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1

One of the central issues that has been discussed in stylistics over the last two decades, is the relationship between language and literature. In its approach and coverage the framework of this discussion can be designated 'semiolinguistic'. A semiolinguistic approach, first of all, looks at literature as discourse. Viewed from this standpoint, the study of language in literature acquires utmost significance, since literary discourse speaks in more linguistic codes than one (Barthes, 1970). Secondly, the semiolinguistic approach rejects the formal linguistic approach which appears to suggest that there is some linguistic constant that can significantly characterise literature as a unified body of texts as distinct from a body of texts that is non-literary (Jakobson, 1960; Jakobson and Jones, 1970). Thirdly, the semiolinguistic approach also rejects the sentence- perspective for studying literary discourse/text
which stresses that literary texts are structurally like sentences, i.e., "the categories of structure that we propose for the analysis of individual sentences (in linguistics) can be extended to apply to the analysis of much larger structures in texts (Fowler, 1977 : 5).

The semiolinguistics approach to the study of literature accepts literary communication as a social contract of the order 'I-Thou' rather than 'I-It' in its orientation. It examines literature with the reciprocity implicit in the 'I-thou' perspective, and conceives of literary discourse as a mediating agency between two sets of communicants: I (Writer-Question-Utterance) and thou(Reader-Answer-Response). Secondly, the linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of language use in literature. This can be diagrammatically shoes as follows:

Reciprocity of I-Thou Perspective
Linguistic THOU

Writer
Question Verbal Para-
Utterance linguistic

Reader
Non- Answer
Non-Vocal Linguistic Non-Verbal Response

Mediation Process
(Inter-subjective objective)

The semiolinguistic approach further emphasises that the world which literature encapsulates in its text is a fictional reality which is created by the writer into a system of forms with significance through a channel of inter-subjective cultural codes that makes communication possible. This specific aspect of the semilolinguistic approach brings together and aligns the theory of communication with a theory of cultural perception. In fact, it is this approach that has been discussed by Srivastava (1985) and Srivastava and Gupta (1983).

In the present paper we would like to argue that the use of language in literature is, on the one hand, like the use of language in common discourse and, on the other, language is employed in literature with significance which is meaningfully different from the use of language in common discourse. This simply suggests that language can be created within language. This means that language in literature can be seen as being constituted of hierarchical set of interlocking levels or layers, i.e., level of sentence-symbols, level of symbols in art and the level of art symbol (Srivastava, 1980). Secondly, we would like to emphasize that there are several other intervening factors which transform the nature, quality and function of language during the creative process of writing factors that have a direct bearing on the use of language in literature. For our discussion in the following pages we have identified the following four factors:

(a) Choice of language of literary discourse.
(b) Language in fictional discourse.
(c) Language in written discourse.
(d) Language with stylistic meaning and rhetorical significance.

II

Literature on stylistics suggests that while on the one hand style is the way in which language is used, on the other, it also consists in the choice; that a literary artist makes from the repertoire of the language he is using. Semiolinguistic approach however, extends this notion to include, choice of one code or the other from the verbal repertoire of the speech community. This extension of the notion of choice is especially relevant in relation to writings in a multilingual context. Scholar; have, hitherto, taken a casual attitude toward: the question of a writer's choice of language and have tended to hold the view that problems related to language choice are extrinsic to literary criticism simply because language in literature is merely instrumental. This is a very limited view that belittles the significance of language in literature. Language is not merely instrumental; it is a powerful symbol of identity, a tool of cultural transformation and an important factor in social relationship, in short, an all-embracing phenomenon of a man's social and personal existence.

