work involved in making the movie look good again, one of Leonard's guests commented that, "For a forty-year-old picture, it doesn't look too bad on the screen."

All of this made me think about the enormous advantages that literature has over other artforms when it comes to durability and accessibility.

A written text can be reproduced precisely and, in the digital age, at virtually no cost. There's no sense in which the Iliad has "deteriorated" during the millenia since it was first set down in writing, unlike classical Greek sculpture, painting, and architecture, all of which survive only in fragmentary form. (Not a single work of Phidias, supposedly the greatest of all Greek sculptors, is extant today.) As for ancient Greek music and dance, they are now merely rumors.

It's true that, through various mishaps, some ancient literary works have vanished. We only have brief quotations from the poetry of Sappho, for example. But proportionately, there's no comparison between the survival rates of literature and other artforms. And when you come down into more modern times, especially since the invention of printing, it's hard to imagine how any significant piece of writing could ever completely vanish, unless civilization as we know it was completely destroyed. For example, since hundreds of thousands of printed copies of David Copperfield must exist in libraries and homes around the world, Dickens's novel is basically indestructible.

It is also accessible, at very little cost, to almost anyone, anywhere. By contrast, a painting, sculpture, or building can really be experienced only in person; a photo or reproduction captures just a fraction of the qualities of the original. And any work of music, dance, or drama doesn't exist at all except through the talents of living artists who perform it. Films, CDs, and DVDs perform a valuable service in capturing a particular performance in fairly durable form, but their dependence on technology is treacherous, as the example of the deteriorating Major Dundee suggests. (And there are reportedly many movies, especially from the silent era, that have already vanished beyond recovery--this in an artform that is scarcely more than a century old.)

The only major disadvantage one can point to regarding the durability and accessibility of literature is the fact that languages are not universal in space and time. I can personally experience the Iliad only by way of a translation into modern English, and we all know that translation is imprecise at best. But translation is available, and so is the option of learning foreign languages, even dead ones like ancient Greek. In any case, an artform like the movies is also language-bound to the extent that it relies on dialogue. (One could even argue that non-verbal artforms are subject to similar restrictions, in that our full comprehension of painting, sculpture, and music is limited by "language barriers" relating to the symbolic and cultural meanings inherent in specific images, gestures, and musical forms. But that would probably be pushing the case too hard.)

It's ironic and wonderful, isn't it, that literature, the most disembodied of artforms--mere words, formed, as Yeats put it, "out of a mouthful of air"--is also the most permanent, the most far-reaching, the one with the greatest power to overcome barriers of space and time.