The big quetion 1/5. An encounter with a surly ex.

If this building existed, it was never as good as its story.

When I was nineteen years old, I dated a mildly attractive and thoroughly surly girl by the name of Petunia.  OK, I have forgotten her real name but Petunia will serve well enough for this story.  She was a scientist in training who looked at everything in the world and asked two significant questions:  

1. Why had it been created?
2. What possible use was it to her?

Petunia and I were not together long before she figured out that in regards to myself the answers to those questions were “out of spite to her principles,” and “none at all.”  After two months of sparse and abrasive contact, intermittently peppered with a kiss or two, the relationship fell into death throws in a popular Birkenhead drinking establishment where she told me that her father had warned her about boys like me.  What she meant by that was not that I was a sexual predator but rather that I was an idiot with no career prospects.  Petunia was an irritatingly bright and observant girl.

Ours was a dull and short-lived affair and our "relationship" may well have blended into the multitude of other unceremonious and unexplained rejections that plagued my adolescence were it not for that fact that, right in the middle of dumping me, she asked the following question:

           

            “What use is literature for anything?”

She spoke the words with the full contempt that she seemed to feel that everything involving me deserved and accompanied them with a dismissive curl of her poorly painted lips.  I was studying for my undergraduate degree at the time and my chosen subject was just one of many facets of my character that she felt was inferior to her own.  She then went on to add:

           

            “Doctors heal people, scientists make people’s lives easier, what actual physical use are writers?”

The question infuriated me, partially because it was intended as detraction but mostly because it was just so valid.  Even today if you type the phrase, “literature is” into the Google search engine it automatically prompts you with, “literature is pointless.”  The purpose of literature is not so innate within the human structure that its purpose almost doesn’t bear consideration. It’s always been there, like the cerebrum and like the cerebrum you could probably function without it but not to the full human potential.

“What actual physical use are writers?” Was not an easy question to be asked when my mental faculties were already caught up in solving the twin dilemmas of how to stop getting dumped by the red faced pixie that was screaming at me and, how to get that same pixie to take her clothes off within the hour.  As a matter of fact it is not the easiest question to answer, even now, when those dilemmas are fifteen years into the past.

At the time I simply retorted by asking her why if scientists were so great, I could name three Elizabethan authors without blinking and she couldn’t come up with a single Elizabethan scientist?  After that, I made some juvenile and ignorant comments about flat-Earth theory and effectively won the argument.  A few minutes later, I remembered that I was not trying to win the argument but to stop her from leaving me forlorn in the Birkenhead branch of Yeats' Wine-Lodge.  It was too late: she had already stormed away never to enter my life again.

As I made good use of the Archers and lemonade she had left behind, I began thinking about her question again and I concluded that I had come nowhere near to answering it.

 The role of literature has long been questioned by the critics of the world and has been seriously defended many times; most recently by the Stanford critic Gregory Jusdanis in his Fiction Agoniste: A Defence of Literature.  Jusdanis convincingly argues that literature provides a fence between reality and the immaterial concepts that make up the human condition.  It is a great study that is written by a top academic but Jusdanis stops short at addressing the unique nature of literature that will be innate within my own study.

Literature is, in my opinion, the single most important human endeavour (if not necessarily the most useful), but it is one that I see constantly marginalised by corporate interests, apathy, anti-intellectualism and just plain old stupidity.  I think the problem is that no-one has ever clearly answered Petunia’s question and that the world is full of Petunia’s stomping around and marginalising any interest that is not their own.  Furthermore, as annoying as she was I have a good deal of respect for Petunia’s question and feel that it deserves a decent study. 

I have set up this blog so that its readers (those two or three of you that find your way in) might know the purpose of literature, the point of writing and the point of reading good quality prose, plays and poetry.  These are not easy questions to answer and, I know already, it is going to take me another four weeks just to ask the questions fully. 

I have been considering the issues that the two questions raised for the better part of twenty-five years (Yeah, I am not young.  My profile picture is a tree stump for a reason). It is my hope, that each update I make to this blog will go a bit further towards skimming froth off the surface of this vast and vivacious ocean.