Questions related to language choice assume greater significance once we begin to ponder why a writer selects one language as his medium rather than some other language available in his verbal repertoire. For instance, if a speaker of one of the Indian languages selects English for his literary works, or if a speaker of Bengali or Tamil opts for Hindi, the question of language choice obviously becomes an important area of investigation. There cannot be a universal answer to our question: why does a writer choose to write in language 'A' rather than in language 'B'? One
answer, as pmointed out by Srivastava and Gargesh (1981) is that as writers incarnate the genius of a language, it must be the one that has shaped their incipient thought and modulated their experiential world, i.e., a native language. But this, quite often, is not the case, especially in multilingual countries. At present we find in India several writers who are able to deepen our aesthetic sensibility through their writings in English a non-mother tongue language. Similarly, there are many recognized writers in Hindi literature for whom Hindi is a second language. Another factor that seems to determine language choice in literature is the readership, i.e., a writer has in mind the reading public whom he wishes to address before he attempts to produce his literary work. This consideration has led to the theory that the literary communication act is not much different from the production act. Since a producer cannot ignore the needs and requirements of his consumers, he tries to shape his product in accordance with those needs and requirements. This consideration of readership vis-a-vis language choice raises several related questions about the intended reader: Who is the reader? Where is the reader located? To which stratum does the reader belong? What is the linguistic reality of the reader? etc., as well as, the kind of reader with whom the writer wishes to identify.

Another question that comes up is: if Indian writers write in English, do their writings form a part of English Literature or a part of Indian Literature? lyengar characterizes Indian creative writing in English as part of Indian literature. Indian literature comprises several literatures ... and Indian writing in English is but one of the voices in which India speaks. It is a new voice no doubt, but it is as much Indian as others (lyengar, 1962 : 3). Raja Rao, writing in a similar vein, considers the choice of English as being partly native and partly alien. Thus he writes:

One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own ... I use the word 'alien', yet English is not an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up - like Sanskrit or Persian was before - but not of our emotional make-up. We are all intinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English, we shouldn't. We can write only as Indians, we have grown to look at- the large world as part of us (Raja Rao, 1938 : viii).

The selection of English, from within the verbal repertoire of the Indian speech community, as a medium for literature is related to the question of identity, and can be said to be conflicting in nature - one group describing Indian poetry in English as "Mathew Arnold in Sari", while the other group, represented by Gokak, labels it as "Shakuntala in Skirts" (Gokak, 1964 : 162).

Another question that deserves to be explored and answered is whether language serves merely as a carrier of literary message. Sociolinguists have come to the conclusion that
Language is not merely a means of interpersonal communication and influence. It is not merely a carrier of content, whether latent or manifest. Language itself is content, a reference for loyalties and animosities, an indicator of social status and personal relationships, a marker of situations and topics, as well as, of the societal roles and large scale value- laden arenas of interaction that typify every speech community (Fishman, 1972 : 4).

Viewed from the perspective that medium is, at least partly, the message, English in present day India is definitely something more than the "language of intellectual make-up". Raja Rao has compared the present use of English in creative writing to the use of Sanskrit for a similar purpose in the medieval period. It is true that the leaders of the cultural rennaissance during the medieval period - Vallabhacharya, Madhavaicharya, Nimbak- acharya, etc. - employed their mother tongue in their intimate home-life, Braj Bhasha for their social reform movement, and Snaksrit for their philosophical speculations. However, the question one would like to ask is: why did the poets of the Bhakti movement opt for Bhakha - Braj, Awadhi or Maithil - when Sanskrit was generally upheld as the sacramental and socio-cultural inter-lingua for literary activity? It needs to be stressed here that this was a period when court poets felt more at home in Sanskrit than in their mother tongue. Why did Bhakha poets - Kabir, Tulasi, Jayasi, and Surdas - choose to write in Bhakha (dialect) which was considered rustic and uncultivated as compared to Sanskrit which was the literary language par excellence? If we agree that language as medium is, at least partly, the message itself, a referent for loyalties and animosities, then what aspect of content in message does Bhakha really signify? We must remember that the voice of Bhakti as a cultural rennaissance was tuned to mass culture. Literary creations by the saint- poets were meant to be read by millions of people. This was a voice incarnated in a language medium which brought not only religion but also art to the level of common life. It was in this context that Sanskrit was compared by Kabir to the "stagnant water of the well" while Bhakha was upheld by him as a "flowing stream". Similarly, Tulasi made the comparison between Sanskrit and Bhakha in terms of Kumach (silk) and Kamari (rug).

