A taste of Literature

Entrance of IPELSHT (Institue Préparatoire aux Études Littéraires et Sciences Humaines de Tunisz)

Looking back at the two years I’ve spent in the Preparaotory Literary Institute of Tunis, a tsunami of ambivalent emotions hits me hard and then drowns me in its bottomless depths. The lessons and morals that I’ve learnt from that dark/exhilrating experience will remain as a part of my personality for the rest of my life.

The main yard

So this blog post is sort of a tribute to that institute and those inside of it. Kenek mel prep wta9ra fel blog, a3ref rani n7ebek ya 5ra.

As I mentioned earlier, when I was knee deep in the literary academia, I was kind of blind to what literature really is. All I saw was novels or plays to be critically read and then alayzed and its themes delianeted. Now that I’ve graduated from the said institute, I stopped seeing literary works as such and started rather “feeling” or appreciating them more. And after reflecting on the subject a little, I could finally put it into words and here is why literature is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced my entire life.

The beauty of literature is simply the myriad of interpretations people throughout the ages from far and wide draw from it. For one Shakespearean play, for example, take Julius Caasar, you may find so many readings: if you were a historian just trying to trace what historical events inspired Shakespeare to write the play, you may compare and contrast its events to some episodes of Plutarch’s Lives and the latter to the real history of the state; if you were a Renaissance Literature specialist, you would give the play a social reading comparing Julius Caesar to King James I of England; or let us suppose that you were an enthusiastic feminist, you would certainly dwell on Portia’s iconic scene where she slits her thigh just to prove to Brutus how strong she is. You could also give it a theatrical/artistic reading, highlighting body language and the strength of poetry.

The point is, depending on your educational background, the motivation behind picking up the book and reading it in the first place, or even your mood, you might just see the piece of literature you are observing with slightly different colors than the person right next to you. Such fact is true of every book/poem/play/the rest of literary forms out there. It is the same masterpiece, but people will surely see it very differently, and that what makes literature really exhilarating.

So many people out there do not appreciate literature because “there is no right or wrong”, “there is no real answer”, “it’s ambiguous. You’ll never be able to tell what the author really wanted to say”, and “because the curtains are f***ing blue”. They claim that science has all the answers. It is numbers and logical formulas. It can never make mistakes and in science we should put our trust. “At least if you study maths or physics or whatever, you end up with a final answer to the problem at hand.”

And they’re right. I can’t argue with that. What I am saying, though, is that the diversity of answers people come up with to one literary work is what truly makes it unique, not the actual answer. Having dozens of interpretations revolving around the real answer makes the latter seem less exciting, in my humble opinion.

Science may have the answer to different problems concerning your health or space traveling and everything in between, but literature has answers to your inner dilemmas, unvoiced struggles, the unspoken things, and so much more of what’s going on behind your blue curtain.

Let me elaborate a little bit more.

Maybe that little incident that happened to you a few years ago, that strange feeling you had at some point of your life that you couldn’t just put into words or express, that epiphanic incident when you realized something but you just went blank; you just lived it, felt it, knew what it was, but never ever could you communicate it- that particular incident was what inspired the poet/writer/artist to start working on his/her art. But unlike you, they did indeed manage to see the world from your eyes, hear it from your ears, or even breathe it from your soul and then put it down to ink and paper.

A friend of mine recently raised my attention to a very important point. Her idea was that “it is true that literature gives us answers to what is in the mind, the abstract and the theortical and that’s quite amazing. But to me the real beauty of literature stems from what is called 'The Death of the Author', a modernist concept that postulates that the author is not the owner of his work. His/her ideas put into works had already been thought of and belong to a different person in the past or the future. 

“With that in mind, you can start trying spotting your own thoughts scattered throughout the book. Meaning we would see the subject at hand as what the lines tell us, not what it could potentially mean in relation to the life of the writer or his context.

“And when you do that,” she continued, “you get to finally observe the ‘raw’ material of literature. You begin to see a few similarities between yourself and the text. It becomes a sort of journey to the self.

“Sometimes, for example, you get to read a medival piece of literature and somehow some bearded guy who spoke a language entirely different  from yours managed to understand the way you think and feel”.

And let me give you a personal example of me finding multiple answers in a poem I used to ABHOR wholeheartedly when I first read it.

When I left home to start studying abroad, I had gone through so many inner conversations with myself.

I remember on one of the first few days, I decided to walk aimlessly through the city not caring where I’d end up. So I got off the bus in the city center and started walking. There is a block gone, two, three, four and the number kept increasing until I literally thought that they were endless. They all looked the same, had similar architecture, people were coming out and going in buildidngs, pedestrians minding their own business, homeless people holding signs and there was me strolling along.

This incident felt vaguely familiar, somehow. It felt like a kind of déjà vu. And no, it was not in my home country. In Tunis the capital, if you walk for 10 minutes, you’re introduced to a totally different part of the city than the one you were in before. Think about the Old Medina of Tunis, the center, the northern poshy parts, and then you get to the southern parts. There were no endless almost identical streets like the ones here.

So I sat down and kept thinking, where did I see this before? And it hit me. It was none other than T.S Eliot’s wicked The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

… Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question

…Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit. 

F*** me upside down and sideways if that doesn’t mysteriously happen to describe what I felt word by word. What is it that I was feeling during that little walk ? And what is it that T.S Eliot refrains from telling us but confuses us by asking about it ?

This and so many other examples that I will abstain from mentioning because some of them are too personal to be put out on the internet.

So next time you read some literature, try looking at it for what it really is. Try seeing it from your own perspective and getting your own interpretation just from the words before you even google "What did x really meant in his/her y poem ?"