theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
singular, present tense, while the epic is third person, past tense
(the "I" of the epic teller is really looked at from the side as a
third person
—
"dieses objektivierte Ich"). 13,
Such explorations of the basic kinds, which attach them on the
one extreme to linguistic morphology and at the other to ultimate
attitudes toward the universe, though "suggestive" are
scarcely promising of objective results. It is open indeed to ques-
tion whether these three kinds have any such ultimate status,
even as component parts variously to be combined.
One awkwardness, to be sure, is the fact that in our time
drama stands on a different basis from epic ("fiction," novel) and
lyric. For Aristotle and the Greeks, public or at least oral per-
formance was given the epic: Homer was poetry recited by a
rhapsode like Ion. Elegiac and iambic poetry were accompanied
by the flute, melic poetry by the lyre. Today, poems and novels
are eye-read to oneself, for the most part. 14 But the drama is still,
as among the Greeks, a mixed art, centrally literary, no doubt,
but involving also "spectacle"—making use of the actor's skill
and the play director's, the crafts of the costumer and elec-
trician. 15
If, however, one avoids that difficulty by reducing all three
to a common literariness, how is the distinction between play and
story to be made? The recent American short story (e.g.,
Hemingway's "The Killers") aspires to the objectivity of the
play, to the purity of dialogue. But traditional novel, like the
epic, has mixed dialogue, or direct presentation, with narration
indeed, the epic was judged highest of genres by Scaliger and
some other devisers of generic scales, partly because it included
all the others. If epic and the novel are compound forms, then
for ultimate kinds we have to disengage their component parts
into something like "straight narration" and "narration through
dialogue" (unacted drama) ; and our three ultimates then become
narration, dialogue, and song. So reduced, purified, made
consistent, are these three literary kinds more ultimate than, say,
"description, exposition, narration"? 16
Let us turn from these "ultimates"— poetry, fiction, and drama
—to what might be thought of as their subdivisions: the eighteenth-century
critic, Thomas Hankins, writes on English drama
illustrated in "its various species, viz., mystery, morality,
;