The above discussion suggests that like style choice, code selection from within the verbal repertoire of a speech community signals social meaning which can be further exploited for making the medium of literature severe as its own content.

III

Coming to the question of language(s) in literature and language(s) of literature, we are at once aware of the fact that the relationship between natural language and fictional language continues to be extremely problematic in contemporary aesthetic and linguistic theory. It is common place to refer to poetry as inspired speech, language of passion and emotive statements as against non-poetic language as something uninspired, plain language of reason and verifiable statements. In order to understand the true relationship between language of day-to-day life and language of literature, we would like to invoke the notion of literature as mimes-is, and to use the distinction, suggested in literature, between natural discourse and fictive discourse.

Linguistic utterances in natural-discourse refer to real extra-linguistic situations, and they are also supposed to denote a referent. Contrary to this, there exists a whole range of discourse which can be characterized as fictional in which the question of specific extralinguistic circumstances and of reference comes up in an entirely different way. In natural discourse all deictic and other functional linguistic elements imbibe their meaning from circumstances that are external to the speaker. For example, if someone says, "I will meet you there tomorrow", the contextual meaning of 1', 'you',
'there' and 'tomorrow' is controlled by such factors as who speaks to whom, where, and when. All such information is external to the utterance and relates to specific extralinguistic circumstances. In literary discourse deictic and other functional linguistic elements acquire significance from the fictional world created within the literary artefact rather than from the 'real' world external to the literary discourse, i.e., statements found in literature do not refer to a real referent but to a fictional one. Some of these deictic elements are first and second person pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs of place, adverbial of time, and adverbial of manner. These deictic elements have the potential of implicature and help us to infer the context within the literary discourse. For example, consider the opening lines of Donne's 'Good-morrow':
"I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we lov'd, were we not wean'd till then?"

The italicised deictic elements provide essential information about the 'situation within the literary work' - what Leech (1969) calls 'inferred situation'. A similar function of deictic elements can be demonstrated ' from the couplets of Bihari. Based on this concept of natural discourse and fictional discourse; Ducrot and Todorov make a distinction between real and realism, on the one hand, and between formal logic and internal logic on the other.

For logicians, truth is a relationship between the individual occurrence of a sentence and the referent about which the sentence affirms something. Sentences constituting literary discourse have no referent; they present themselves as expressly fictional, and the question of their truth is without meaning (Ducrot and Todorov, 1979 : 261).

Related to the question of real and reality is the guestion concerning the modes of representation. According to Ducrot and Todorov (1979) the problem of reality is no longer centred around the description or depletion of a pre-existing reality, but rather concerns how the illusion of such a reality has been created. We would hasten to clarify that when we talk about illusion of reality, we are not suggesting a 'break' or 'disjunction' between 'the real' and the 'illusion of the real' (of literary order). The relationship between the two is not one of reflection or even refraction; it is rather one of interaction and participation. This needs further elaboration.

Critics have pointed out that a genuine piece of literature is at once both timeless and time-bound. It is timeless because a reader of any age or period is able to read, understand and enjoy it without having access to the information concerning extra- linguistic circumstances in which the literary artefact came into being. It is time-bound because each literary artefact echoes the sensibility and realities of the age in which it has been created. It is possible for timelessness and time-boundedness to coexist, because in the process of creation, the natural discourse is transformed into fictional discourse, and reality is transformed into illusion of reality. A natural utterance takes place in specific circumstances, but this circumstantial specificity of the external, objective world, is no longer needed, or even valid, in a fictional discourse because, once the fictional (literary) world has been created on the basis of construction- principle, a new fictional reality, a parallel world as it were, has come into being and the deictic and other functional linguistic elements of fictional discourse have their referent in the 'created, fictional world' and not in the circumstanceial specificity of the 'real world'. It is precisely this characteristic of literature that makes 'Shakuntala' or 'Hamlet' or 'Odyssey' timeless. The 'context of situation' required for interpretation and enjoyment of a work of literature is provided by the writer within the work itself. Thus, the work of literature is cut off from the real world, a parallel world is created in the work itself, and during perusal, the literary work becomes its context, its own referent. However, in construing the parallel world (which is a fictional reality), to the extent the writer cuts off his literary artefact from extralinguistic circumstancial specificity, he is obliged to build into the fictional world a corresponding set of specific circumstances. In the process of creating this fictional world with its attendant circumstances and contexts the writer integrates the realities and sensibility of his time, thus making the literary work time-bound.

