Oral Literature and Peace

I attended Peter Wasamba's lecture tonight, which focused mostly on the political and ethnic conflicts in the history of Kenya, and it was really interesting. He described some of the problems that developed out of colonialism when land was divided up unfairly between the different Kenyan tribes. It developed an insider/outsider way of thinking based on what tribes received greater advantages than others, and this resulted in many ethnic clashes among the people. The recent political unrest that has taken place in Kenya developed out of the ethnic tensions that tend to arise to a greater extent at the time of elections because the politicians take advantage of their ethnic identity and try to gain support from their ethnic groups to achieve their own political motives. He also said that if a president doesn't come from your ethnic community, then you will end up being a marginalized group.

Although Wasamba didn't focus on his literary role during this discussion, he briefly described his work with oral literature in Kenya in the context of the country's historical background. He undertook the task of visiting Kenyan communities in order to collect their songs, proverbs, stories, and testimonies. He said that he never failed to travel to any place and listen to oral literature of a specific ethnic group despite the fact that ethnic divides existed between them. From this work, Wasamba was able to see very clearly how the different ethnic groups could learn from each other's differences rather than allow them to result in ethnic conflicts. He said that their ancestors had been able to move peacefully from one community to another despite their ethnic differences because they knew that when isolated, no community can survive. He finds these ideas within his oral literature.

It was interesting hearing Wasamba describe his work with literature knowing the ethnic tensions that exist in his country. It sounds like the role of literature in this situation is to bring people together. It can be a peacemaker of sorts. The oral literature of the different communities reflects snippets of their humanity, and the fact that they all have values for certain proverbs and songs shows their similarities. Literature humanizes people in a way that ethnic classifications simply don't. It kind of reminds me of a quote from Stalin that goes something like "The death of an individual is a tragedy, the death of millions, a statistic." Literature can bring attention to the person as an individual where they would otherwise get lost in the classification that blends them into with the group.

Literary Excellence

I always thought it was interesting in classes like Victorian Lit or Romantic Lit when we learned about trends that occurred during these time periods, and it was always a footnote that these trends really only applied to the intellectuals of the period. I always wondered, who are these intellectuals that dominate what we learn about in history? And what is everyone else doing while the intellectuals are busy setting trends? Although I like to think that my education led me to study the best novels from these time periods, the question arises as to what makes them the best and whose values they really reflect. In Richard Ohmann's "The Shaping of the Cannon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975," he writes, "To answer that the best novels survive is to beg the question. Excellence is a constantly changing, socially chosen value" (1885). It's interesting to think that we read things that we may not personally consider excellent because we want to learn to recognize excellence that may not echo our own.

Ohman further discusses the qualities that are necessary in order for a novel to enter into our literary cannon: "I am suggesting that novels move toward a canonical position only if they attained both large sales (usually, but not always, concentrated enough to place them among the best-sellers for a while) and the right kind of critical attention" (1886). It makes sense to have both of these criteria because, as Ohmann uses the example with Love Story, it is completely possible for something to be considered a best-seller and have it's big trendy entrance into literary culture and then it will slowly drift away as the trend passes. At that point, "who will read it tomorrow, except on an excursion into the archives of mass culture?" (1886). Sounds kind of reminiscent of things like the mullet haircut or parachute pants. In this way, literature seems to fit in the category of any cultural trend like fashion or pop music. It gets popular for a while, and then it passes on into the literary archives when it loses its cultural trendiness. However, the unique factor of literature is that we select certain pieces of it to keep around and study. These "elite" pieces never go out of style. Actually, they tend to set the style for the future, because if you drop the name of certain "classic" works, it can make you seem quite intelligent. Ohman makes a good point in establishing that a book must experience both cultural popularity and strong critical reviews in order to make it onto that list of canonical books.

Story time, anyone?

