Conquered in a Car Seat

We who dabble in literature professionally — especially as critics — often puzzle over its purpose. It certainly isn’t profitable, much less enjoyable — not the way eating ice cream is enjoyable, anyway. There used to be something of a consensus among scholars that good literature possessed certain inherit qualities, but then some critics started asking — mostly with good reason — what “literature” even was in the first place and who or what determined if it was “good” or not and much of the faith that readers and professors used to have in the inborn virtue of poetry and prose got shot all to hell.

There are moments, however, when it appears to rally.

Inspired by the musician Wynton Marsalis, who says that we usually don’t concentrate on music the way we should (try to think of the last time you focused on an album as you would a novel, and you begin to see his point), I dedicated one day of my writing seminar to the playing of (and, I hoped, listening to) a contiguous musical work. And it was in one of my students’ written responses that I found a glimmer of that old faith.

For the sake of anonymity, I’ll just say that this student had very recently suffered a loss. And her response to the exercise — being forced to listen to music for 50 minutes — was basically a blow-by-blow of the struggle between the music and the part of her that was trying not to think of the pain and confusion this recent ordeal had wrought on her. The culmination of her essay was a beautifully honest admission of helplessness in grief.

I say “helplessness” and not “hopelessness” because even though this student was grappling with pain, her willingness to face ­it — beginning with a confession of what she was powerless to change — suggested to me that she had the right attitude to deal with her loss, a kind of beleaguered optimism.

I struggled for some time to phrase the previous sentence properly, and that goes to the point of this essay. “Deal with” is an acceptable phrase to use, I would say, so long as it does not conjure an image of someone being recommended to a “professional” and then carted off from the pack like a wounded weakling. The underlying problem it points out is that as a group we like society at large to appear well balanced while as individuals we know that that is not the way of reality. We all have our problems, our losses, our grief, and those things never go away. They are part of us, and even if our relationship with them changes over time, it never ends. We do not “get over” the stuff of our life, no matter how much we and those around us would like to think that we do. And it is art — literature, music, and so forth — that acknowledges this truth.

Art accepts individual suffering and pain in a way that society rarely does, because it is made by one individual for another. It sees pain for what it is — not as a passing distemperment, but as the uncontrollable shifting of the fault lines of our heart, sometimes mild, sometimes severe, but never completely finished.

My student’s struggle that day is what Flannery O’Connor calls a “long look,” a courageous confrontation with her actual experience.

As social animals, we tend to resist individual experience in favor of group behavior, but our person is incomplete if we try to ignore our desire and pain and hope. When a piece of art is made, a voice cries out in the desert, hoping that just one person might hear and listen; when a piece of art is seen or read or heard, another person replies that every voice deserves listening to, and is not alone.

I’m moved to quote something I read while putting this essay together. It’s from the end of Luigi Pirandello’s novel One, No One & One Hundred Thousand, about the trials of a man who tries to identify all the versions of himself that exist in the world and eventually, well, here’s the quote:

No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names.

We are often convinced that life is simple and manageable, but to believe this is to turn away from the depths of our existence, which never end. Art turns us around again, puts us face to face with what society usually requires we ignore.

This is a matter of faith, and as such will probably not interest anyone who doesn’t already believe. But anyone who has felt the balm that art brings in hours of despair needs no convincing, just reminding. I don’t think this settles the disputes over “literature” and “good literature,” but I hope it highlights something that is often lost in such debates: Regardless of how it might be scored by critics or posterity, art by its very existence reminds us, perhaps more than any other human activity, that the heart matters. And in giving or receiving art, the whole person is saved from a maddening existence split between public utility and private purposelessness.

2 Footnotes

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This is one in a series of posts (listed below) that seem to be feeding into the same idea and may become part of a larger personal essay. This essay might also serve as a note toward a larger essay about the purpose of literature and the state of English at the university.

Notes on the Ineffable 1: New York
Notes on the Ineffable 2a: In the Air
Notes on the Ineffable 2b: Chicago
Notes on the Ineffable 3: Literature