How to Read Literature Like a Professor (7 page)

Is my reading greatly enhanced by this knowledge? Perhaps not greatly. Something subtle happens there, but no thunder and lightning. The meaning doesn’t move in the opposite direction or shift radically; if it did, that would be self-defeating, since so many readers would not get the allusion. I
think it’s more that the ending picks up a little greater weight from the association with Isaiah, a greater impact, pathos even. Oh, I think, it isn’t just a twentieth-century problem, this business of brothers having trouble with each other and of young men stumbling and falling; it’s been going on since forever. Most of the great tribulations to which human beings are subject are detailed in Scripture. No jazz, no heroin, no rehab centers, maybe, but trouble very much of the kind Sonny has: the troubled spirit that lies behind the outward modern manifestations of heroin and prison. The weariness and resentment and guilt of the brother, his sense of failure at having broken the promise to his dying mother to protect Sonny—the Bible knows all about that, too.

This depth is what the biblical dimension adds to the story of Sonny and his brother. We no longer see merely the sad and sordid modern story of a jazz musician and his algebra-teacher brother. Instead the story resonates with the richness of distant antecedents, with the power of accumulated myth. The story ceases to be locked in the middle of the twentieth century and becomes timeless and archetypal, speaking of the tensions and difficulties that exist always and everywhere between brothers, with all their caring and pain and guilt and pride and love. And that story never grows old.

B
Y NOW
I’
VE BEATEN YOU SEVERELY
about the head and shoulders with the notion that all literature grows out of other literature. We’re dealing in this case, however, with a pretty loose category, which could include novels, stories, plays, poems, songs, operas, films, television, commercials, and possibly a variety of newer or not-yet-invented electronic media we haven’t even seen. So let’s try being a writer for a moment. You want to borrow from some source to add a bit of flesh to the bare bones of your story. Who ya gonna call?

Actually,
Ghostbusters
is not a bad answer. In the short run. Will people in a hundred years, though, be conversant with film comedy of the 1980s? Maybe not. But they will get it right now. If you want topical resonance, current film or tele
vision may work fine, although the frame of reference as well as the staying power may be a little limited. But let’s think in terms of slightly more canonical sources. The “literary canon,” by the way, is a master list of works that everyone pretends doesn’t exist (the list, not the works) but that we all know matters in some important way. A great deal of argument goes into what—and more important who—is in the canon, which is to say, whose work gets studied in college courses. This being America and not France, there is no academy that actually sets a list of canonical texts. The selection is more de facto. When I was in school, the canon was very white and male. Virginia Woolf, for example, was the only modern British woman writer who made the cut at a lot of schools. Nowadays, she’ll likely be joined by Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell, or any number of others. The list of “great writers” or “great works” is fairly fluid. But back to the problem of literary borrowing.

So, among “traditional” works, from whom should you borrow? Homer? Half of the people who will read that name think of the guy who says “D’oh!” Have you read
The Iliad
lately? Do they read Homer in Homer, Michigan? Do they care about Troy in Troy, Ohio? In the eighteenth century, Homer was a sure bet, although you were more likely to read him in translation than in Greek. But not now, not if you want most of your readers to get the reference. (That’s not a reason not to cite Homer, by the way, only a caution that not everyone will get the message.) Shakespeare, then? After all, he’s been the gold standard for allusion for four hundred years and still is. On the other hand, there’s the highbrow issue—he may turn off some readers who feel you’re trying too hard. Plus, his quotes are like eligible persons of the other sex: all the good ones are taken. Maybe something from the twentieth century. James Joyce? Definitely a problem—so much complexity. T. S.
Eliot? He’s all quotes from elsewhere to begin with. One of the problems with the diversification of the canon is that modern writers can’t assume a common body of knowledge on the part of their readers. What readers know varies so much more than it once did. So what can the writer use for parallels, analogies, plot structures, references, that most of his readers will know?

Kiddie lit.

