How Literature Elevates Us

In light of Tuesday night's presentation on Picasso, Storytelling and The Unseen Masterpiece, this seemed a suitable follow-up while being a nod to Throwback Thursday. This originally appeared on August 19, five summers ago.

In addition to the philosophy club which we host, Susie has been for ten years involved with a Barnes & Noble classic books club in which each month the group reads and discusses some of the world's great literature. The group has seen its share of ebb and flow but one constant throughout has been the classics, literature that goes beyond its moment in time.

What's the difference between a good book and a classic? To illustrate, I'll point to the business book Built to Last by Jim Collins. In Collins' analysis, the great companies are those that have dedicated themselves to the long haul. They hang their shingle on the word excellence at every level of the game. By way of contrast, and this was the plight of the tech bubble, many companies were being built to flip. That is, from the outside they looked like good companies but the management disregarded strengthening the foundations for the sole aim of getting bought out at a very high price, bringing profits the stakeholders.

So it is that writers have different aims when they produce books. The Jonestown Massacre took place the year I worked in a bookstore in Puerto Rico, in 1978. The Peoples Temple tragedy occurred in November, and to my utter amazement two books appeared on this topic before the end of the year. These books, long forgotten now, would not be deemed literature. They were rushed to market with the intent of exploiting the moment and are examples of a "built to flip" style of writing.

Books written to exploit the moment are not necessarily bad books, and can be informative, often timely and have a measure of value, though many are clearly written with the hope of making a buck, its only aim quite transparent. On the other hand, classics aspire to something greater. Classic fiction strives to participate in the great dialogue, our human story, bringing additional light into the great battle of light verses darkness. Unlike books on how to make a killing on Wall Street or how to raise your son to be a doctor, the great stories wrestle with ethical issues, the problem of evil and questions like Why am I here? Where did I come from? Who am I and what is my life about?

In other words, the great books deal with great themes.

Another factor in the great books is the writing itself. The importance of the theme motivates the great writers to strive for a perfection of language that is effective for higher purposes, laboring over his selection of words and sentences to more eloquently convey the ideas and the story. Hence the phrase belles letres, beautiful letters. The aim is not only a worthy theme, but writing that is worthy of the theme.

My view on these matters has been significantly shaped by John Gardner, who wrote, "Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations." (The Art of Fiction)

Gardner's high view of literature stems from a high view of humankind.

Leo Tolstoy had this to say about the writer's task: "The main purpose of art... is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets one cannot say in simple words.... Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."

There are two metaphors I've frequently used regarding our personal stories, which help us not only understand our human condition but also help us to better understand God. The first is the image of a chandelier. Picture a large ball of cut glass (or jewels, diamonds, whatever) and in the middle is the light, which we cannot see, but which is reflected through each jewel. We are the jewels. Our stories, and transparency, make the light more vivid. We each make a contribution to the human story, and our role is to do it the best we are able, first in learning how to understand our stories and then fine tuning our ability to communicate the story.

The second image is that of a fly's eye. (Yes, I know flies are creepy to to people, but go with me on this.) The eye of a fly has two thousand faces, which enables it to see in multiple directions. These multiple images are then synthesized in the fly's brain into something coherent. So it is with our own manifold stories. Each contributes to the whole of our understanding of the human situation.

Remember growing up and thinking every family was like yours? Then you discover that not only families are different, lives are totally different based on where you are from, etc.

I'm out of time and will have to leave off discussing Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country or Andre Gide's Two Symphonies, Melville's Moby Dick or Dickens, Conrad and Twain.

If you write, aim high. In the process you will not only achieve more for yourself, but might lift others as well. Let your light shine and your story be told.

Terrorists Preying (cont.)

It’s Short Story Monday again. This is the first multi part story I have begun to post, and I’m having my doubts about the efficacy of trying to share such long stories in this manner. If it's a page turner that you can't put down, then such a piecemeal approach feels stifling, though Dickens did it with his weekly serials. On the other hand, a newspaper serial has a lot more room to work with than a blog, with it's unspoken prescribed 500 word limit.

Last Monday I offered up the beginning of Terrorists Preying. It is a first person account about a former art student from the east coast who now lives in Minneapolis. He visits the Walker Fine Arts Museum whereupon he unexpectedly witnesses a scene of great violence.

That scene of a group of three men assaulting an innocent man in an art gallery actually took place, but not in a gallery. It occurred in a dream I had one night twenty years ago. I mulled over where to go with it and wrote last week’s section, believing it a story. When I shared what I had written with a literary professor, he suggested that it was only a beginning. How did it change this man’s life? His soul? What happens next?

This, I agreed, was my homework assignment. What happens next?

Part two begins…

It’s evening and I’ve been changed.