We would like to add here that fictional reality is a precondition for literature. However, not all fictional discourse is literature. While discussing the difference between natural discourse and fictional discourse, Hernnstein-Smith characterizes a natural utterance as being a historical event, i.e., "all utterances - trivial or sublime, ill-wrought or eloquent, true or false, scientific or passionate - that can be taken as someone saying something, somewhere, sometime, that is, as the verbal acts of real persons on particular occasions in response to particular sets of circumstances" (Hernnstein-Smith, 1978 : 15). According to her, texts of different kinds like dialogues, personal letters and inscriptions of verbal events which are not records of utterances but constitute utterances themselves belong to natural discourse. Anything written to be printed, no matter what its style, and irrespective of its recent or remote origin, has to be treated as a natural utterance so long as it may be taken as the verbal response of a historically real person occasioned by a historically real world. Texts that are neither transcriptions of natural utterances nor natural utterances in written form may be termed fictive utterances. According to Hernnstein-Smith (1978) literary creations are not natural utterances simply because they are not historically unique verbal acts or events, and cannot be ever said to have 'occurred' in the usual sense. Our response to a poem as a linguistic structure is governed by special conventions - be it the reading of a poem or the hearing of its recitation. Acts and events in dramatic poetry do not 'happen' but are represented as happening. What is being emphasized here is that what poems or other literary artefacts represent in and through language is basically language, speech, human utterance, discourse. In natural discourse language is made subservient to its referent; in fictional discourse the referential world is first dissolved in language, so that a new referent, (illusion of referent/reality) comes into being. This, perspective of studying literature suggests that literature as an art form, represents not ideas, images, feelings, characters, situations, etc., but discourse. It further suggests that the 'world' created in and through language involves not imitation, reflection or refraction of existing objects or events, but rather the fabrication of objects and events as 'possible worlds'.

IV

No discussion of literary discourse would be complete without some consideration of the written and spoken modes of manifestation and their relationship with the linguistic sign, as well as of the cognitive and linguistic consequences of the verbalization of the abstract language in speech or writing. These aspects of spoken and written language have received much scholarly attention in the last decade or so (Gupta, 1971; Greenfield, 1972; O'Donnel, 1974; Poole and Field, 1976; Philips, 1975; Heath, 1980; Scribner and Cole, 1981; Srivastava and Gupta, 1983 and 1985). In this connection we would like to argue that spoken and written entities are manifestations of the same linguistic unit, i.e., they exist for what they represent. Their relationship does not rest on the fact that the one merely mirrors the other, but rather on the fact that they are both actualizations of the same linguistic unit (Srivastava, 1984). Since both the phonic and graphic materials perform the same function, i.e., the actualization of the oppositional and relational aspects of the same form, it is but natural that they evince certain correspondences.
However, as the stylistic meanings are generated in terms of optional structures which a language potentially offers, we would like to argue that the option between oral and written representation also generates additional meaning. We split semantics into two: conceptual/referential/linguistic meaning which is the area of meaning common to all variants, and stylistic meaning which is to all variants, and stylistic meaning which is differentially additive in function, and which comes into language by the very act of selecting one variant as opposed to others made available by a language. There is a definite relationship between conceptual invariant (referential meaning) and contextually conditioned alternates (stylistic meaning) since stylistic meaning can be encoded only when the variation in structure has some conceptual equivalence. The pronominal use of 'tu', 'turn' and 'ap' in Hindi illustrates our point. They can be characterized as three distinct variants which refer to the invariant "Second Person Singular Pronouns". The selection of one from among these three variants signals socially conditioned stylistic meaning (Srivastava, 1978).