Yep.
Alice in Wonderland. Treasure Island
. The Narnia novels.
The Wind in the Willows
and
The Cat in the Hat
.
Goodnight Moon
. We may not know Shylock, but we all know Sam I Am. Fairy tales, too, although only the major ones. Slavic folktales, those darlings of the Russian formalist critics of the 1920s, don’t have a lot of currency in Paducah. But thanks to Disney, they know “Snow White” from Vladivostok to Valdosta, “Sleeping Beauty” from Sligo to Salinas. An added bonus here is the lack of ambiguity in fairy tales. While we may not know quite what to think about Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia or the fate of Laertes, we’re pretty darned sure what we think about the evil stepmother or Rumpelstiltskin. We kind of like the idea of Prince Charming or the healing power of tears.

Of all the fairy tales available to the writer, there’s one that has more drawing power than any other, at least in the late twentieth century: “Hansel and Gretel.” Every age has its own favorite stories, but the story of children lost and far from home has a universal appeal. For the age of anxiety, the age when Blind Faith sang “Can’t Find My Way Home,” the age of not just Lost Boys but lost generations, “H&G” has to be the preferred story. And it is. The tale shows up in a variety of ways in a host of stories from the sixties on. Robert Coover has a story called “The Gingerbread House” (1969) whose innovation is that the two children aren’t called Hansel and Gretel. The story makes use of our knowledge of the original
story by employing signs we’ll recognize as standing in for the parts we’re familiar with: since we already know the story from the arrival at the gingerbread house till the shove into the oven, Coover doesn’t mention it. The witch, for example, as the story progresses is metonymically transformed into the black rags she wears, as if we’re just catching her out of the corner of our eye (metonymy is the rhetorical device in which a part is made to stand for the whole, as when “Washington” is used to represent America’s position on an issue). We don’t see her attack the children directly; rather, she kills the doves that eat the bread crumbs. In some ways, this act is even more menacing; it’s as if she is erasing the only memory of the children’s way home. When, at the end of the tale, the boy and girl arrive at the gingerbread house, we only get a glimpse of the black rags flapping in the breeze. We’re made to reevaluate what we know of this story, of the degree to which we take its elements for granted. By stopping the story where the drama normally kicks in, with the children innocently transgressing against the witch’s property, Coover forces us to see how our responses—anxiety, trepidation, excitement—are conditioned by our previous encounters with the original fairy tale. See, he suggests, you don’t need the story because you have already internalized it so completely. That’s one thing writers can do with readerly knowledge of source texts, in this case fairy tales. They can mess around with the stories and turn them upside down. Angela Carter does that in
The Bloody Chamber
(1979), a collection of stories that tear the roof off old, sexist fairy tales to create subversive, feminist revisions. She upends our expectations about the story of Bluebeard, or Puss-in-Boots, or Little Red Riding Hood to make us see the sexism inherent in those stories and, by extension, in the culture that embraced them.

But that’s not the only way to use old stories. Coover and Carter put the emphasis on the old story itself, while most writers are going to dredge up pieces of the old tale to shore
up aspects of their own narratives without placing the focus on “Hansel and Gretel” or “Rapunzel.” Okay, let’s assume you’re the writer. You have a young couple, maybe not children, and certainly not the children of the woodsman, and definitely not brother and sister. Let’s say you have a pair of young lovers, and for whatever reason they’re lost. Maybe their car broke down far from home; maybe there’s no forest, but a city, all public housing high-rises. They’ve taken a wrong turn, suburban types with a BMW maybe, and they’re in a part of town that is wilderness as far as they’re concerned. So they’re lost, no cell phone, and maybe the only option turns out to be a crack house. What you’ve got in this hypothetical tale is a fairly dramatic setup that’s already fraught with possibility. All perfectly modern. No woodcutter. No bread crumbs. No gingerbread. So why dredge up some moldy old fairy tale? What can it possibly tell us about this modern situation?

