Some thoughts
“I believe the fabric of the entire universe is made of one continuous thread that everything in the universe is in some way connected to everything else. Therefore, all the examples of literature we read this semester — the short story, the play, the poetry, and the novel — are linked, and not just by the accident of language. They are woven of that same universal thread, and our little bit of the universe would not be the same without any one of them. They are all connected by form (more on that in a bit) and by content. They are connected in terms of content because I believe all literature exists to serve a single purpose: to give us a better understanding of who we are, and a greater ability to know others and thereby help us to understand others, not destroy them. They (those "others") are, after all, of the same universal thread, the same endless supply of star-stuff as we. All the works we read are connected by form in that all the various forms of literature are much more alike than disparate. After all, they are many voices saying the same thing: that we are worth it.”
“A book consists of all possible permutations. That is, it is at once One and Many. Literature is holographic, intertextual; the part is necessarily a fragment of the whole, and yet it is intricately connected with every other part of the whole: somehow it is that whole. And the whole remains the dream of every author. But just as the set of all sets cannot be a member of itself, so the part cannot logically be tantamount to the whole. Yet, it is!”
Floyd Merrell
Merrell couldn’t have said it better. In the thesis statement given, there are two distinct claims that are being made. While one states that all literature is connected in form, the other states that all literature is also connected in content. While I choose to agree with the former, I will go on to refute the latter in a minor way. In the paper that follows, the above statement is discussed and dissected, to conclude why it may be true or false.
Allow me to begin by comparing literature to religion, for in some of our lives, that is the role the written word plays. It occupies a pedestal, where each work of art is likened to an object worthy of worship, where each piece of literature leads us closer to a truth we never knew. Going by that premise, we can state that we’ve worshipped many gods so far and bowed at several shrines. To say it in the words of Ramakrishna, a mystic of 19th-century India, ‘We are all calling on the same God. Like one mother, who has prepared dishes to suit the stomachs of her children; Religions to suit different aspirants, times and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths.’ And so it is with literature: different authors, churning out classics to suit their readers, their times, their ethnographic survey results, but all borrowing from one fount of wisdom – what the above statement calls the continuous universal thread.
The above mentioned fount is an extremely interesting piece of architecture. Let us for a moment assume that all literature is drawn from this common fount. And to describe that fount, let us gather that it is a bottomless pit, comprising the deepest of human emotions, the wisest of mortal minds and words – every single one of them. The contents of this fount by itself, is sheer proof of the fact that all literature is woven out of the same thread. And here’s why: Given that writing is the result of an emotional need to express oneself, that literature is literally just laying bare the recesses of one’s mind, soul and heart, and given that these emotions are the very link that connects one human being to another, we reach the conclusion that all literature is linked, inextricably, but not inadvertently. And so we see blatant proof of the above in all works of literature, even the few pieces we’ve studied over the course of the year.
William Carlos Williams wrote The Red Wheelbarrow while caring for a sick child. While there are several interpretations to the poem, about its imagery, and its color, and its great choice of words, most interpretations miss the cruel streak that lies somewhere beneath those lines. When the poet said so much depends on the wheelbarrow and the chickens that lay close by, and then threw in red into the picture, did he mean to paint a life-giving image? Or did he mean to say that so much of life and death itself, depended on that wheelbarrow, which had the power to crush those chickens that lay on the side, wet by the same rain that glazed the wheelbarrow, and allow blood – red – splatter across the scene? Was he talking about the cruelty that could be caused in a single move of the wheelbarrow? And if yes, how different is his expression of cruelty from that of Charlotte Gilman’s portrayal of it in her story, The Yellow Wall Paper? What was she empathizing with in her story? The great tragedy of a manic depressive? Or the subtle thread of male cruelty that confined a woman’s convoluted mind to a claustrophobic nursery? What is amazing about both pieces of literature is that while Charlotte Gillman chose to paint her picture or weave her masterpiece with many skeins of thread, William Carlos Williams chose to weave his not so obvious story in a few lines. Yet, did it attack at the very root of the emotion that is being packed into the story? Did it manage to relate to the reader, irrespective of length, and form? The answer to that would be a definite yes, and goes to show that one only need look close enough, before connections to everything begin to surface.
