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.