Don't Miss the Point

Literature, for me, is perhaps one of the most "human" things we do, yet the task of creating literature is one that not even those with much practice and experience fully understand.  Literature is, in the most basic sense, concerned with digging through the layers of our humanity; churning up the soil, and trying to point out, using whatever means necessary, something true about humans.  Literature, or at least good literature, asks questions about why we live, how we live, and how we live with each other, and the best literature can take on a life of its own, providing the author with some fresh perspective on our humanity even as she writes.

Because literature seems to possess an almost prophetic power, it has been the subject of human fascination for centuries.  Even before human beings wrote stories down, oral traditions carried on tales through generation after generation, holding them in the highest esteem because they connected both listener and storyteller to some greater reality, some larger picture than the mundane, the understandable, and the close at hand.  This connection to some higher reality and this ability to transport a reader or storyteller beyond himself also makes great literature, in some sense, timeless.  In the year 2012, in Upstate New York, we read Homer, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck, not because we are disproportionately concerned with ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or the Depression-era Southwest, but because each holds within its pages something profoundly true about our experience as humans, something that makes us laugh and cry and wonder despite the fact that we are far removed in both time and place. 

These concerns, I think, are central to our understanding of literature.  We can, in the academic community, spend incredible time and effort dissecting a text, searching word-by-word for the author's intent, her clever use of language, and her manipulation of the readers' response.  These activities may, for a time, be worthwhile, but if authors wrote novels, plays, and poetry merely as a technical exercise,  as a way of manipulating worlds to flex their intellectual muscle, literature would carry little merit outside the academy.  Thankfully, the elements we so carefully deconstruct and analyze are mere tools that serve the greater purpose of communicating that someone, somewhere, at some time thought profoundly worthwhile. 

As I read a number of works for three different literature courses this semester, my goal is to keep in mind the purpose of literature and to always reference that larger concern even as I examine the details before me.  I hope that as an English major, I take a magnifying glass to the details, the tools, in order that I might better understand how the larger purpose is successfully accomplished.  I hope that I can always be sure to make connections that broaden my perspective and teach me about something greater, even, that literature itself.  I hope I don't miss the point.