Well, what elements do you want to emphasize in your story? What feature of the plight of these young people most resonates for you? It might be the sense of lostness. Children too far from home, in a crisis not of their own making. Maybe the temptation: one child’s gingerbread is another’s drugs. Maybe it’s having to fend for themselves, without their customary support network.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, you may choose some prior tale (in our case, “H&G”) and emphasize what you see as corresponding elements in the two tales. It may be pretty simple, like the guy wishing they had a trail of bread crumbs because he missed a turn or two back there and doesn’t know this part of town. Or the woman hoping this doesn’t turn out to be the witch’s house.

Here’s the good deal for you as writer: You don’t have to use the whole story. Sure, it has X, Y, and B, but not A, C, and Z. So what? We’re not trying to re-create the fairy tale here. Rather, we’re trying to make use of details or patterns, por
tions of some prior story (or, once you really start thinking like a professor, “prior text,” since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want. In fact, you may invoke the whole story simply by a single small reference.

Why? Because fairy tales, like Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and all other writing and telling, belong to the one big story, and because, since we were old enough to be read to or propped up in front of a television, we’ve been living on that story, and on its fairy variants. Once you’ve seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Grimm Brothers and not think Warner Brothers.

Doesn’t that work out to be sort of ironic?

Absolutely. That’s one of the best side effects of borrowing from any prior text. Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn’t overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle. Let’s face it, these two clandestine lovers are hardly babes in the woods. But maybe they are. Socially out of their depth in this part of town. Morally misguided, perhaps. Lost and in danger. Ironically, their symbols of power—BMW, Rolex watch, money, expensive clothes—don’t help them a bit and actually make them more vulnerable. Finding their way and avoiding the witch may be as hard for them as for the two pint-sized venturers of the original. So they don’t have to push anyone into an oven, or leave a trail of crumbs, or break off and eat any of the siding. And they are probably far from innocent. Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony.

In the age of existentialism and thereafter, the story of lost children has been all the rage. Coover. Carter. John Barth. Tim O’Brien. Louise Erdrich. Toni Morrison. Thomas Pynchon. On and on and on. But you don’t have to use “Hansel and Gretel” just because it’s the flavor of the month. Or even of the last half century. “Cinderella” will always have her uses. “Snow White” works. Anything in fact with an evil queen or stepmother. “Rapunzel” has her applications; even the J. Geils Band mentions her. Something with a Prince Charming? Okay, but tough to live up to the comparison, so be prepared for irony.

I’ve been talking here as if you’re the writer, but you know and I know that we’re really readers. So how does this apply? For one thing, it has to do with how you attack a text. When you sit down to read a novel, you want character, story, ideas, the usual business. Then, if you’re like me, you’ll start looking for glimpses of the familiar: hey, that kind of feels like something I know. Oh wait, that’s out of
Alice in Wonderland
. Now
why
would she draw a parallel to the Red Queen here? Is that the hole in the ground?
Why?
Always,
why?

Here’s what I think we do: we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it. If it manages both things at once, strangeness and familiarity, it sets up vibrations, harmonies to go with the melody of the main story line. And those harmonies are where a sense of depth, solidity, resonance comes from. Those harmonies may come from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Dante or Milton, but also from humbler, more familiar texts.

So next time you go to your local bookstore and carry home a novel, don’t forget your Brothers Grimm.

I
N THESE LAST THREE CHAPTERS
we’ve talked about three sorts of myth: Shakespearean, biblical, and folk/fairy tale. The connection of religion and myth sometimes causes trouble in class when someone takes myth to mean “untrue” and finds it hard to unite that meaning with deeply held religious beliefs. That’s not what I mean by “myth,” though. Rather, what I’m suggesting is the shaping and sustaining power of story and symbol. Whether one believes that the story of Adam and Eve is true, literally or figuratively, matters, but not in this context. Here, in this activity of reading and understanding literature, we’re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader. All three
of these mythologies work as sources of material, of correspondences, of depth for the modern writer (and every writer is modern—even John Dryden was not archaic when he was writing), and provided they’re recognizable to the reader, they enrich and enhance the reading experience. Of the three, biblical myth probably covers the greatest range of human situations, encompassing all ages of life including the next life, all relationships whether personal or governmental, and all phases of the individual’s experience, physical, sexual, psychological, spiritual. Still, both the worlds of Shakespeare and of fairy and folk tales provide fairly complete coverage as well.