Consider the two poems we studied and their two poets. Gerard Manley Hopkins begins his song of praise, in words that could not be clearer, giving glory for everything that is beautiful, for freshness, colour, pattern and variety. He manages to cover so much of God’s creation in a few lines, and makes a vehement statement of God’s unchanging beauty by the end of it. The reader cannot help but be filled with a sense of awe, and look on at the exquisite picture that the poet has painted. Hopkins chooses to write in a meter of his own, in a style he prefers, and on a theme that means the most to him. Cut to another poem, another time, another gender. Here is Elizabeth Bishop, writing about a Filling Station. Who would’ve thought that a poem could be written on a grime destination such as this, and one so beautiful, that we study it and ponder its meaning many years down the line? And who would’ve thought that she writes about the very same theme that Hopkins chose to write about. Yet she picks a different setting, a different image, and a whole set of new characters, to convey the exact same emotion that Hopkins conveys. Both poets talk about the striking beauty in imagery that they’re familiar with: Hopkins about scenes in nature that he’s admired and Bishop, about scenes in a setting closer home. Yet the end result, tugs at that distinct universal thread of beauty that lies buried in every human heart. And every reader, no matter where or when, is capable of building their own mental image of the poets’ description, thanks to the common thread that runs through our veins. It is the thread that links us all as readers of poetry, as admirers of beauty, and links in the endless chain of life and literature. Different forms, the same beauty!
Proof of this is seen in Brannigan’s New historicism and cultural materialism. An eternal philosophical riddle of our times, has always been, does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? And what better art form to answer that question than literature itself? What better record of life than the study of history. There is no doubt that there is immense truth in the statement that history repeats itself. And so it is with literature, with writes that borrow from the same fount of inspiration, there is bound to be a certain degree of repetition, a commonality that binds and ties us together with the universal thread. Literature regularly invites us to believe in it as a narrative or representation of the past. It needs our belief, or at the very least, the suspension of our disbelief, in order to tell its stories of history, community, the individual, and everything else. When we consider the similarities between history and literature, Brannigan notes that the only difference he can find is that history was intended to be true. Literary theories and critical practices are always in transition, because they are always in history, always subject to change and constantly being revised and reused. Every new historicist reading, every reading of a new historicist reading, reinvents the concerns and methods of new historicism. The challenge which literary theories offer the reader is not the necessity of learning how to reinvent the theory and the text. The challenge of theory is the challenge to invent conversations between texts and theories, between one text and other texts, between texts and the histories and discourses of which they are part. If this sounds like the creation of imaginary friends, it is because there is something of childish play in reading, something of the childish fascination with invention and gaming in the act of conversing with texts. And yet, at the same time, these acts of playing with texts could not be more serious. All texts are about representations, and representations are about how we see ourselves to others. Proof of this is seen in the way native Americans were colonized and subjugated. Why? Because the Europeans consistently represented the native Americans as savage, wild people in need of Western civilization and culture, but in order to avail of the gifts of European civilization, their savagery had to be tamed, punished and controlled (Brannigan 219).
The above argument goes to show, that just as there is an irrevocable tie that binds all of mankind to all of history, irrespective of past, present or future; so it is with literature that is written across time periods and audiences, yet manages to make a connection with that universal thread buried deep within us.
Moving on to the second claim that is mentioned, that states that all literature exists for a common purpose. Earlier on in this paper, there is mentioned the analogy of literature like religion, is many gods, one truth. There’s more to the above analogy than meets the eye: sure, religion is like literature in that it is different versions of the same thing. But in more ways than one, literature reflects religion and its properties. It’s a balm that the masses turn to for hope and sustenance, it’s a temple that the rational, the delusional and the conventional seek hope in. It’s a weapon to those that chose to react and rant against those powers that be, and the forces that exist and exert their influence.