It was a bright day at Sipi Falls, Uganda, and despite the fact that I had recently sprained my ankle, I was determined to enjoy the scenery by hiking out to a waterfall with a few friends. We had to walk through the local village to reach the trail, and as we walked, our skin color performed Pied Piper magic by attracting all local children to follow us in parade fashion, singing, "mzungu, mzungu!" The parade skimmed out until just a few children were left in tow as we reached the mountainous part of the hike that required us to climb quite a bit. A Ugandan friend led the way, and while he moved forward, or rather upward, at a rather quick pace, our exhaustion from climbing and my throbbing sprained ankle helped us persuade him that we should stop for a break. As we gathered together to rest, our Ugandan leader told us that this was the time for a story, and he asked us which of us had a story to tell. I looked around nervously at my group of five American friends, and it seemed that all of us echoed each other's uncertain faces. What kind of story was fitting for a situation such as this? I hadn't had story time since I was a child, and I only vaguely remember the stories. Not to mention the fact that we were all old enough to be considered adults, and a fantastical children's story hardly seemed fitting. As we attempted to explain to our Ugandan friend that none of us really had a story to tell, he didn't really seem to believe us. However, he proceeded to tell us a story of his own as if storytelling were the most common of daily activities. And perhaps in his culture it was, but I can't say the same for my own.

As I read Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller," it seemed that he was describing this very moment when our Ugandan friend asked us to tell a story:

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences (1).

It's rather odd now that I think about it. When I was a little kid, I came up with all kinds of fantastical stories, and yet that inclination to tell stories sort of dwindled down as I grew up and learned to read and write stories on my own. The process of learning how to read and write almost trains us how to not tell stories to one another, because reading novels on our own and then discussing them is the much more appropriate-seeming thing to do. But that doesn't require actual story-telling skills. Looking through the lens of Marxist literary theory, it's interesting to note that our industrialized culture adopts the novel as its preferred literary form, whereas in less-developed Uganda, storytelling is an essential part of community.

Différance and Deconstruction

I've always been interested in learning about the concept of deconstruction, and so I recently read the essay "Différance" by Jacques Derrida. He uses this French word "différance" (he purposely spells it with an A because you can read the A but can't hear it when spoken) to develop his idea of deconstruction.Derrida notes that in the system of language, “there are only differences” (11). He uses the word différance , which he declares is neither a word nor a concept, to acknowledge the play in language and demonstrate that there is no clear origin or beginning from which language develops. He usesdifférance to refer to two distinct meanings: defer and differ. According to the idea of différance in terms of the word "defer," words are signifiers that cannot summon their full meaning, but they develop meaning by their relation to other words. This creates a chain of meaning, which is comparable to the analogy of looking up a word in a dictionary only to find more words that can also be looked up in the dictionary, and the process can carry on infinitely with no apparent starting point of meaning. The "differ" aspect of différance refers to the way that words are defined against one another, and this furthers the idea that complete meaning is always delayed and never indicated through words. However, because différance directly means neither of these, it exemplifies the play that works within language. Derrida develops this concept of deconstruction from his critique of Edmund Husserl’s idea that there exists a pure origin of meaning: “Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured, and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name ‘origin’ no longer suits it” (11). The differences within language which have been produced have no specific subject or thing that causes the differences. Therefore, this idea cannot even be contained in the word différance, because there is no name that exists for the origination of meaning in language. However, the play of the word gives the effect that Derrida wants to use to refer to his ideas about language.

It was interesting to read a primary source to learn more about Derrida's concepts of deconstruction, and I'm interested in reading more about the influences that Derrida's ideas have had on our perspectives of language and literature.

To clarify a bit

In response to a comment on one of my previous posts where I complained a bit about structural analysis views of texts, a classmate advised, "I don't think that you have to allow criticism to destroy your enjoyability of the text." I guess that's not really the argument I was going for. I enjoy reading about the different kinds of criticism, and I think that knowing critical views for examining a text are beneficial for the reader. I even see the rationale and influence that structuralism has on our mindsets about literature. However, I guess I'm basically disagreeing with the specific approach of over-objectifying texts. The prospect of studying literature as a science makes me cringe. I guess the aesthetic qualities of the texts strike me as more worthy of discussion than the categorical makeup.

"You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog"

When I recently signed onto Facebook, the first thing I noticed was a large advertisement in the "News Feed" section for Wordclay, which described its services as "DIY Self Publishing on your own terms. What could be better?" I went to the website to look around a bit, and it allows you to upload your book and market it on your own in just six simple steps.

