How to Read Literature Like a Professor (12 page)

All this matters. Knowing a little something about the social and political milieu out of which a writer creates can only help us understand her work, not because that milieu controls her thinking but because that is the world she engages when she sits down to write. When Virginia Woolf writes about women of her time only being permitted a certain range of activities, we do her and ourselves a great disservice by not seeing the social criticism involved. For instance, in
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), Lady Bruton invites Richard Dalloway, a member of Parliament, and Hugh Whitbread, who has a position at court, to luncheon. Her purpose is to dictate to them material she wants to see introduced into legislation and sent as a letter to the
Times,
all the while protesting that she’s merely a woman who doesn’t understand these matters as a man would. What Woolf shows us is a very capable, if not entirely lovable, woman using the fairly limited Richard and the completely doltish Hugh to make her point in a society which would not take the point seriously if it was seen as coming directly from her. In the years after the Great War, the scene reminds us, ideas were judged on the basis of the class and gender of the person putting them forward. Woolf handles all of this so subtly that we may not think of it as political, but it is.

It always—or almost always—is.

T
HIS MAY SURPRISE SOME OF YOU
, but we live in a Christian culture. What I mean is that since the preponderance of cultural influences has come down to us from European early settlers, and since those early settlers inflicted their values on the “benighted” cultures they encountered (“benighted,” from the Old English, meaning “anyone darker than myself”), those inflicted values have gained ascendancy. This is not to say that all citizens of this great republic are Christians, any more than that they are all great republicans. I once heard a well-known Jewish professor of composition speak about walking into her very first final examination in college only to be confronted with this question: “discuss the Christian imagery in
Billy
Budd
.” It simply never occurred to her professor back in the 1950s that Christian imagery might be alien territory for some students.

Institutions of higher learning can no longer blithely assume that everyone in class is a Christian, and if they do, it’s at their own risk. Still, no matter what your religious beliefs, to get the most out of your reading of European and American literatures, knowing something about the Old and New Testaments is essential. Similarly, if you undertake to read literature from an Islamic or a Buddhist or a Hindu culture, you’re going to need knowledge of other religious traditions. Culture is so influenced by its dominant religious systems that whether a writer adheres to the beliefs or not, the values and principles of those religions will inevitably inform the literary work. Often those values will not be religious in nature but may show themselves in connection with the individual’s role within society, or humankind’s relation to nature, or the involvement of women in public life, although, as we have seen, just as often religion shows up in the form of allusions and analogues. When I read an Indian novel, for example, I’m often aware, if only dimly, of how much I’m missing due to my ignorance of the various religious traditions of the subcontinent. Since I’d like to get more out of my reading, I’ve worked to reduce that ignorance, but I still have a way to go.

Okay, so not everyone is a Christian around these parts, nor do those who would say they are necessarily have more than a nodding familiarity with the New Testament, aside from John 3:16, which is always beside the goalposts at football games. But in all probability they do know one thing: they know why it’s called Christianity. Okay, so it’s not the most profound insight ever, but it matters. A lot. Northrop Frye, one of the great literary critics, said in the 1950s that biblical typology—the comparative study of types between the Old
and New Testaments and, by extension, out into literature—was a dead language, and things haven’t improved since then. While we may not be all that well versed in types and archetypes from the Bible, we generally recognize, whatever our religious affiliation, some of the features that make Christ who he is.

Whether you do or not, this list may be helpful:

• 1) crucified, wounds in the hands, feet, side, and head
  
• 2) in agony
  
• 3) self-sacrificing
  
• 4) good with children
  
• 5) good with loaves, fishes, water, wine
  
• 6) thirty-three years of age when last seen
  
• 7) employed as carpenter
  
• 8) known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred
  
• 9) believed to have walked on water
  
• 10) often portrayed with arms outstretched
  
• 11) known to have spent time alone in the wilderness
  
• 12) believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted
  
• 13) last seen in the company of thieves
  
• 14) creator of many aphorisms and parables
  
• 15) buried, but arose on the third day
  
• 16) had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted
  
• 17) very forgiving
  
• 18) came to redeem an unworthy world
  

You may not subscribe to this list, may find it too glib, but if you want to read like a literature professor, you need to put aside your belief system, at least for the period during which you read, so you can see what the writer is trying to say. As you’re reading that story or poem, religious knowledge is helpful, although religious belief, if too tightly held, can be a problem. We want to be able to identify features in stories and see how they are being used; in other words, we want to be analytical.