While the statement made in the claim as to why literature exists is this: ‘to give us a better understanding of who we are, and a greater ability to know others and thereby help us to understand others’, I would disagree with it slightly. Not in saying that this is not the purpose of literature, but in saying this is only the byproduct of the ultimate purpose of literature, which is solely: expression of the self. It serves an extremely ironic purpose – here is a medium that seeks to alleviate pains of the world at large, and yet, it is produced solely to relieve oneself of a deep emotion that is dying to be let lose. The greatest of writings, the most poignant of poetry, the novels that struck a chord with audiences across the world are not pieces of writing that were written to impress or to empathize or to connect, but simply to put on paper a burden that weighed heavily on the mind, a story that marinated in the writer’s imagination for days and would cause great pain if it weren’t penned, an emotion that was all-pervasive and needed to be expressed, not for praise, or accomplishment or flattery, but just for self expression.
Let us take for example the widely read, and greatly loved book: The Diary of Anne Frank. Did the young girl write those words knowing that it would be a best seller or that it would sell thousands of copies or that she would touch the hearts of many? None of the above. Anne wrote with the sole purpose of self expression and self-preservation in mind. And that is the key to great literature that is timeless and unaffected by form or even, I dare to say, content.
On the other hand, let us consider an author who writes with the aim to sell, to be a best-seller, to make as much money as he possibly can. His writing is not one of self-expression. His style may titillate, please, excite, arouse and even move to tears, but it was not written from the heart, the temple of the universal thread. And it is such literature, that is written from the heart that is sheer proof of the fact that literature exists but to self-express!
It is that quality that ties all content in literature together: the ability to be an exorcist of deep emotion and expression. Having stated this purpose, every other purpose of literature, cascades from it, and begins to be sub-parts to a larger whole.
Good natured critics early in the day agreed to the above argument. In effect, what they did was to separate literature from morality by refusing to judge a literary work on moral grounds, in good part because they more and more thought of literature as self-expression, in accordance with the increasingly popular idea of the natural goodness of man and hence the natural goodness of the poet’s emotions. Critics thought of their chief duty as interpreting and appreciating the author’s works rather than judging them, and hence in effect repudiated the fundamental premise of the purpose of literature which Neo-classical considered critical to the dignity and esteem in which literature should be held (Trace 23)
Secondary purposes of literature have been agreed upon by several since time immemorial. Plato argued that the tragedy, comedy and epic stirred up emotions that must be kept under check. Aristotle in reply to Plato’s claim accepted that certain kinds of poetry have powerful emotional effects on the audience, but the function of this emotion he says is cathartic in nature. Aristotle explains the cathartic effect of literature, by comparing it with the healing of people suffering from hysterical outbreaks of emotion, and the role of ‘cathartic songs’ in healing them, which arouse their emotions and thereby relieve them. Jacob Bernay lends another interpretation and states how the best audience for a tragedy, in terms of its emotional effect, would surely be an audience of people who are emotionally disturbed and unbalanced. Aristotle implies in his writings that ordinary audiences are inferior to the man of judgement, who is in control of his emotions. The Poetics assume that normal audiences in normal emotional states, visit literature the way they visit a doctor (Janko 3).
Borges’ “The Dream of Coleridge”, tells of a thirteenth-century emperor who dreams a palace and builds it, and a nineteenth century poet dreams a poem about the same palace, unaware that the structure was derived from a dream. This puzzle gives rise, Borges conjectures, to the notion that the series of dreams, poems, and labors has not ended. Perhaps in fact, the series is endless, or perhaps the last person to dream will have the key. At any rate, whoever would have compared palace to poem “would have seen that they were essentially the same”. This is a vision of the qualitative infinity of a timeless order of textuality. This interconnected fabric, whether supposedly in reference to reality, fiction or dream, necessarily includes both the world of readers and authors as well as texts. Should it disconcert us or disquiet us to realize that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote or Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? No, for on the contrary, if the characters in a story can be readers and spectators, then we, their readers or spectators can be fictitious. For universal history is an infinite, sacred book that all men read, write and try to understand; and in which they too are written (Merrrell 192). While all of the above claims continue to coexist with the several forms of literature, while the critics can continue to state their reasons why literature should or shouldn’t exist, how it should or shouldn’t be read, all that matters at the end of the day, is that literature will continue to pervade humanity and course through our veins, binding us together with the invisible, universal thread that lies buried within us all.
