My Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary degree in Religion and Literature. When I was in school, there were only two Religion and Literature departments in universities: U Chicago, and U Virginia. Religion and Literature is a strange major that neither discipline wants. Religion departments don’t understand why one of their students would study literature. And I have been called an “interloper” by a professor in the English department. The reason I wanted to study Religion and Literature is due to my conviction that literature conveys meaning. Most sacred literature, including the Bible, is written in literary forms (also the Rig Veda, the Koran, and the Songs of Milarepa). Many of the prophets use poetry and metaphor, the Psalms are lyric poems, and much of the other books are stories. It was, and is, my belief that Hemingway says something about life, about reality, and about meaning or the lack thereof in existence. So did T. S. Eliot. So did Samuel Taylor Coleridge–especially in his famous poem, THE EOLIAN HARP. And Coleridge certainly said something about existence and thinly disguised religion in THE RHYME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER. But I need to be clear, I was not interested in religious literature. Rather, I sought statements about life in all literature. I suppose I was making a Swedenborgian connection not everybody would make. Swedenborg writes, “All religion relates to life, and the religious life is to do good.” So for me, statements about life are religious statements.
Unfortunately for me then, and now, the keepers of English literature do not think that literary art is about meaning-making. I’m not at all sure what English literature does or is for them. But two narratives point to what literature does or is, today.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia is located, I ran into a fellow student from the English department in a bar. I asked him what he was writing about in his dissertation. He said he was writing about the process by which the Mona Lisa became thought of as the greatest painting. He alluded to T.S. Eliot’s remark that Hamlet “is the Mona Lisa of literature.” He said that in his dissertation he makes a lot of that remark by Eliot. We were on friendly terms, and I was interested in his doctoral work. But I wondered why someone in the English department was writing about how the Mona Lisa became thought of as the greatest painting. I think that my colleague was writing critical theory. Making judgments about the value of art is something critics do. But I thought that what he was writing on would be more appropriate in the art department than in the English department. This was due to my presuppositions about English literature. You see how out of sync I was, and am still?
My second narrative isn’t direct personal experience. It is a conversation I had with an English professor at a charming coffee shop where I live now. She has a friend who won an award, she thought, for a poem her friend wrote. My acquaintance at the coffee shop related her recollection of the process her friend went through in writing the poem. She said that her friend wrote out in prose a narrative about her parents’ murder-suicide. She may have also included the guilt she felt as their child. Then, the poet either physically or conceptually cut up the narrative into phrases and segments. Then she rearranged the parts out of sequence, out of grammatical order, and the final product is unintelligible. The final product is called a poem. My acquaintance at the coffee shop said she was unable to read the poem. And she believes that her friend won an award.
I think that these two narratives show what is going on in humane letters. Criticism plays a prominent role in English literature. That’s what my first narrative says. Although criticism didn’t really come of age until the 17th Century, it seems to be alive and well, today. Deconstruction, which I thought was a passe brand of philosophy, dominates contemporary literature. That’s what my second narrative says–I think. For I think that disassembling and reassembling a story is a form of deconstruction. I’m guessing here, I I may be wrong. But what I do think, is that the poem in question is a lie. If a narrative is first written out in prose, that is the truth being expressed. Cutting it up and rearranging the parts into an incomprehensible word salad is a lie. Why rearrange the sentence fragments? Or, more importantly, why write out the story in plain English first? Isn’t the plain English story the reality and the cut-up poem a falsification of the story? And I don’t think that rearranging words into salad is art at all.
Finally, the subject matter of the so-called poem is also telling about the direction in which contemporary art is going. Of course her art would be about something horrible. Contemporary art is not allowed to be about happy, pretty, joyful subjects–especially about the glory of God and God’s works. Only a few years back a movie called No Country for Old Men won several Academy Awards. That movie is about a serial killer. The movie narrated him murdering people. He got away with his killing as Woody Harrelson, the sheriff, was also murdered. (A generation ago The Sound of Music cleaned up at the Academy Awards.) Another acquaintance of mine at the same charming coffee shop told me about her experiences in art school. She said that someone made a painting of an animal torn open. Then, the artist covered the frame in pig’s blood. I went to the art gallery in the city I live in now. There was a display composed of about 20 speakers on stands, with folding chairs set among them. I sat on a chair, and there was an audio loop of a woman describing a dream of crows dying. No eagles soaring upward into the sky. No baby crows hatching into life. No hummingbirds and flowers. Crows dying.
I come up with these ideas about art because I still believe that art makes statements about life. I believe, too, that my view of art is disjunct from how the contemporary keepers of art view it. I have already expressed my inability to appreciate contemporary art. And, indeed, my disinclination even to try. I have made a decision, though, that in my artistic endeavors, I will express my own vision of art. I will not attempt to assimilate contemporary trends. And whether there is an audience or receptivity for what I do is not of my concern. I think that artists who matter, held similar positions about creativity. Critics debated Frost’s value all his life. Andrew Wyeth never was considered a real artist. And Hemingway’s mother never liked his fiction, nor did Gertrude Stein. Of course, I’m not situating myself in such august company. I’m just saying.
David Fekete 