Say we’re reading a book, a novel. Short novel, say. And let’s say this short novel has a man in it, a man no longer young, in fact old, as well as very poor and engaged in a humble profession. Not carpentry, say, but fishing. Jesus had some dealings with fishermen, too, and is often connected symbolically with fish, so that’s a point of similarity. And the old fisherman hasn’t had much good luck for a long time, so no one believes in him. In general there’s a lot of doubt and nonbelief in our story. But one young boy believes in him; sadly, though, the boy isn’t allowed to accompany the fisherman anymore, because everyone, the boy’s parents included, think the old man is bad luck. There’s a second point of similarity:
he’s good with children
. Or at least one child. And he has one
disciple
. And this old man is very good and pure, so that’s another point. Because the world he lives in is rather sullied and unworthy, fallen even.

During his solitary fishing trip, the old man hooks into a big fish that takes him far out beyond his known limits, to where the sea becomes
a wilderness
. He’s all alone, and he’s put through
great physical suffering,
during which even he begins to
doubt himself. His
hands
are ripped up by the struggle, he thinks he’s broken something in his
side
. But he bucks himself up with
aphorisms
like “A man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated”—inspiring things like that. Somehow he can endure this whole episode, which lasts
three days
and which finally makes it seem to those on land that he’s dead. His great fish is ruined by sharks, but he manages to drag this huge ruined skeleton back to port. His return is like
a resurrection
. He has to walk up a hill from the water to his shack, and he carries his mast, which looks like
a man carrying a cross
from a certain point of view.
Then he lies on his bed, exhausted by his struggles, his arms thrown out in the position of crucifixion, showing his damaged, raw hands.
And the next morning, when people see the great fish, even the doubters begin to believe in him again. He brings
a kind of hope, a kind of redemption,
to this fallen world, and…yes?

Didn’t Hemingway write a book like that?

Yes,
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), a nearly perfect literary parable, so clear, with symbols so available, that the Christian imagery is accessible to even beginning readers. But let’s give old Hemingway some credit here; the narrative is more subtle than I’ve just made it sound. And the struggle is so vivid and concrete that one can get a lot out of it—triumph over adversity, the value of hope and faith, the attainment of grace—without placing undue weight on the old man, Santiago, as a Christ figure.

So must all Christ figures be as unambiguous as this? No, they don’t have to hit all the marks. Don’t have to be male. Don’t have to be Christian. Don’t even have to be good. (See the stories of Flannery O’Connor for example after example.) There, however, we’re starting to get into irony, and that’s a whole different area where I don’t want to go just yet. Yet. But if a character is a certain age, exhibits certain behaviors, pro
vides for certain outcomes, or suffers in certain ways, your literary antennae should begin to twitch. How should we know, though? Here’s a handy list, not all-inclusive, but a start:

YOU MIGHT BE A CHRIST FIGURE IF YOU ARE…
(CHECK ANY THAT APPLY):

Are there things you don’t have to do? Certainly. Consider Santiago again. Wait, you say, shouldn’t he be thirty-three? And the answer is, sometimes that’s good. But a Christ figure doesn’t need to resemble Christ in every way; otherwise he wouldn’t be a Christ figure, he’d be, well, Christ. The literal elements—changing water into wine, unless in some clumsy way such as pouring out someone’s water and filling his glass with wine; stretching loaves and fishes to feed five thousand; preaching (although some do); suffering actual crucifixion; literally following in his footsteps—aren’t really required. It’s the symbolic level we’re interested in.

Which brings us to another issue we’ve touched upon in other chapters. Fiction and poetry and drama are not necessarily playgrounds for the overly literal. Many times I’ll point out
that a character is Christlike because he does X and Y, and you might come back with, “But Christ did A and Z and his X wasn’t like that, and besides, this character listens to AC/DC.” Okay, so the heavy-metal sound isn’t in the hymnal. And this character would be very hard pressed to take over Savior duty. No literary Christ figure can ever be as pure, as perfect, as divine as Jesus Christ. Here as elsewhere, one does well to remember that writing literature is an exercise of the imagination. And so is reading it. We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all its possibilities; otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her. At the same time, this doesn’t indicate the story can mean anything we want it to, since that would be a case of our imagination not bothering with that of the author and just inventing whatever it wants to see in the text. That’s not reading, that’s writing. But that’s another matter, and one we’ll discuss elsewhere.

