I was teaching a World Literature class one semester when a
student raised his hand and asked why the stories we were reading were so
depressing. He seemed agitated by this,
and I did my best to answer his question.
“Because there is a lot of stuff in sorrow and suffering. Happiness is pretty straight forward.” It was a stock, oversimplified answer and from
the expression on his face, it seemed not to suffice, but we dropped the topic
nonetheless. Now some years later, I’m
organizing the syllabus for my Intro to Lit class and I am having the same
reaction. This has me thinking of how
art and literature are generated and the state of the ethos that receives them.
It could be
the snow, the cold, the winter doldrums, cabin fever, rendering me particularly
impressionable. Perhaps these benchmarks
of literature (think: The
Story of an Hour, The Yellow
Wallpaper, The Lottery, Madame Savage) are all too potent to be read
together when in the throes of a winter semester. Most of these model stories were written
during the late nineteenth, early twentieth century when there was a need for a
good long wake up call from the facades of propriety. But these days we’re constantly in the throes
of human calamity and dysfunction; it’s lurking on every device we have access
to.
In an art
magazine I bought for a friend, there was a painting of a woman carving out her
own viscera a la grand guignol. Cathartic?
Perhaps if one has dyspepsia. One has to wonder how a piece like this would be received: whether it would be novel and useful to a society over-staturated with gore. Would it promote contemplation or desensitization? And then
there’s that picture of a young Adam Lanza dressed in camouflage with rounds of
ammunition draped across his toddler legs.
The image is just as revolting as the grand guignol painting, but it is
also heartbreaking. We reached a new low
with the Newtown tragedy; it is an indicator of a particular rampant mental lethargy and level
of dysfunction in our society.
I understand that artists and
writers create art for personal reasons and I don’t want to dictate what they
should and should not create. What I am
saying is that we need to be mindful
of what we are releasing to the public and how it might contribute to this already
dire ethos.
This brought my thinking to the
Renaissance and how, perhaps, we could use one right about now. Just as the artists and writers of the
Renaissance chose to revive Western Europe from its mental lethargy with
ancient Greek and Roman texts on humanism, so too can we emulate particular
works and redress our seemingly dire culture with new thought. I’ve been compiling a list of works with the theme of compassion because I believe it to be one of the most crucial of
virtues, one whose power has been sadly underestimated.
Just how, exactly does the mechanism of compassion work in literature, for instance? Stories can inspire
us. The writer presents a round, dynamic character
with whom the reader can sympathize and draws forth the virtue through her
actions and thoughts. For example, the
character Kitty Fane in The Painted Veil
by William Somerset Maugham. When we are
first introduced to Kitty she is having an affair with a local politician. Upon discovering the affair, Kitty’s
seemingly stoic, intellectual husband Walter blackmails her into accompanying
him to a cholera-infested village in China for her penance. Here Kitty is transformed by witnessing her
husband’s tireless efforts to better the lives of others and experiences the
emergence of her own compassionate tendencies when she volunteers at a convent
school. She transforms from a shallow,
immature woman to a model human being; one a reader can aspire to be. A few months ago I had watched the movie
version of The Painted Veil and
revisited Kitty’s transformation. My
reaction was none other than relief;
it is always a gamble as to whether someone will be open and aware to the good
in themselves and the world and when one chooses it, it’s someone to root
for. And that’s what Kitty had brought
out in me, relief and rooting.
A second way the mechanism of
compassion can work in literature is more personal. I was about seventeen when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in an AP English class and saw myself in the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, a
sensitive boy vulnerable to the glorious and treacherous aspects of the
Catholic Church. I don’t recall any big
sin prodding me toward the flames of Hell as Stephen had prodding him, but I
knew I was similarly impressionable and imaginative and aware of the Church’s
message: Be Good or Else. I shared that
yolk of guilt and shame when the conscientious Stephen bore the blows of the
Fire and Brimstone Sermon given by the preacher:
The next day brought death
and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of
spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the death-chill touch the extremities
and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the
bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat
oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs…No help! No help!
During a depression in high school,
I had felt similar pangs of existential worry: No help! No help! The above paragraph depicts an
impressionable and creative mind turning on itself; during my depression, I
experienced just that. Here is an
example of empathy at its best, when a reader and writer (through the persona
of character) commune over an idea and/or emotion. One reads and one is not alone; one
recognizes the suffering in another. The
alleviation of that suffering is compassion due not only to this “intimacy”,
but also through any answer that may be presented. Fallibility, according to Joyce, was part of
artistic maturation:
A girl stood before him in
midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea.
She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a
strange and beautiful seabird...Her image had passed into his soul for ever and
no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had
leaped at the call. To live, to err, to
fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!
A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty,
an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant
of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
Stephen’s “epiphany” is the
realization of his authentic self- the artist.
It was my realization as well, ultimately, and I had started to peel
away at the skins of my suffering. In this
way Joyce’s masterpiece is an act of compassion. Now, I can’t know if Joyce intended to be compassionate by writing A Portrait. But he presented the empathetic arena in
which I might find compassion for myself.
The Renaissance had the printing
press; today we have the Internet. We have
the ability to flash mob on cue, tweet on command, transmit a tome in the blink
of an eye. It comes down to this: do we
assemble in the name of the good and think more critically of conflict, identifying more positive outcomes or do we grab that low-hanging fruit? In this broken and deluded world, we need
compassion. We’ve always needed
compassion.
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