What we are stressing here is that the selection of the material of the medium (graphic or phonic) for encoding the conceptually invariant language itself has the potential of signalling additional meaning. The selection of one medium rather than the other indicates the differential pragmatic conditions for the discourse. Secondly, it has a direct bearing on the linguistic organization of a message. The selection of written or spoken mode of communication and the channel-oriented differences and parallelisms between written and spoken discourse have been discussed at length by Srivastava and Gupta elsewhere (1983). There is something typically characteristic of oral literature, and something typically characteristic of written literature. The same is true of face to face interaction and expository written prose. However, as pointed out by Tannen (1983) these two genres typify but do not exhaustively characterize the two modes of discourse. It can be convincingly demonstrated that written discourse occasionally adopts strategies which are typical of oral discourse, and oral literature which is created after written literature has come into being and has been established as a tradition, imbibes and exploits some of the features and strategies of written literature. How Tulasi in his Manas has creatively exploited the features and strategies of oral tradition as rhetoric devices, has been discussed at length by Srivastava (1971).

v

Before we discuss the nature of language use for stylistic meaning and rhetorical significance, we would like to make a clear distinction between stylistic and rhetorical devices employed in a literary discourse. The first and foremost difference between the two is that while stylistic meaning is internal to the literary work of art and cannot be peeled off or extracted for analysis, rhetorical significance is external to the poesy and, hence, can be extracted from the art-object for scrutiny and analysis. Secondly, the constituents of rhetoric are related primarily to illocution and delivery, i.e., mode of representation and affectation. Contrary to this, stylistic elements can be seen as intrinsic properties of the message of the art-object. For instance, the singing element in the 'Manas' of Tulasi which falls within the mode of delivery, has to be considered under rhetoric. Tulasi as the narrator of a tale wrote 'Manas' as an epic. Nevertheless, he meant this literary artefact, i.e., 'Manas', to be sung, and hence, adopted a metrical composition fit to be read aloud to people. On the other hand in 'Manas' we find the intrinsic quality of sound-effect which is characteristic of stylistic meaning. For example, his 'selection of words with a pronounced nasality rings in the mind of the reader the sound-echo of bangles - the theme-object. Consider, for instance, the following line;
Kankana Kinkin nupur dhuni suni ... etc.

Stylistically significant features have been viewed as being the result of the choices that a language offers as options to the user. Thus, Hockett says:
Two utterances in the same language which convey approximately the same information, but which are different in their linguistic structure can be said to differ in style (Hockett, 1958 ; 556).

According to the Transformational grammarians (cf. Ohmann, 1964), style lies in the process of selecting one of the many transformations which relate the deep structure with its surface representations. It is interesting to raise the question: why does one choose one type of optional transformation as against another? The functional perspective of the study of literary style suggests that stylistic devices employed in a literary work constitute a trap and a cage in which the literary object is captured. Secondly, as pointed out by Riffatarre (1959 : 413), it also suggests that literary style
is the written, individual form of literary intent, i.e., "style is understood as an emphasis (expressive, affective or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed by the linguistic structure without alteration of meaning; which is to say that language
expresses and that style stress ..." It must also be emphasized that the linguistic element of the style that stresses can only be experienced by placing oneself within the world of the poetic object. Inquiring into the process as to how this knowing of stylistic meaning is given to us when we read Dylan Thomas: "Do not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", Macleish, the poet-critic, has the following to say:

We can agree that whatever it is we know in this poem, we know only in the poem. It is not a knowledge we can extract from the poem like meat from a nut and carry off. It is something the poem means - something that is gone when the poem goes and recovered only by turning to the poem's words. And not only by returning to the poem's words hut by returning to them within the poem. If we alter them, if we change their order, though leaving their sense much as it is, if we speak them so that their movement changes, their meaning changes also (Macleish, 1960 : 20).

