Death of Literature?

I was in the eleventh grade, meeting Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, when I first heard and thought of this question. How can Literature die? How can God die? But after all, how can we die? …

Years passed by and I met different writers, different views, different novels. I miss that year, that grade, that age … in the same year I met the writings of James Joyce, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, and some novels by Marquez. I began to be thirsty of Literature, to feel its voice in my heart. In the twelfth grade I read Goethe’s Faust and, as a graduation present to myself, I read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Lovely books. Probably I read in my life a couple of great books … then I met again Joyce, and I met myself in Ulysses, and I saw the birth of literature, of culture, of humanity, I met the Irish nation and the human nation, and at the same time, I started thinking of this question: can Literature die?

There are days when I can’t read. Sometimes weeks. There are books that I hate, that I judge, that I dislike, that I wish I had never heard. There are times when I think “oh, but I saw this theme/motif/idea somewhere else. And it was better.”  Sometimes I am sorry that I read so much, that I saw so many things. Why? Because I LOVE to talk about Literature, but there are so few people that really read … the books that I love. And I feel miserable from time to time because I never really talk about these books … Furthermore, when you read the “best books” from a genre, it’s impossible for you to have any sympathy for the rest of the books. For instance, I love magical realism. I read 3-4 novels by Marquez (and the best remains A Hundred Years of Solitude), I read Rushdie, Bulgakov, and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban. It is hard for me to like and to put in the category of magical realism a book like Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima. Of course that I shall probably use this book in teaching my students, of course that I found it a nice book, but you can’t ask me to love, to appreciate it. So if we think from this perspective, we could say that literature is dead for a part of me, for the part that read the books that should have come before “the easy ones”.

        However, this year I stumbled across another writer. Leslie Marmon Silko. She’s an Indian, a Native American, and I said in my mind “this is something different”. And I guess it was. Have you ever thought how many writers, from various countries, have a story to tell? How many writers are unknown to us just because they are not English/American/French? How many writers are not good enough for us just because they are swallowed by Time and Unknown Space? Think of this.  

Ceremony is a novel written by an Indian. It hides in its pages a different culture, extremely different from the West, from the things that we know, a world that could be understood completely only if you are an Indian. If you have seen movies like Burry my Heart at Wounded Knee, Thunderheart, Dancing with the Wolves, you would know the specific Indian atmosphere/style … like a lyrical ever-lasting song, beyond words. This is one of the things that I liked at this book: its style, how Tayo’s story is linked with Indian poems/traditions/legends. I have also liked the oscillation between past and present, between the chains of memories and the everlasting present. In this aspect, Faulkner helped me … indeed, he is more complicated, complex, more mythical, but still … I love writers that play with Time. Moreover, the narrator doesn’t offer to us complete access to the action, at least not all the time … after all, does it really matter the things that happen in a novel or is it most significant the atmosphere, the transmitted message (think of Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, from To the Lighthouse)?

It is a novel about loss – of identity, of dear ones, of a nation, of self, of will to live. A nice aspect that is present in Ceremony is the relation between Death and Life; Tayo, in his road (or his Ceremony), learns that there are things which are worse than Death. The more he accepts Death, the more he sees the World around him, the more he starts Living.

Remorse plays an important role here. Remorse for being who he is, for his roots, for being the survival of the war, for his brother’s death, for his family’s feeling. Silko presents not only how a war destroys a man and a nation, but how the white people (and not only) destroyed a culture.

“If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world, the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count, the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than 200 years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it.”(Ceremony, 191)

But Tayo doesn’t want to be an Indian or a white fellow. He just wants to be a human being.

“It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.”(Ceremony, 25)

On the other hand, yes, there are various clichés presented in this book, themes that are also present in European/American books. One simple example could be the war and all the things that he causes, the remorse, the loss, the haunting of the past. But to me the key difference is the ceremony, the strong connection with the land, the level of humanity searched by the protagonist, his integrity in the Ceremony of Life ...  

So, is Literature on its finale road? I think that all the readers will always have something to learn, to discover in it. I think that writers shall always have something to say, with their own voice, in their own style, to shape not only the outside world, but also their inside one. And if the outside world can be the same for many of us, the inside one has always something unique, different in it.