What we mean in speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can’t. That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves. Let’s say it this way:
myth is a body of story that matters.

Every community has its own body of story that matters. Nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner went back to the Germanic myths for the material for his operas, and whether the results are good or bad in either historic or musical terms, the impulse to work with his tribal myths is completely understandable. The late twentieth century witnessed a great surge of Native American writing, much of which went back to tribal myth for material, for imagery, for theme, as in the case of Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman,” Louise Erdrich’s Kashpaw/Nanapush novels, and Gerald Vizenor’s peculiar
Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles
. When Toni Morrison introduces human flight into
Song of Solomon,
many readers, white readers especially, take her to be referring to Icarus, whereas what she really has in mind, she has said, is the myth
of the flying Africans, a story that matters to her community, her tribe. On one level, there’s not much difference between Silko’s project and Wagner’s; he too is simply going back to the myths of his tribe. We sometimes forget that people in an age of top hats and stiff collars had tribes, but we do so at our peril. In all these cases, what the artist is doing is reaching back for stories that matter to him and his community—for myth.

In European and Euro-American cultures, of course, there’s another source of myth. Let me rephrase that: MYTH. When most of us think myth, we mean the northern shores of the Mediterranean between two and three thousand years ago. We mean Greece and Rome. Greek and Roman myth is so much a part of the fabric of our consciousness, of our unconscious really, that we scarcely notice. You doubt me? In the town where I live, the college teams are known as the Spartans. Our high school? The Trojans. In my state we have a Troy (one of whose high schools is Athens—and they say there are no comedians in education), an Ithaca, a Sparta, a Romulus, a Remus, and a Rome. These communities are scattered around the state and date from different periods of settlement. Now if a town in the center of Michigan, a fair distance from anything that can be called Aegean or Ionian (although it’s not very far from the town of Ionia), can be named Ithaca, it suggests that Greek myth has had pretty good staying power.

Let’s go back to Toni Morrison for a moment. I’m always slightly amazed that Icarus gets all the ink. It was his father, Daedalus, who crafted the wings, who knew how to get off Crete and safely reach the mainland, and who in fact flew to safety. Icarus, the kid, the daredevil, failed to follow his father’s advice and plunged to his death. His fall remains a source of enduring fascination for us and for our literature and art. In it we see so much: the parental attempt to save the child and the grief at having failed, the cure that proves as deadly as the ailment, the youthful exuberance that leads to self-destruction,
the clash between sober, adult wisdom and adolescent recklessness, and of course the terror involved in that headlong descent into the sea. Absolutely none of this has anything to do with Morrison and her flying Africans, so it’s little wonder that she’s a bit mystified by this response of her readers. But it’s a story and a pattern that is so deeply burrowed into our consciousness that readers may almost automatically consider it whenever flying or falling is invoked. Clearly it doesn’t fit the situation in
Song of Solomon
. But it does apply in other works. In 1558 Pieter Brueghel painted a wonderful picture,
Landscape with Fall of Icarus
. In the foreground we see a plowman and his ox, just beyond him a shepherd and his flock, and at sea a merchant ship sailing placidly along; this is a scene of utter ordinariness and tranquillity. Only in the lower right corner of the painting is there anything even remotely suggestive of trouble: a pair of legs askew as they disappear into the water. That’s our boy. He really doesn’t have much of a presence in the frame, but his presence makes all the difference. Without the pathos of the doomed boy, we have a picture of farming and merchant shipping with no narrative or thematic power. I teach, with some regularity, two great poems based on that painting, W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) and William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” (1962). They’re wonderful poems, very different from each other in tone, style, and form, but in essential agreement about how the world goes on even in the face of our private tragedies. Each artist alters what he finds in the painting. Brueghel introduces the plowman and the ship, neither of which appears in the version that comes to us from the Greeks. And Williams and Auden find, in their turn, slightly different elements to emphasize in the painting. Williams’s poem stresses the pictorial elements of the painting, trying to capture the scene while sneaking in the thematic elements. Even his arrangement of the poem on the page, narrow and highly vertical, recalls the body plummeting
from the sky. Auden’s poem, on the other hand, is a meditation on the private nature of suffering and the way in which the larger world takes no interest in our private disasters. It is astonishing and pleasing to discover that the painting can occasion these two very different responses. Beyond them, readers find their own messages in all this. As someone who was a teenager in the sixties, I am reminded by the fate of Icarus of all those kids who bought muscle cars with names like GTO and 442 and Charger and Barracuda. All the driver education and solid parental advice in the world can’t overcome the allure of that kind of power, and sadly, in too many cases those young drivers shared the fate of Icarus. My students, somewhat younger than I am, will inevitably draw other parallels. Still, it all goes back to the myth: the boy, the wings, the unscheduled dive.

