The season of class registration is here, which means that over the span of the past week, I’ve overheard all too many discussions about which courses to take for the upcoming semester. While I can understand that major requirements, college requirements and easy A’s trump all other priorities when it comes to the credits students are willing to load, I usually can’t help but interject my suggestion to take at least one literature course at the University.
And by “interject,” I should clarify that it’s not just my close friends who have to listen to my speech on the importance of reading books in an academic setting. In fact, most of the people who get to hear it are people who I only marginally know. And while some are polite enough to stick around for the whole spiel, I’ve had to get used to others, like Mr. Green Flannel in the Alderman Café, slowly getting up and tiptoeing away.
My pretentious side likes to think that the embarrassment is but a small price to pay for all the “difference” my insistence on literature has been making, but I’m coming to realize that maybe eavesdropping on strangers isn’t the most effective way to reach the masses. So instead I’ve opted to write this column, and for the sake of The Cavalier Daily, I’ll keep my point as short as I can: No matter what you’re majoring in, the study of literature will improve you.
And in contrast to what the past few paragraphs may suggest, these aren’t just the desperate ramblings of a humanities major, but the most sincere way I can advise college students to extend their scope of thinking beyond their own filters. In his letter to playwright Oskar Pollack, Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, wrote that a book “must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” Now without transforming into “that kid” from your high school AP Literature discussion, I want to point out, through my experience, just how accurate his metaphor really is.
Kafka’s “sea” is really another way of describing the realities that exist within our conscience and our universe. Some realities are abstract, like the ideas of love or jealousy, while others are physical or logical truths, like A=A or the gravitational constant. Whatever the “realities” may be, civilization, education and natural maturity forces the conscience to “freeze” a certain number of them to create a frozen “surface” on which we live and describe most of our lives.
And unlike in the sea, where the realities float around without any defined relationships at all, the “surface” keeps them fastened in place with bold lines drawn between them. While what crystallizes on the surface varies from person to person and culture to culture, the truth is that as both students and humans, we are forced to create a representation of reality and live on it.
Take the idea of “justice.” For thousands of years, from Hammurhabi to the Supreme Court, what we today consider “justice” has been put to practice in polarized forms. Some frozen levels connect “justice” with “redemption,” while others have placed it closer to “punishment.” And while any philosophy student will tell you that neither relationship is more correct, almost every moral code, and certainly every government, has frozen “justice” as one or another conception.
This is where books come in. According to Kafka, the “frozen” surface to the sea is just as much of a barrier to the infinite realities as it is a roadmap for our thoughts. Even though the surface is a part of the sea itself, it has lost its mobility, its mystery and is nothing but a tiny fraction of the sea as a whole. When you read a good book, it hacks at the surface as new associations are made and new realities are introduced. You see other surfaces through the point of view of the author and characters. Suddenly, concepts like “justice” don’t necessarily have to associate with other things in the same way, and you find yourself actually entering the sea.
But enough with the abstractions. The reason Kafka’s metaphor is true is that the academic study of literature, like it or not, forces you into this new realm of thinking that isn’t offered in any other department, or at least not in the same “existential” sense, and the idea of breaking your ordinary conceptualizations is fruitful even for those who are neck-deep in organic chemistry. What’s more, while the last-minute, “BS” analysis of a passage under a strict time deadline isn’t exactly what most people look forward to in a course, if you’re doing it for a book you actually enjoy, it will be.
So when the time comes to register for classes, no matter if you’re a first-year or on the verge of graduation, I urge you to make room for just one literature class that you think might break your surface. And whether or not you take my advice, I want to congratulate you for making it to the end of what I think is the weirdest column I’ve ever submitted.
Denise Taylor’s column normally appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at d.taylor@cavalierdaily.com.
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