“A book consists of all possible permutations. That is, it is at once One and Many. Literature is holographic, intertextual; the part is necessarily a fragment of the whole, and yet it is intricately connected with every other part of the whole: somehow it is that whole. And the whole remains the dream of every author. But just as the set of all sets cannot be a member of itself, so the part cannot logically be tantamount to the whole. Yet, it is!”
Floyd Merrell
Merrell couldn’t have said it better. In the thesis statement given, there are two distinct claims that are being made. While one states that all literature is connected in form, the other states that all literature is also connected in content. While I choose to agree with the former, I will go on to refute the latter in a minor way. In the paper that follows, the above statement is discussed and dissected, to conclude why it may be true or false.
Allow me to begin by comparing literature to religion, for in some of our lives, that is the role the written word plays. It occupies a pedestal, where each work of art is likened to an object worthy of worship, where each piece of literature leads us closer to a truth we never knew. Going by that premise, we can state that we’ve worshipped many gods so far and bowed at several shrines. To say it in the words of Ramakrishna, a mystic of 19th-century India, ‘We are all calling on the same God. Like one mother, who has prepared dishes to suit the stomachs of her children; Religions to suit different aspirants, times and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths.’ And so it is with literature: different authors, churning out classics to suit their readers, their times, their ethnographic survey results, but all borrowing from one fount of wisdom – what the above statement calls the continuous universal thread.
The above mentioned fount is an extremely interesting piece of architecture. Let us for a moment assume that all literature is drawn from this common fount. And to describe that fount, let us gather that it is a bottomless pit, comprising the deepest of human emotions, the wisest of mortal minds and words – every single one of them. The contents of this fount by itself, is sheer proof of the fact that all literature is woven out of the same thread. And here’s why: Given that writing is the result of an emotional need to express oneself, that literature is literally just laying bare the recesses of one’s mind, soul and heart, and given that these emotions are the very link that connects one human being to another, we reach the conclusion that all literature is linked, inextricably, but not inadvertently. And so we see blatant proof of the above in all works of literature, even the few pieces we’ve studied over the course of the year.
William Carlos Williams wrote The Red Wheelbarrow while caring for a sick child. While there are several interpretations to the poem, about its imagery, and its color, and its great choice of words, most interpretations miss the cruel streak that lies somewhere beneath those lines. When the poet said so much depends on the wheelbarrow and the chickens that lay close by, and then threw in red into the picture, did he mean to paint a life-giving image? Or did he mean to say that so much of life and death itself, depended on that wheelbarrow, which had the power to crush those chickens that lay on the side, wet by the same rain that glazed the wheelbarrow, and allow blood – red – splatter across the scene? Was he talking about the cruelty that could be caused in a single move of the wheelbarrow? And if yes, how different is his expression of cruelty from that of Charlotte Gilman’s portrayal of it in her story, The Yellow Wall Paper? What was she empathizing with in her story? The great tragedy of a manic depressive? Or the subtle thread of male cruelty that confined a woman’s convoluted mind to a claustrophobic nursery? What is amazing about both pieces of literature is that while Charlotte Gillman chose to paint her picture or weave her masterpiece with many skeins of thread, William Carlos Williams chose to weave his not so obvious story in a few lines. Yet, did it attack at the very root of the emotion that is being packed into the story? Did it manage to relate to the reader, irrespective of length, and form? The answer to that would be a definite yes, and goes to show that one only need look close enough, before connections to everything begin to surface.