So that’s one way classical myth can work: overt subject matter for poems and paintings and operas and novels. What else can myth do?

Here’s a thought. Let’s say you wanted to write an epic poem about a community of poor fishermen in the Caribbean. If this was a place you came from, and you knew these people like you know your own family, you’d want to depict the jealousies and resentments and adventure and danger, as well as capturing their dignity and their life in a way that conveys all that has escaped the notice of tourists and white property owners. You could, I suppose, try being really,
really
earnest, portraying the characters as very serious and sober, making them noble by virtue of their goodness. But I bet that wouldn’t work. What you’d wind up with instead would probably be very stiff and artificial, and artificiality is never noble. Besides, these folks aren’t saints. They make a lot of mistakes: they’re petty, envious, lustful, occasionally greedy as well as courageous, elegant, powerful, knowledgeable, profound. And you want noble, after all, not Tonto—there’s no Lone Ranger here.
Alternatively, you might try grafting their story onto some older story of rivalry and violence, a story where even the victor is ultimately doomed, a story where, despite occasional personal shortcomings, the characters have an unmistakable nobility. You could give your characters names like Helen, Philoctetes, Hector, and Achille. At least that’s what Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott does in his
Omeros
(1990). Those names are drawn, of course, from
The Iliad,
although Walcott uses elements—parallels, persons, and situations—of both it and
The Odyssey
in his epic.

The question we will inevitably ask is, Why?

Why should someone in the late twentieth century draw on a story that was passed along orally from the twelfth through the eighth century
B
.
C
.
and not written down until maybe two or three hundred years later? Why should someone try to compare modern fishermen with these legendary heroes, many of whom were descended from gods? Well for starters, Homer’s legendary heroes
were
farmers and fishermen. Besides, aren’t we all descended from gods? Walcott reminds us by this parallel of the potential for greatness that resides in all of us, no matter how humble our worldly circumstances.

That’s one answer. The other is that the situations match up more closely than we might expect. The plot of
The Iliad
is not particularly divine or global. Those who have never read it assume mistakenly that it is the story of the Trojan War. It is not. It is the story of a single, rather lengthy action: the wrath of Achilles. Achilles becomes angry with his leader, Agamemnon, withdraws his support from the Greeks, only rejoining the battle when the consequences of his action have destroyed his best friend, Patroclus. At this point he turns his wrath against the Trojans and in particular their greatest hero, Hector, whom he eventually kills. His reason for such anger? Agamemnon has taken his war prize. Trivial? It gets worse. The prize is a woman. Agamemnon, forced by divine order and by public
sentiment to return his concubine to her father, retaliates against the person who most publicly sided against him, Achilles, by taking his concubine, Briseis. Is that petty enough? Is that noble? No Helen, no judgment of Paris, no Trojan horse. At its core, it’s the story of a man who goes berserk because his stolen war bride is confiscated, acted out against a background of wholesale slaughter, the whole of which is taking place because another man, Menelaus (brother of Agamemnon) has had
his
wife stolen by Paris, half brother of Hector. That’s how Hector winds up having to carry the hopes for salvation of all Troy on his shoulders.