On the flip side, if someone in class asks if it’s possible that the character under discussion might be a Christ figure, citing three or four similarities, I’ll say something like, “Works for me.” The bottom line, I usually tell the class, is that Christ figures are where you find them, and as you find them. If the indicators are there, then there is some basis for drawing the conclusion.

Why, you might ask, are there Christ figures? As with most other cases we’ve looked at where the work engages some prior text, the short answer is that probably the writer wants to make a certain point. Perhaps the parallel deepens our sense of the character’s sacrifice if we see it as somehow similar to the
greatest sacrifice we know of. Maybe it has to do with redemption, or hope, or miracle. Or maybe it is all being treated ironically, to make the character look smaller rather than greater. But count on it, the writer is up to something. How do we know what he’s up to? That’s another job for imagination.

I
TOOK JUST ENOUGH PHYSICS
in school to master one significant fact: human beings cannot fly. Here’s a principle that always holds. If it flies, it isn’t human. Birds fly. Bats fly. Insects sometimes fly. Certain squirrels and fish sail for a bit and seem to fly. Humans? Thirty-two feet per second squared. Same as bowling balls. If you drop me and a bowling ball off the Tower of Pisa (and please don’t) at the same time, the bowling ball won’t go splat. Otherwise we’re the same.

Airplanes?

No doubt about it, airplanes and blimps and helicopters and autogiros have changed the way we perceive flight, but for almost all of human history, we’ve been earthbound.

Meaning what?

Meaning that when we see a person suspended in the air, even briefly, he is one or more of the following:

• 1) a superhero
  
• 2) a ski jumper
  
• 3) crazy (redundant if also number 2)
  
• 4) fictional
  
• 5) a circus act, departing a cannon
  
• 6) suspended on wires
  
• 7) an angel
  
• 8) heavily symbolic
  

Of course, just because we can’t fly doesn’t mean we don’t dream of it. We chafe at laws, particularly when we feel they’re unfair or inhibiting or both, as with the law of gravity. The steady winner in magic acts, since most magicians can’t afford an elephant for the vanishing act, is levitation. British imperialists in the nineteenth century came back from the Eastern realms with tales of swamis who had mastered the art of hovering above the ground. Our comic book superheroes defy gravity in various ways, whether through flight directly (Superman), tethers (Spider-Man), or gadgets (Batman).

Culturally and literarily, we have toyed with the idea of flight since earliest times. Few stories from Greek mythology capture the imagination like that of Daedalus and Icarus: the ingenious father’s attempt to save his son from a tyrant as well as from his own invention (the labyrinth) by coming up with an even more marvelous creation; the solemn parental warning ignored in a burst of youthful exuberance; the fall from a great height; a father’s terrible grief and guilt. Flight alone is a won
der; with these other elements, a complete and compelling myth. Other cultures share this fascination. Toni Morrison has spoken of the myth of the flying Africans. The Aztecs saw a particularly important god, Quetzalcoatl, as a snake with feathered wings. Christian popular belief often sees new arrivals in heaven decked out with wings and a harp—emblems of flight and music which are natural properties of the birds but denied humans. Scripturally, flight is one of the temptations of Christ: Satan asks him to demonstrate his divinity by launching himself from the promontory. Perhaps it is that episode that has associated witchcraft with flight through so much of our history, or perhaps it is merely that our misplaced desire for flight has turned to envy.

So what does it mean when literary characters fly? Take, for example, Morrison’s
Song of Solomon
and its highly ambiguous airborne ending, with Milkman suspended in mid-leap toward Guitar, each of them knowing only one can survive. Morrison’s use of the myth of the flying Africans introduces a specific historical and racial reference that is outside the experience of most readers, but we recognize various implications. Milkman’s great-grandfather, Solomon, flew off to Africa but couldn’t hold on to his youngest child, Jake, dropping him back to earth and slavery. Flying off, in this instance, suggests casting off the chains of slavery on one level and returning “home” (Africa for Solomon, Virginia for Milkman) on another. In general, flying is freedom, we might say, freedom not only from specific circumstances but from those more general burdens that tie us down. It’s escape, the flight of imagination. All of this is very good. Well then, what about Pilate, Milkman’s unfortunately named aunt? After she dies, a bird swoops down, grabs the earring box containing a slip of paper with her name on it, and flies away. Milkman suddenly realizes that of all the people he’s ever known, Pilate alone had
the power of flight, even though she never left the ground. What does it mean to say that someone who remains physically earthbound has been able to fly? It’s spiritual, we might conclude. Her soul could soar, which you can’t say about anybody else in the novel. She is the character of spirit and love; her last utterance is a wish that she could have known more people so she could have loved them all. Such a character is not anchored at all. She’s flying in a way we don’t need to know the underlying myth of the flying Africans to comprehend.

