Reconciling a Literary Worldview
Please don’t analyze this.
Considering “I’m not a stock character. I’m a person” is a line 19-year-old me actually delivered to an (in)significant other in the midst of romantic confusion, it’s clear that I have taken my literary education as dogma.
I feel proud. I’m proud because to study literature is to study the human condition, and to study the human condition is to live more conscientiously as a human. I find this to be an exemplary manifestation of the transitive property — art imitates life, life imitates life, and life imitates art. By this logic, it comes as no surprise to me that professors of literature are often the most devoted human rights activists. They majored in empathy, after all.
From Infinite Jest, I’ve learned to evaluate people on the basis of their philosophies, not their vices; from Ulysses, patience — patience and deep breathing; from Norwegian Wood, to relish the beauty of reticence; from The Lost Girl, not to settle; from Lolita, the complexity of sympathy for someone you abhor; and from A Room of One’s Own, the value of space. For the sake of brevity (it’s the soul of wit!), I’ll stop there.
Books have taught me a lot. But what, in absorbing literary texts, have I taught myself? A recent text message clued me in. In a moment when someone catches you being jargon-y outside of the classroom, and you, in an out-of-body-experience twist-of-fate, wonder how long the dangerous habit has unconsciously reverberated, that text message looks like this: “You’re an English major but don’t do that to yourself! Those are externalities. No need for there to be a larger narrative.”
What do you mean, no larger narrative? Isn’t everything housed in a larger narrative? Hello? Anyone? ANYONE? Murakami, back me up!
When I told my dad I was writing this article, that I thought I had a tendency to view my life as an analyzable story, he asked, “Do you have an ending?” I could’ve tried for a clever retort, but I didn’t want to foreshadow.
In literature classes, we operate under the assumption that each textual maneuver is conscious, and therefore important. When strung together, these maneuvers form a multifarious web from which readers and critics make meaning of a writer’s work. I love this concept because connection is beautiful in its execution. It makes literature richer.
But the truth is, life is not a literary text, so it should not be treated as such. Somewhere along the way, I think I permitted myself to use tools gleaned from academia to scour nonexistent subtext for an overarching narrative that’s built on nothing; I didn’t look back afterwards. I’ve allowed enthusiasm to morph into a misplaced habit of analysis that has impacted my worldview and my private interiority. While studying literature might have inspired me to be more conscientious about my relation to the world, I’ve accidentally used it as leverage against myself.
When I remove my cozy literary goggles, what I know I know is that a life that exists off the page doesn’t require scrutiny or a narrative arc to have meaning. It is already rich in its own right. I cannot decipher every action and reaction, and I should not internalize everything in the exterior. There are more effective means of gaining mastery of a situation than through sheer analysis. What’s important is to be selective about what matters, to be appropriately aware, and to recognize when I, the protagonist, create and honor patterns purely for the sake of their connection, for the sake of the narrative.
Studying literature is both a privilege and a burden. Life is much more complex than synecdoche, metonymy, anachronism, archetype, and alliteration. Such devices allow for an artistic rendering of our familiar world, but they are only renderings. Like a funhouse mirror, they are interesting to examine within a wider context, but can be misunderstood if they aren’t taken with a grain of salt.
I’ve been known to pick the salt off pretzels. But I’m working on it.