I wondered what would posess someone to publish their book in such a way, especially since this ad was on Facebook and therefore possibly targeted at college students? I recently read a rather entertaining article called "The Transom: You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog" by William W. Savage, Jr. His article focused mostly on the way that people write on internet blogs (and it was published in 2006, so I'm not sure how big of a difference 2 years can be in the world of internet writng), but he made a comment that I think could apply to any type of website that allows people to publish works online. He writes that "One may write about whatever one pleases, without fear of vetting, editing, or anything else destructive of one's ego." This is interesting because one main difference between a person writing on a blog or on a site like Worclay and a person publishing something through a publisher is the process. If you "publish" something online, it is not subjected to the process of submitting it to an editor or having to rewrite it to meet certain standards. And it saves you from the criticism that you might get elsewhere. I found one quote from this article particularly entertaining:

I have come to the conclusion that academic blogging is a great deal like talk radio, albeit for intellectuals. Listen long enough to talk radio and you might--and I emphasize the conditional--hear an intelligent remark. But, for the most part, the medium seems to exist to encourage nitwits and crackpots to believe that somebody out there truly cares about their opinion. As a reader, I suspect that I shall continue to prefer the printed page over the monitor's glowing screen. It's easier on the eyes and better for the posture, don't you know.

This quote has some truth in it, although that nitwits and crackpots comment doesn't apply to our literary criticism class, of course. But although Savage seems quickly turned off by blogs, I think that sometimes the type of reading that a blog provides is just what interests me. I can enjoy the way that blog entries have that personal touch of someone's thoughts even though they are written for an abstract internet audience to read. However, I noticed that the way I read a blog differs a lot from the way I read something in print. When I read a blog or online article, I have a tendency to scan quickly through it and often I end up following some link that takes me to some tangent website and sometimes distracts me from the ideas of the blog. But I can hardly ever pick up a book to read without also picking up a pencil. Printed texts allow for more interaction and, for me, more focus. They just seem more real. I don't know if that perspective is changing though with more and more writing appearing online.

Is the map more valuable than traveling?

I remember some painful English classes (somewhere around elementary school? middle school? both?) where the teacher decided to draw plot diagrams on the chalkboard. She made us learn words like exposition and denouement, and we were somehow supposed to force the colorful and diverse events of every story into the lifeless categories of this ugly line. When we finished reading a book and had a test, there never failed to appear a question about the climax of the story. This question bothered me to no end. I understood the story and how the events worked together, but I could never identify the climax of the story correctly. Furthermore, I didn't really care whether or not I was able to identity the exact event that someone had decided to label as the climax, because it seemed irrelevant to the story itself. I don't ever recall learning why it was important to know exactly which portion of the story counted as the climax; I just knew that it was a word that appeared on all our tests.

Well, after reading Tzetan Todorov's article "Structural Analysis of Narrative," it's all starting to make sense. Structural analysis seeks to "discover in each work what it has in common with others . . . or even with all other works . . . it would be unable to state the individual specificity of each work" (2100). When I read that Todorov's stuctural analysis wanted to "inquire about the possibility of a typology of plots," I couldn't shake that chalkboard image out of my head (2105). It wipes out the all-too-important uniqueness from each work and instead scientifically categorizes how all works fit into certain structures of discourse.

I recently read Kierkegaard's "Concluding Unscientific Postscript," and it was really interesting to see how he regards objective and subjective knowledge. He differentiates subjective knowledge as that which focuses on the relationship between subject and object, and it notes the motivation of an individual's passion in regarding everything else. Subjective knowledge, Kierkegaard argues, is the only way that we have the possibility of attaining truth. Objective knowledge focuses on making things documentable and repeatable, and therefore the person fails to even matter. If a person conducts parts of a scientific study well (in quest of objective knowledge), someone else will be able to take over with all their recorded information and start exactly where they left off. The object matters, but the subject is replaceable. With subjective knowledge, however, we can't separate the subject and object. Their relationship is where truth lies. In this case, if an artist is to die, no one can possibly repeat their technique and the way they created their art. Kierkegaard's ideas seem relateable to the idea of structural analysis because in a way, this process seems like it's objectifying literature. It's looking at literature in terms of the systematic way that anyone can create literature, but I think literature is too subjective for that. Yeah, maybe people can create a similar structure, but who cares about the structure? It's the story, creativity, and style that one person is able to bring together into their literary creation that matters. I see more importance in examining literature subjectively as a craft and a little less as a science.

We can look at the stars and marvel at how lovely they look up there in the sky at night. But the second someone comes to me to talk about how a star is really only a "massive, luminous ball of plasma" (as says Wikipedia), it loses a little bit of its wonder. I would rather focus on how it looks, and maybe even the various shapes that the stars form, than on its scientific composition and its approximated distance from the earth. And I feel the same way about literature.