So freedom, escape, return home, largeness of spirit, love. That’s a lot for just one work to do with flying. What about others? What about
E.T.
? When those bicycles leave the street in the Steven Spielberg classic, what’s the situation? The adults of the community, representing conformity, hostility to anything new, xenophobia, suspicion, a lack of imagination, are bearing down on our young heroes. They’ve even set up a roadblock. At just the moment when things look worst, the bicycles leave the earth and, with it, the earthbound grown-ups. Escape? Certainly. Freedom? You bet. Wonder, magic? Absolutely.

It’s really pretty straightforward:
flight is freedom.

It doesn’t always work out that way, but the basic principle is pretty sound. Angela Carter’s
Nights at the Circus
(1984) offers a comparative rarity, a fictional character who actually possesses wings. Carter’s heroine, Fevvers (whose name paradoxically suggests both “feathers” and “tethers”), is a woman whose flying act has made her the toast of circuses and music halls across Europe. It has also set her apart. She is not like other people, cannot comfortably fit into normal human life. Carter’s use of flight differs from Morrison’s in that it does not emphasize freedom and escape. Like Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Fevvers has a gift that places her in a cage: her flights are contained
indoors, her world is a stage where even the fourth wall is a barrier, since she is so different from her audience that she cannot freely join them. There are a couple of points that should be made here. First, as I have intimated several times before and will discuss later,
irony trumps everything
. But irony typically depends on an established pattern on which it can work its inversions. All of Carter’s irony here, naturally enough, builds on a foundation of expectations having to do with flying and wings. If flying is freedom, and if Fevvers’s flying represents a kind of counterfreedom, then we have an inversion that creates significance: she’s trapped by the ability most symbolic of freedom. Without our expectations about the meaning of flight, Fevvers is simply an oddity on a stage. The second point has to do with different kinds of freedom: just as Morrison’s Pilate can fly without ever leaving the ground, so Fevvers can find freedom even within the limitations of her fishbowl world. Her act frees her to express her sexuality in ways not available to other women in the novel’s highly restricted late-Victorian society. She can dress, speak, and act in a manner that would be deeply shocking in other contexts. Her freedom, like her “imprisonment,” is paradoxical. Carter uses Fevvers, with her mix of earthy sexuality and avian ability, to comment on the situation of women in English society; it’s a strategy that is perfectly normal for Carter, whose novels typically, and comically, undercut assumptions about masculine and feminine roles, holding up our received notions for scrutiny and occasional ridicule. Social criticism is the outcome of this subversive strategy, flight the device by which Carter sets up her ironic notions of freedom and imprisonment.

Characters like Fevvers who possess wings are particularly interesting to us. And why not? How many of your friends and neighbors sport feathers? In truth, stories with winged characters make up a pretty small genre, but those few stories hold a
special fascination. Gabriel García Márquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968) features a nameless old man who falls from the sky during a monsoonal rain. His wings are indeed enormous. Some of the poor people in the coastal Colombian town where he lands take him to be an angel, but if he is, he’s a very odd one. He’s dirty and smelly, and his ragged wings harbor parasites. It is true that shortly after he plops down in the yard of Pelayo and Elisenda, their child recovers from a life-threatening fever, but his other “miracles,” if he has anything to do with them, don’t work exactly right. One character fails to recover health but nearly wins the lottery, while another, although not cured of leprosy, sprouts sunflowers from his sores. Still, the residents are fascinated by this new arrival, so much so that the peasant couple constructs a cage and puts him on display. Although the old man does nothing remarkable, so many people come and pay the small admission fee that Pelayo and Elisenda become wealthy. We never know what the old man is, and speculation among the townspeople is hilarious as well as occasionally bizarre (his green eyes suggest to one character that he’s a Norwegian sailor), but his hapless, shabby appearance and long-suffering silence clearly benefit the family in a nearly miraculous fashion. In the way of those who receive miraculous aid, they are unappreciative and even a little resentful at having to provide for the old man. Eventually the old man regains his strength and, seen only by the wife, flaps away, his ungainly flight recalling a rather disreputable vulture more than any angel. Like Carter, García Márquez plays on our notions of wings and flight to explore the situation’s ironic possibilities. In fact, he goes even further in some ways. His winged character is literally caged; moreover, he’s dirty and unkempt and bug-ridden, not at all what we expect from potential angels. On one level, the story asks us if we would recognize the Second Coming if it occurred, and perhaps it reminds us that the Messiah was not
generally acknowledged when he did come. The angel doesn’t look like an angel, just as the King didn’t look like a king, certainly not like the sort of military ruler the Hebrews had expected. Does the old man choose not to fly? Has he been reduced in power and appearance purposely? The story never says, and in its silence it poses many questions.

