The Real Reason For A Quest Never Involves The Stated Reason

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary, of course, just like language itself. This occurred during the Renaissance in Europe, but when Western and Oriental art encountered each other in the 1700s, Japanese artists and their audiences were serenely untroubled by the lack of perspective in their painting. No one felt it particularly essential to the experience of pictorial art. Literature has its grammar, too. You knew that, of course. Even if you didn’t know that, you knew from the structure of the preceding paragraph that it was coming. The grammar of the essay. You can read, and part of reading is knowing the conventions, recognizing them, and anticipating the results. So now we’re all happy, because the convention has been used, observed, noted, anticipated, and fulfilled. What more can you want from a paragraph? Well, as I was saying before I so rudely digressed, so too in literature. Poems have a great many of their own, involving form, structure, rhythm, rhyme.

Best Of Both Worlds

And then there are conventions that cross genre lines. Spring is largely universal. And if we associate even further, that constellation may lead us to more abstract concepts such as rebirth, fertility, renewal. Okay, let’s say you’re right and there is a set of conventions, a key to reading literature. How do I get so I can recognize these? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall. In other words, they are emotionally and instinctively involved in the work. Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? If you learn to ask these questions, to see literary texts through these glasses, you will read and understand literature in a new light, and it’ll become more rewarding and fun. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd. English professors, as a class, are cursed with memory. I can’t not do it, although there are plenty of times when that ability is not something I want to exercise. This does not necessarily improve the experience of popular entertainment. Professors also read, and think, symbolically.

Transformative Contrasts

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. We ask, Is this a metaphor? What does the thing over there signify? The kind of mind that works its way through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literature and criticism has a predisposition to see things as existing in themselves while simultaneously also representing something else. This predisposition to understand the world in symbolic terms is reinforced, of course, by years of training that encourages and rewards the symbolic imagination. A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition. Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. Like the symbolic imagination, this is a function of being able to distance oneself from the story, to look beyond the purely affective level of plot, drama, characters. Nor is this skill exclusive to English professors. Literature is full of patterns, and your reading experience will be much more rewarding when you can step back from the work, even while you’re reading it, and look for those patterns. When small children, very small children, begin to tell you a story, they put in every detail and every word they recall, with no sense that some features are more important than others. Wily veterans, on the other hand, will absorb those details, or possibly overlook them, to find the patterns, the routines, the archetypes at work in the background. Let’s look at an example of how the symbolic mind, the pattern observer, the powerful memory combine to offer a reading of a nonliterary situation. Let’s say that a male subject you are studying exhibits behavior and makes statements that show him to be hostile toward his father but much warmer and more loving toward, even dependent on, his mother.

Through The Storm

Okay, that’s just one guy, so no big deal. But you see it again in another person. You might start to think this is a pattern of behavior, in which case you would say to yourself, Now where have I seen this before? Your memory may dredge up something from experience, not your clinical work but a play you read long ago in your youth about a man who murders his father and marries his mother. As I said, not only English professors use these abilities. Sigmund Freud reads his patients the way a literary scholar reads texts, bringing the same sort of imaginative interpretation to understanding his cases that we try to bring to interpreting novels and poems and plays. His identification of the Oedipal complex is one of the great moments in the history of human thought, with as much literary as psychoanalytical significance. I want them to be able to reach that conclusion without me. I know they can, with practice, patience, and a bit of instruction. Now Kip hates Tony already because he has a name like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the ’Cuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of light, and also because Tony has never had to work a day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a great time, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. For our purposes, the nature of the decision doesn’t matter any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which color balloon manifests the saint. What just happened here? In other words, a quest just happened. But it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? Seems like a bit of a stretch. On the surface, sure. But let’s think structurally. In fact, usually he doesn’t know. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the store for bread. Go to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, to be sure, but structurally all the same.