It startled me to read, “If the
wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either.” This passage, near the end of the first
chapter of The Secular Scripture, only a few sentences before the
discussion about mazes with and without plans is something that struck me as
profound in its simplicity. Perhaps the
best place to start this is a little background into my experience with
Literature and English. When I took the
career aptitude test in high school, I remember only one thing about my
results: on my list of top five things I should not be was “English
Teacher.” At the time, I couldn’t have
agreed more, and even through the my first few semesters at the university, I
would have laughed had you told me that I was going to graduate with a
bachelors degree in English Literature while planning to continue onto graduate
programs with the intentions of teaching Literature at the college level. Fortunately, I had a teacher who managed to ignite
something of a spark in the dark room of my understanding of literature, and
things eventually took off from there. One
of my biggest problems when in High School, and before and for some time after,
was understanding the point of studying English. (The explanation of English as an art form
was something that was never presented to me and was something I was forced to arrive
at on my own.) Eventually, as Dr. Sexson
had his Lolita moment, I had my The Sun Also Rises moment, and
well, here I am.
That being said, I always enjoy
finding something aphoristic that sums up the study of English and Literature
in such simple terms. Therefore, for
lack of a better phrase, I was startled when I read this passage by Frye. I don’t think I was startled because of some
radical idea put forth by Frye, but by something simpler, the truth of it. I don’t want to say that all Literature can
be reduced to “a wandering of desire,” though I’m sure there are those who
would. Instead, I want to take a little
while to explore this idea of “wandering desire.” While this exploration is by no means
comprehensive, I hope that these few notes will help explore the phrase on both
the part of the Author and the Reader.
Let us first start by exploring the wandering
of the Author. My first reaction is that
the Author desires to be, among other things, able to play God and to be a god
over his dominion. By being able to use
his wandering desires, he is capable of using his craft to create worlds and
people that have never existed and never will exist and the Author places
himself and the supreme power. All
characters and events are subject to his whim, to his story. On a larger scale, we see desire contributing
to the advancement, or modification, rather, of literature. Over the centuries there are measurable
periods of time where schools of literature can be observed, e.g., Romanticism
to Victorianism to Modernism. The desire
of each school to depart form the schools that precede it help to distinguish the
schools from each other and keep the evolution moving forwards. (Admittedly, I
am hard-pressed to consider Modernism progress.)
On the part of the Reader, however,
I see only one desire that captures the literary mind: the desire to escape
from a prescribed reality into another of the Reader’s choosing. The fancy of the Reader is allowed free play
amongst the various works of literature and to seek refuge among them from the various
trouble of his or her reality. This is
the desire that drives the Reader to literature and the works that are most
receptive to readers, that allow for the desire to escape to become a temporary
reality, are what are considered “great literature.”
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