I'm sitting in a chair, listening to music, recording my thoughts, trying to get in touch with my pain, trying to find a way to get inside myself. I don't even know where to begin. I've witnessed a terrible thing and I can't dismiss it. Why didn't I do anything? I want to excuse myself and I can't. Why did I just watch? Why didn't I scream? Or run for help? Or try to stop them? But what bothers me most is that I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything.

The hero regrets his passivity in the face of such violence. He tries to deal with it, gets drunk, remembers Les Garnet from college, his quest for fame at any cost. He recalls a dialogue in which he sees clearly that he and Garnet have different values.

He decides that he will return to the gallery and see if he can meet up with Les again.

I remember these things and wonder if I'm not watching someone else's life.

These were my thoughts as I left my car and began walking the two block hike to the Walker. It was late morning, the day after the assault. A steamy breeze whooshing through the shrubbery and trees blended with the traffic on Hennepin Avenue to create a white noise backdrop against which my memories performed. The headache remained lodged behind my eyeballs.

Once inside I was struck by how utterly different my experience of this museum was from the previous day. Was it only yesterday I was here?

First, the people were different. I looked at them differently, wondering to myself, "What if it had been her?" and "What if he had been the unlucky one?" What were these people thinking? What did they know about the thing that happened? Were they even aware of it? I found myself studying their faces for clues.

A middle aged man with a fat black mustache looked at me suspiciously and I became conscious of how different I was from the rest of these people. The thing I experienced has stained me.

The art today is different, too. The famous paintings are as wallpaper that has no attraction whatsoever now as I walk past on my way to Gallery 7. The Chuck Close piece gives me a start when I round that corner there, but as for the rest, it may as well be beige on beige.

I make the assumption that this is a temporary feeling. Then again, one never knows.

So I experienced the Walker differently this second time through, having been immunized against those very images that one day previous induced catalytic tremors in my soul.

I understand now why criminals return to the scene of the crime. It is not simply to see if there have been clues left behind. No, it's more than that. They return to reconcile themselves to the reality of horror. There has been violence, created and experienced, and they return to pay homage--in disbelief and in awe. Not a conscious homage, but in that same emotional vein. Will the blood stains still be there?

As I climbed the stairs leading to the Garnet/Benders show, the muffled sound of happy conversation reached me through the closed door of the gallery. The moment I touched the handle, the door flew open, revealing a man in his mid-thirties with rolling waves of thick dark hair, dark eyes and wide, fat lips. He wore the eager look of a Little Leaguer on his way to the Dairy Queen after a big win. He turned to say something to someone standing inside the gallery out of my view.

I enjoyed the process of writing Terrorists Preying, trying to let the characters determine where it was going. In many cases, I know where I want the story to go. But in this instance, it’s almost the closest I came to actually letting the hero decide where it should go.

To finish this story continue here ... One of my favorite parts is still up ahead.

My Near Death Experience

This past winter the flu that was going around grabbed hold of me and shook me hard. I went through two forty-eight hour stretches where I couldn’t sleep, had fever and chills, and at one point literally wished I could die.

Then my life flashed before my eyes. The strange part was that half of it was fiction.

In one scene, I was sitting with William Shakespeare. He -- or we I am not sure – was trying to work some humor into the third act of Taming of the Shrew. I told him that the notion of having Petruchio stick an eggplant in his pants and strut around on stage as if it were a codpiece was a bit too lowbrow.

“Bill,” I said, “You can do better.”

He seemed to take great pleasure from imagining this scene, but finally cut the eggplant. I then took a knife and sliced another piece off, and he cut off another slice and in a few minutes we had a plateful of eggplant slices. I suggested we pour tomato sauce and cheeses on it, and bake it. “What would you call something like this?” he inquired. I hesitated, then suggested we call it eggplant parmesan, and he said maybe he could work this into a story he was developing about Venice. He was torn between Death in Venice and The Merchant of Venice as a title. I proposed the latter. (Tom Mann would later be relieved.)

In another scene that flashed before my eyes I was manicuring Charles Dickens’ nails. He was chattering on and on about Great Expectations, how much it just seemed to be flowing right out of him. He had evidently shown me an early draft of the first half, because I told him I thought the scene with the eggplant was quite hilarious. He leaned back in his chair and frowned.

“What?” I asked with my eyebrows tilted upwards.

“I didn’t think the humor was working in that scene at all. Besides, it didn’t tie to anything else in the story,” he said.

“It was an anecdote,” I said leaning forward.

He leaned a little further back, as if I had bad breath, which I may have had because of a bad tooth. He shook his head in a dejected way. And finally said, “I really don’t think there is anything funny that you can do with eggplants. Do you?”

I replied, “Maybe that’s why I am having such a hard time coming up with a punchline for ‘Why did the eggplant cross the road?’”

He gave me a quizzical look, and the next thing I knew I was trembling violently in a sweat on my couch, remembering my flu, grateful for life.

Having survived my ordeal, I have great expectations for the next chapter of my life, whatever it brings.

Eat healthy, stay fit, and you have a good day, too.