What Am I Writing

What is Literature?

by Nathan Gale

Literature is something you hear from places where sound doesn't exist, something you see vaulted across places that are always past your field of vision, like Tantalus reaching for a glass of milk. For if you cant see it or hear then you must describe it the way you see it and hear it for yourself. A pilgrimage to somewhere unknown that cannot be charted upon a map of anywhere. To me true literature in its own way endures with these principles.

Literature may be considered works of romantic prose or airport fiction, yet these books are rather like a math equation, you add the numbers into the equation in order to achieve the highest amount of satisfaction. Whereas literature is a way of recreating the equation, and letting the reader be the numbers, add themselves subtract themselves or divide themselves into two. Literature not only asks question that have not been asked but it reveals to you worlds inside of worlds that you would have never discovered if you had never picked up the book. It challenges connections into existence throughout the chemical portions of your mind, as if shifting your mind from automatic to manual in a few short sentences.

In Aimee Bender’s The Girl In the Flammable Skirt, the author describes a backpack of stone, a weight that the tries to bare for her father yet his trouble finding not only the strength but the logic behind her fathers strange customs. As outlandish as it might be, i too have had to bare the weight of my parents woes. I was able to locate a select portion of myself amongst the fiction of Aimee Benders world, how is this when the life I lead so utterly non-fiction in comparative? Because true literature is about the writer finding and explaining parts of his imagination, that readers will discover inside themselves, like picking an image of yourself right out of a portrait of salmons else’s imagination. A form of Rorshack test.

Literature is then more about finding yourself then learning about the writer or his imaginary landscapes. When you don’t enjoy a piece of literature you know that “you” are no where to found in that book. When you read “trashy literature” such as cheap romance novels, quick thrillers or detective books with 6 ghost writers, you can never find yourself honestly in those books, you can only fantasize or imagine yourself as the protagonist, a false sense of unhealthy identity; a still birth of the self undeveloped and helpless. Literature helps you discover your identity and lets you leave with that identity in tact.

As for myself I discovered my quaint taste of darker topics in 9th grade while reading Burroughs, Ginsberg, Paulhinuik, Artaud, Miller, Bukowski and Kerouac. And during years to come I would find myself again and even my pallet out with writers such as Hesse, Brautigan, Simic, Elliot, Lorca, Yeats, Kafka and Capote. It can feel odd to find yourself 80 years ago in short-story written by the unknown face of a man named Sherwood Anderson, or in a single word of a poem by Blake. Either way to me what separates literature from simply entertainment, is the fact that you are able to build the tinniest bridges over gaps in your thinking, and populate the vast frontier of your imagination with parts of your being you found in the literature you read.