Consider the two poems we studied and their two poets. Gerard Manley Hopkins begins his song of praise, in words that could not be clearer, giving glory for everything that is beautiful, for freshness, colour, pattern and variety. He manages to cover so much of God’s creation in a few lines, and makes a vehement statement of God’s unchanging beauty by the end of it. The reader cannot help but be filled with a sense of awe, and look on at the exquisite picture that the poet has painted. Hopkins chooses to write in a meter of his own, in a style he prefers, and on a theme that means the most to him. Cut to another poem, another time, another gender. Here is Elizabeth Bishop, writing about a Filling Station. Who would’ve thought that a poem could be written on a grime destination such as this, and one so beautiful, that we study it and ponder its meaning many years down the line? And who would’ve thought that she writes about the very same theme that Hopkins chose to write about. Yet she picks a different setting, a different image, and a whole set of new characters, to convey the exact same emotion that Hopkins conveys. Both poets talk about the striking beauty in imagery that they’re familiar with: Hopkins about scenes in nature that he’s admired and Bishop, about scenes in a setting closer home. Yet the end result, tugs at that distinct universal thread of beauty that lies buried in every human heart. And every reader, no matter where or when, is capable of building their own mental image of the poets’ description, thanks to the common thread that runs through our veins. It is the thread that links us all as readers of poetry, as admirers of beauty, and links in the endless chain of life and literature. Different forms, the same beauty!
Proof of this is seen in Brannigan’s New historicism and cultural materialism. An eternal philosophical riddle of our times, has always been, does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? And what better art form to answer that question than literature itself? What better record of life than the study of history. There is no doubt that there is immense truth in the statement that history repeats itself. And so it is with literature, with writes that borrow from the same fount of inspiration, there is bound to be a certain degree of repetition, a commonality that binds and ties us together with the universal thread. Literature regularly invites us to believe in it as a narrative or representation of the past. It needs our belief, or at the very least, the suspension of our disbelief, in order to tell its stories of history, community, the individual, and everything else. When we consider the similarities between history and literature, Brannigan notes that the only difference he can find is that history was intended to be true. Literary theories and critical practices are always in transition, because they are always in history, always subject to change and constantly being revised and reused. Every new historicist reading, every reading of a new historicist reading, reinvents the concerns and methods of new historicism. The challenge which literary theories offer the reader is not the necessity of learning how to reinvent the theory and the text. The challenge of theory is the challenge to invent conversations between texts and theories, between one text and other texts, between texts and the histories and discourses of which they are part. If this sounds like the creation of imaginary friends, it is because there is something of childish play in reading, something of the childish fascination with invention and gaming in the act of conversing with texts. And yet, at the same time, these acts of playing with texts could not be more serious. All texts are about representations, and representations are about how we see ourselves to others. Proof of this is seen in the way native Americans were colonized and subjugated. Why? Because the Europeans consistently represented the native Americans as savage, wild people in need of Western civilization and culture, but in order to avail of the gifts of European civilization, their savagery had to be tamed, punished and controlled (Brannigan 219).
The above argument goes to show, that just as there is an irrevocable tie that binds all of mankind to all of history, irrespective of past, present or future; so it is with literature that is written across time periods and audiences, yet manages to make a connection with that universal thread buried deep within us.
Moving on to the second claim that is mentioned, that states that all literature exists for a common purpose. Earlier on in this paper, there is mentioned the analogy of literature like religion, is many gods, one truth. There’s more to the above analogy than meets the eye: sure, religion is like literature in that it is different versions of the same thing. But in more ways than one, literature reflects religion and its properties. It’s a balm that the masses turn to for hope and sustenance, it’s a temple that the rational, the delusional and the conventional seek hope in. It’s a weapon to those that chose to react and rant against those powers that be, and the forces that exist and exert their influence.