Of course, his mode of arrival poses another question for us.

What about characters who don’t quite fly or whose flights are interrupted? Since Icarus, we’ve had stories of those whose flights end prematurely. In general, this is a bad thing, given what is the opposite of flying. On the other hand, not all crashes end disastrously. At almost the exact same moment (the novels were published within months of each other), Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie introduced characters—two in each case—falling from great heights, from exploding airliners. In Weldon’s
Hearts and Lives of Men
the contested child of an ugly divorce is kidnapped, and she and her kidnapper float down to safety as the rear section of the plane, containing only the two of them, rather improbably disobeys certain laws of aerodynamics to glide gently to earth. Rushdie’s two main characters, Gibreel and Saladin, fall bodily to the ground, their landings softened by the snow-covered English beach on which they land. In each case, there is an element of rebirth in their cheating what would typically prove to be certain death. The characters are not inevitably better off in their new lives; Rushdie’s two are particularly devilish, while Weldon’s little girl loses the immense privilege of her previous existence for a very long time, gaining instead the sort of life Dickens would invent for one of his waifs. Nevertheless, the act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of flight itself. As thrilled as we are by the prospect of flying, we are also frightened at the prospect of falling, and anything that seems to defy the inevitability of a plummeting demise sets our imaginations working overtime.
The survival of these characters demands that we consider the implications. What does it mean to survive certain death, and how does such survival alter one’s relationship to the world? Do the characters’ responsibilities to themselves, to life itself, change? Is the survivor even the same person any longer? Rushdie asks outright if birth inevitably involves a fall, while Weldon poses questions that are equally suggestive.

If our consideration of flying were limited to those works where characters literally fly, we’d have a pretty thin discussion. These examples of actual flight, necessary as they are, remain valuable chiefly for the instruction they give us in interpreting figurative flight. There’s an Irish novel about a little boy growing up to become a writer. As he matures, he finds that in order to acquire the experience and vision he needs to become a writer, he’ll have to leave home. Problem: home is an island. The only way he’s going to be able to leave is to cross a body of water, which is the most dramatic and final sort of home-leaving one can take (and he is a young man with a fear of water). Fortunately, he has the right name to help him out: Dedalus. Not a very Irish name for a young man from Dublin, nor is it the first name he tried for young Stephen, but it’s the one James Joyce settled on for
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
(1916). Stephen feels hemmed in by the strictures of Irish life, by family and politics and education and religion and narrow-mindedness; as we know by now, the antidote to limitations and shackles is freedom. The latter parts of the novel are filled with images of birds, feathers, and flying, all of which, while not referring to literal flight, evoke thoughts of metaphorical flight, of escape. Stephen has an epiphany, a Joycean religio-aesthetic word for an awakening, of a wading girl, in which moment he experiences the sensation of beauty and harmony and radiance that convinces him he must be an artist. The girl is neither singularly beautiful nor memorable in herself. Rather, the scene is beautiful in its totality, or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say in his perception of its totality. In this moment the narration describes her as a bird, from the feathery edges of her drawers to her breast like that of some “dark-plumaged bird.” Subsequent to this epiphany, Stephen begins to ruminate on his namesake, the crafter of wings for escape from a different island, whom he comes to think of as “hawklike.” Finally he announces that he must fly past the nets he sees as set to trap him into the conventionality and smallness that is every Dubliner’s inheritance. His understanding of flight is purely symbolic, yet his need for escape is no less real for that. In order for him to become a creator, his spirit must soar; he must be free.