Let us at this point see what the nature of a literary work is and how a literary work as 'expressive form' differs from 'referential symbol'. It is commonly agreed that both literary creation and sentence articulation are verbal in essence. However, there is a vital difference between the two. Semanticists have pointed out that language as
a code is not an end in itself. According to Chafe (1970 : 15), "Language is a system which mediates, in a highly complex way, between the universe of meaning and the universe of sound". Similarly, it can be said that "in the sentence we experience language not as an object, not a closed system, but as a mediation ... In the sentence and through the sentence, language escapes (transcends itself) towards what it says" (Ricoeur, 1960). Contrary to this, in literary creations the function of language goes much beyond that of denotation and mediation. Language here does not only mean but also exists: it does not merely refer to objects of the outside world, but also becomes an object in itself. In a work of literature the transparency of a verbal symbol - a phenomenon arising out of the referential role of language - gets realized as an opaque object like a mirror in which the literary intent throws its reflection with a quality that makes the life encaged in the work a dense world. It is for this reason that it cannot strictly be said to have meaning; what it does have is import - life lived and felt, the matrix of mentality (Langer, 1937).

Scholars like Richards (1926) have talked about the uses of language - scientific (denotative) and poetic (connotative). Similarly, Langer (1967) has talked of symbols in art and art-symbol. According to her, language is the symbolic form of rational thought, and that is why we call rational cogitation as 'discursive'. Metaphors, images, etc., which are symbols in art, generally have the discursive properties of language, and thus behave like usual linguistic symbols. Secondly, they serve as elements to create the art-symbol, i.e., the expressive form. Contrary to this, the art-symbol is the expressive
form. According to her;

It (the art-symbol) is a symbol in a special and derivative sense, because it does not fulfil all the functions of a true symbol: it formulates and objectifies experience for direct intellectual perception, or intuition but it does not abstract a concept for discursive thought ... The symbol in art is a metaphor, an image with overt or covert literal signification; the art-symbol is the absolute image - the image of what otherwise would be irrational, as it is literally ineffable (Langer, 1937 : 139).

Langer's contention that the difference between the art-symbol and symbols in arts is not only one of kind but also of function, can be questioned from the standpoint of the organization of language in a literary work. For example, Srivastava (1983) has identified, within the poem, three distinct but organically integrated levels; (a) the level of sentence symbols, (b) the level of symbols in art, and (c) the level of art-symbol. The last of these is shown as having two contexts of existence: potential, i.e., art-symbol, and actualized, i.e., aesthetic symbol. He contends that all these levels and their corresponding units are inherently verbal in nature, and hence the difference is merely of function and not of kind.

While rejecting the two uses of language (Richards, 1926) and the dichotomy proposed by Langer (1957), we wish to propose two uses of literary language within the overall construction principle of literary artefact. We would like to argue that the linguistic component which becomes an integral part of the art-object, signifying both form and content, is a part of overt style. All verbal elements that constitute covert style belong to the domain of poetic function. Contrary to this, rhetorical elements belong to the domain of overt style which has two levels of existence: disengagable form (signifier level) and detachable content (signified level). This distinction also brings out the concept of 'verbal beauty' from two different angles: one from within the poem, and the other from without, i.e., embellishment, ornamentation, word-play, etc. As covert style is not isolable and exists in the dialectics of form and content of a verbal expression, the language employed as an element of this covert style can only be seen in the perspective of literary function. On the other hand, overt style can be peeled off from the work of art and can be analysed in terms of linguistic conventions, poetical language, decorum, oration and styles of different periods and genres, etc.

To conclude, the relationship between language and literature, on the one hand, and between linguistic and critical aspects of literary studies, on the other, is complex and multidimensional. The language/literature problem is not confined to either denotative and connotative meaning, or merely to the banal and creative use of language, but has several other dimensions which have hitherto escaped the most sensitive scholars of language and literature. In this paper we have simply pointed out the multiple functions and dimensions of significance with which language enters the work of verbal art.