While the statement made in the claim as to why literature exists is this: ‘to give us a better understanding of who we are, and a greater ability to know others and thereby help us to understand others’, I would disagree with it slightly. Not in saying that this is not the purpose of literature, but in saying this is only the byproduct of the ultimate purpose of literature, which is solely: expression of the self. It serves an extremely ironic purpose – here is a medium that seeks to alleviate pains of the world at large, and yet, it is produced solely to relieve oneself of a deep emotion that is dying to be let lose. The greatest of writings, the most poignant of poetry, the novels that struck a chord with audiences across the world are not pieces of writing that were written to impress or to empathize or to connect, but simply to put on paper a burden that weighed heavily on the mind, a story that marinated in the writer’s imagination for days and would cause great pain if it weren’t penned, an emotion that was all-pervasive and needed to be expressed, not for praise, or accomplishment or flattery, but just for self expression.
Let us take for example the widely read, and greatly loved book: The Diary of Anne Frank. Did the young girl write those words knowing that it would be a best seller or that it would sell thousands of copies or that she would touch the hearts of many? None of the above. Anne wrote with the sole purpose of self expression and self-preservation in mind. And that is the key to great literature that is timeless and unaffected by form or even, I dare to say, content.
On the other hand, let us consider an author who writes with the aim to sell, to be a best-seller, to make as much money as he possibly can. His writing is not one of self-expression. His style may titillate, please, excite, arouse and even move to tears, but it was not written from the heart, the temple of the universal thread. And it is such literature, that is written from the heart that is sheer proof of the fact that literature exists but to self-express!
It is that quality that ties all content in literature together: the ability to be an exorcist of deep emotion and expression. Having stated this purpose, every other purpose of literature, cascades from it, and begins to be sub-parts to a larger whole.
Good natured critics early in the day agreed to the above argument. In effect, what they did was to separate literature from morality by refusing to judge a literary work on moral grounds, in good part because they more and more thought of literature as self-expression, in accordance with the increasingly popular idea of the natural goodness of man and hence the natural goodness of the poet’s emotions. Critics thought of their chief duty as interpreting and appreciating the author’s works rather than judging them, and hence in effect repudiated the fundamental premise of the purpose of literature which Neo-classical considered critical to the dignity and esteem in which literature should be held (Trace 23)
Secondary purposes of literature have been agreed upon by several since time immemorial. Plato argued that the tragedy, comedy and epic stirred up emotions that must be kept under check. Aristotle in reply to Plato’s claim accepted that certain kinds of poetry have powerful emotional effects on the audience, but the function of this emotion he says is cathartic in nature. Aristotle explains the cathartic effect of literature, by comparing it with the healing of people suffering from hysterical outbreaks of emotion, and the role of ‘cathartic songs’ in healing them, which arouse their emotions and thereby relieve them. Jacob Bernay lends another interpretation and states how the best audience for a tragedy, in terms of its emotional effect, would surely be an audience of people who are emotionally disturbed and unbalanced. Aristotle implies in his writings that ordinary audiences are inferior to the man of judgement, who is in control of his emotions. The Poetics assume that normal audiences in normal emotional states, visit literature the way they visit a doctor (Janko 3).
Borges’ “The Dream of Coleridge”, tells of a thirteenth-century emperor who dreams a palace and builds it, and a nineteenth century poet dreams a poem about the same palace, unaware that the structure was derived from a dream. This puzzle gives rise, Borges conjectures, to the notion that the series of dreams, poems, and labors has not ended. Perhaps in fact, the series is endless, or perhaps the last person to dream will have the key. At any rate, whoever would have compared palace to poem “would have seen that they were essentially the same”. This is a vision of the qualitative infinity of a timeless order of textuality. This interconnected fabric, whether supposedly in reference to reality, fiction or dream, necessarily includes both the world of readers and authors as well as texts. Should it disconcert us or disquiet us to realize that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote or Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? No, for on the contrary, if the characters in a story can be readers and spectators, then we, their readers or spectators can be fictitious. For universal history is an infinite, sacred book that all men read, write and try to understand; and in which they too are written (Merrrell 192). While all of the above claims continue to coexist with the several forms of literature, while the critics can continue to state their reasons why literature should or shouldn’t exist, how it should or shouldn’t be read, all that matters at the end of the day, is that literature will continue to pervade humanity and course through our veins, binding us together with the invisible, universal thread that lies buried within us all.
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