I never considered myself as one “good at literature” during my high school years. The art of reading between the lines I never quite mastered, resulting in missing the metaphors and ironies that pepper the texts and failing to come up with any critique worthy of credit. The doors of literature were locked in my face. While taking A Level English Language I gave literature tries after tries the same way an armed force attempts to conquer a city, burying myself in those heavy classics and even considering self-studying the syllabus before sitting the exams along with my schoolmates who took A Level Literature, only to fail miserably time after time. In the end I resigned to the fact, or what seemed like so at that time being, that literature, this beautiful discipline, was not for me.
I graduated from high school with an offer for linguistics and switched to a different university after a year to study sociology, disciplines that have nothing to do with literature, and did not expect me and those books to go any further. It may be worth noting, though, that during this whole process I always had a hollow, empty feeling deep down, something I hardly ever mentioned to anyone; I love words, after all, so not being able to appreciate the epitome of words troubled me.
Sociology fits me in more senses than one. Sitting squarely at the heart of all social science disciplines its influence radiates to all subjects that have something remotely to do with it, ideal for me who at that time was still torn between whether to apply to social anthropology or education studies, or whatever else, for graduate school. More importantly, I thoroughly enjoy it, and pages after pages of endless material did not bother me much. During a lecture of “Media, Culture and Communication” the professor was illustrating the process of media portraying messages when he brought up the concept of connotation and denotation; while the denotation of a full stop is the dot or circle at the end of a sentence, its connotation is the ending of a sentence, a period of time, or an event. I made notes but did not think about it until a couple of days later.
That evening I was browsing my computer trying to find something else to read after spending an hour or so on my sociology reading. Though never confident in literature I still made sure I keep electronic versions of literature anthologies in my computer, just in case I was craving for something else to read after hours of sociology. So I flipped through the anthology, and picked a piece of prose at random. The text, with its detailed depiction of guests at a dinner party and how the protagonist in the end reached a state of total peace and tranquility while gazing at the snowy night outside, fascinated me and somehow rang a bell somewhere in my head. And then it clicked: the guests were symbols of the society in which the author was writing, and the protagonist’s state of mind was the author’s own understanding of aesthetic neutrality – this was what I learned in my sociology course just days ago, this was connotation and denotation.
Words, more often than not, are merely symbols, inferring concepts and emotions much deeper and much harder to express. I sat there stunned, by the carefully crafted writing, and by how I managed, for the first time in years, to actually comprehend a piece of text with the help of knowledge acquired elsewhere.
That text, the last one from “Dubliners” by the Irish writer James Joyce, triggered a thought that had not crossed my mind for the past few years: I decided to read that book, along with all other books, all the masterpieces I had missed during my battle with literature over the years.
The first challenge, it soon turned out, was catching up with literary theory while not having studied literature systematically in high school. I started with textbooks, A Level English Literature textbooks and anthologies I should have gone through long ago, and made daily trips to the library to self-study them.
While at first I expected the process to be a pain for someone educated as a social scientist, it turned out to be much more enjoyable than any experience I had ever had with literature.
What I learned in sociology class, I discovered with delight, corresponds perfectly with what I was reading. Two poems on mountain climbing by Christina Rosetti discuss the author’s changing attitudes towards religion that mirrored how society had evolved during her lifetime; Western cultural hegemony and how it affects the lives of second-generation immigrants was depicted precisely in autobiographic works of Indian Americans; even in an obscure short story titled “The Phoenix” did I manage to detect the craze of consumerism and pessimism towards the future in postwar Britain.
Then it came one afternoon when I planned to read one last text before calling it a day, and the text I picked happened to be “The Son’s Veto” by Thomas Hardy. I went through every word of the story, the marriage between a priest and his parlour maid, the uneducated mother and her son who attended prestigious public schools, him later opposing her marrying the store owner whom she loved after the death of the priest, and how his manner did not change even after his mother’s unhappy death and he becoming a priest himself. My eyes misted with tears, because of the class struggles, the patriarchy, the toxic family environment and the way religion triumphs over humanity illustrated in the short story, and because of how simply beautiful the language was.
As I packed the book into my bag I made up my mind to study literature in graduate school, the same way I planned to apply to social anthropology before. I was not surprised by the fact that I came up with this idea, partly because I knew the kind of person I am, and partly because that hollow empty feeling deep down was finally filled up by literature after all these years.
I was aware of how quickly my thoughts change, though, so patiently I waited for me to change back to the non-literature-loving self while still going to the library every day. I waited for days, then weeks, and not only did the desire to study literature not diminish, but it grew stronger, like a fire in the hearth fed by wood and coal. So to keep the fire blazing I decided.
It proved to be easier said than done. My university was not known for humanities and social sciences to start with, and even if it was, the resources were not delivered to my doorsteps. Sociology majors could only take one non-sociology module per year, and to make matters worse, almost all English literature modules are restricted to literature majors; at first glance it seemed that the doors of literature were locked in my face, again. Yet after all this I became a firm believer of the cliche that nothing is impossible, and my experience did not let me down.
Once the professor of “Media, Culture and Society” invited a doctorate student to give us a lecture on the topic he is familiar with, and when chatting with him after class I learned to my surprise that he did his undergraduate degree at Cambridge – in English literature. Thrilled, I poured out all the questions I had accumulated throughout the past weeks, to which he answered patiently, including that T. S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land”, one I had always chalked off as gibberish, actually has its sociological and anthropological values. “Literature is most of the time but a veil of society made of words,” he said in the end, “and literature in turn becomes part of society.”
I emailed him later asking whether we could have a chat sometime on how literature and sociology intersect, to which he agreed and added that it is absolutely feasible to apply to study literature in graduate school with an undergraduate degree in sociology, “as long as you work hard for it”. After checking on the student system literature courses in Semester Two I emailed one of the course administrating professors and asked whether I could attend lectures; he said yes, and I could hear the wall I constructed between myself and literature collapsing.
I still have not read “Dubliners” yet, for I need to finish my anthologies first and also need to revise for exams after the winter break. I never regret choosing sociology as my major, for without sociological knowledge I would not be able to have even the tiny bit of comprehension on literature I possess at the moment, but that is not the most important understanding I came to. I regard that afternoon reading “The Son’s Veto” and swearing to study literature in the quiet library as the moment I bid farewell to my past, to all those confusions and lament. For now I know that I am neither lazy nor stupid, as I myself had speculated before; I am simply in a different time zone when it comes to this beautiful disciplines of literature.
No two creatures share the same time zone. There are trees like willows, reaching their prime in but thirty or forty years and dangling their long emerald leaves in the breeze, only to wither as soon as they flourish; there are also trees like pines, much less remarkable than willows during the same time frame, but when given hundreds and thousands of years erect themselves like pillars that connect heaven and earth, shielding passers-by from sunlight and raindrops. Likewise, some people get all they want at twenty and die at forty, others retire from an obscure life at sixty only to start their own business at seventy. Both willows and pines add precious shades of green to the world, and as long as one contributes to society one is worthy of respect, be them twenty or seventy years old.
I would not and should not be ashamed of being in a slower time zone when it comes to literature. If I cannot be a willow tree, being a pine tree does not sound bad either.
- Article｜Mary Liu
- Pictures｜Mary Liu
