Literature

Alora Young
Intro to Writing and Literature
9/22/2010

Literatrue

C.S. Lewis once said, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.” Literature should make you feel, make you think. The best literature can change your life. But who’s to say a piece of writing that makes me ponder life and all its heart-breaking horrors will have any effect at all on the person who sat beside me on the bus last Tuesday? Who decides what literature is or is not? Ronald Banthes wrote about ‘jouissance’, a more uncomfortable sort of pleasure, and about the point in reading when one finds themselves lost within a text – when a person becomes so involved that the outside world has no impact on their reading of the world within the text. Surely that is literature. Again, however, not everyone will find jouissance in the same pieces of writing.

Some stories we read challenge our perceptions of literature, and some stories conform to them. My idea of literature was challenged in my reading of ‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders. If it is indeed considered literature, then in my opinion it is bad literature. It began with promise, implying taboo themes with an opening at a male strip club. It wanted to shock me, and I wanted to be shocked. And then Saunders seemed to try too hard, took it too far, so that it quickly surpassed shocking. It became stupid. I didn’t care about the characters or their clichéd, bottom class struggles, or the fact that Min and Jade “debate about how many sides a triangle has” while studying for the GEDs that they apparently skipped because they couldn’t keep their legs shut any better than they can keep their foul mouths shut.

I think for something to be shocking it has to be plausible, and I didn’t believe for one instant that any of the characters in this story were real. Aunt Bertie almost succeeded in being a little more than two-dimensional, and then she came back from the dead. When she was “basically just a pile of parts”, I caught myself scoffing at the stupidity of the whole thing. “’Show your cock,’ she says, and dies again” just topped it off. I thought the piece was entirely pointless, it didn’t conform in the slightest to my opinion of literature, and I just didn’t like it. Under normal circumstances, I would have stopped reading part-way through, and would have promptly forgotten about it.

Wells Towers’ ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’, on the other hand, I liked quite a lot. There’s a fine line between successfully and unsuccessfully writing a historically-based fiction in modern language, and I felt that this piece was quite successful. Once you read enough to gather that the characters are Vikings, and get used to the profanities and way the characters talk in modern-day slang (“Djarf get at you yet?”), it becomes really enjoyable. It achieves this, I think, because within all the pillaging, berserking and talk about a curse of having “horns like a goat” and “shit[ting] little shits like a goat” verses the curse of “a seven-foot dick that you had to have hanging out of your pants at all times”, there are moments of true, relatable emotion.

“When I got back in bed, she tucked the covers over her face, hoping I’d think she was angry instead of crying” was a sentence that I felt. It was real, and my empathy for the characters grew with every well-placed and well-written sentence like it. At the story’s end, when our protagonist Harald says, “You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself”, it brings to the surface an awful reality that many of us don’t ever want to think about. Sometimes we do wish we loved nothing in life because it would make so many things easier. And then we hate ourselves and wish we were better people, and resolve never to think a thing like that again – let alone put it down on paper and get it published. I was sure after reading that sentence that this story was indeed ‘literature’ to me, because it resonates for both good emotions and bad. It makes me feel, makes me think, and adds to reality by taking us almost entirely out of the one we know, yet managing to keep the unfamiliar storyscape and supposedly barbaric characters utterly, unexpectedly real.