A literal should mean, I am to be taken literally

Nonsense. Literals are always interpreted. The literal 1234 in the expression $a = 1234; is a group of characters, yet they are interpreted as a number. And somehome, the quotes in the literal "abc" are removed.

Without interpretation, the compiler wouldn't know where the string ends and/or wouldn't allow certain characters to be part of the string. For example, what if there was a quote in your ASCII art? How would Perl know the string doesn't end at that quote, but rather the following one? (or the one after that?) For single quoted strings, you preceed the quote with a backslash. Of course, now we need a method of allowing backslashes followed by single quotes...

Whenever something is embedded in something else, be it a string in a Perl source file, a object in a data file or text between HTML tags, some form of encoding or escaping is required. To be crystal clear: You can't have strings and Perl code in the same file without some form of escaping or encoding.