And yet somehow, through the centuries, this story dominated by the theft of two women has come to epitomize ideals of heroism and loyalty, sacrifice and loss. Hector is more stubbornly heroic in his doomed enterprise than anyone you’ve ever seen. Achilles’ grief at the loss of his beloved friend is truly heartbreaking. The big duels—between Hector and Ajax, between Diomedes and Paris, between Hector and Patroclus, between Hector and Achilles—are genuinely exciting and suspenseful, their outcomes sources of grand celebration and dismay. No wonder so many modern writers have often borrowed from and emulated Homer.

And when did that begin?

Almost immediately. Virgil, who died in 19
B
.
C
.
, patterned his Aeneas on the Homeric heroes. If Achilles did it or Odysseus went there, so does Aeneas. Why? It’s what heroes do. Aeneas goes to the underworld. Why? Odysseus went there. He kills a giant from the enemy camp in a final climactic battle. Why? Achilles did. And so on. The whole thing is less derivative than it sounds and not without humor and irony. Aeneas and his followers are survivors of Troy, so here we have this Trojan hero acting out the patterns set down by his enemies. Moreover, when these Trojans sail past Ithaca, home to Odysseus, they jeer and curse the agent of their destruction.
On the whole, though, Virgil has him undertake these actions because Homer had already defined what it means to be a hero.

Back to Walcott. Almost exactly two thousand years after Virgil, Walcott has his heroes perform actions that we can recognize as symbolic reenactments of those in Homer. Sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch, since we can’t have a lot of battlefield duels out in the fishing boats. Nor can he call his Helen “the face that launched a thousand dinghies.” Lacks grandeur, that phrase. What he can do, though, is place them in situations where their nobility and their courage are put to the test, while reminding us that they are acting out some of the most basic, most primal patterns known to humans, exactly as Homer did all those centuries before. The need to protect one’s family: Hector. The need to maintain one’s dignity: Achilles. The determination to remain faithful and to have faith: Penelope. The struggle to return home: Odysseus. Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves. What is there, after all, against which we need to prove ourselves but those four things?

In our modern world, of course, parallels may be
ironized,
that is, turned on their head for purposes of irony. How many of us would see the comedy of three escaped convicts as parallel to the wanderings of Odysseus? Still, that’s what the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen give us in their 2000 film
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
It’s about trying to get home, isn’t it? Or this, the most famous example: a single day in Dublin in 1904, on which a young man decides on his future and an older man wanders the city, eventually returning home to his wife in the small hours of the next morning. The book has only one overt clue that this all might have something to do with Homer, its one-word title:
Ulysses
(1922). As we now know, James Joyce envisioned every one of the eighteen episodes of the novel as
a parallel to some incident or situation in
The Odyssey
. There’s an episode in a newspaper office, for instance, which parallels Odysseus’s visit to Aeolus, the god of the winds, but the parallel may seem pretty tenuous. To be sure, newspapermen are a windy group and there are a lot of rhetorical flourishes in the episode, to say nothing of the fact that a gust of wind does zip through at one point. Still, we can see it as resembling the Homeric original only if we understand that resemblance in terms of a funhouse mirror, full of distortion and goofy correspondences—if we understand it, in other words, as an ironic parallel. The fact that it’s ironic makes the parallel—and the Aeolus episode—such fun. Joyce is less interested than Walcott in investing his characters with classical nobility, although finally they do take on something of that quality. After watching poor old Leopold Bloom stroll around Dublin all day and half the night, running into no end of trouble and recalling great heartbreak in his life, we may well come to feel he is noble in his own way. His nobility, however, is not that of Odysseus.