An Affair to Remember

In Endless Pursuit of Literature

By Alexis Almeida

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Illustration by Alyssa Xu
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In his poem, "So That You Will Hear Me," Pablo Neruda evokes the frustration of using language that resists translation. His words, which have been tailored in relation to himself, cannot illustrate his mind as he sees and feels it. But they will try anyway: "And I watch my words from a long way off.before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are." He is writing a love poem, grappling with language in order to portray a fleeting sensation. I am falling in love with his words, shaping them to my life. I imagine a world using the fabric Neruda has woven, peopled with the visages of my consciousness.

This is what happens when I read literature. Above I refer to poetry, but poetry, prose, language all have a quality of the supernatural that is both lascivious and dangerous, a combination that grips me in its ability to render the world accurately, even if in ephemeral moments that only my mind can perceive. Perhaps, as Julio Cortazar says, "I prefer the words to the reality that I'm trying to describe." Through the words of others, my imagination is stimulated, my reality reassembled, and via this process, my life made sense of, enhanced. My brain is overwrought by language, both pretty and haunting, that in many ways, is more authentic than the stuff of the immediate present. As my mind relentlessly attempts to find manifestations in 'the real world,' I can't help but take a more circuitous route, funneling thoughts through other people's words. The way I read books, respond to them, and interpret them always leaves me more aware of myself and how I relate to the world. The beauty of this journey is that I depart momentarily from my present, and I gain something marvelous every time. Kind of like falling in love.

So herein I profess my strange and bizarre love affair with literature. Literature is my lover: offering me so many things in her own terms but refusing to be tied down, giving herself to everyone, but not all of herself, perhaps just enough, on her better days. She doesn't commit to anyone, but she gives people what they want; they start out thinking they want her and then they realize they need her, they use her to serve their own needs but she will never admit to serving them. Her soul serves only herself, but in this world, we could never be resigned to believing that. In this world where we need conduits and catalysts, we tailor her face to our own desires and ideals, to inspire us. And she lets us, because she knows who she is, underneath all of the beautiful, cryptic language that adorns her life.

She is an elusive and ubiquitous creature and I wonder sometimes if my love for her is not only unabated, but unrequited as well.

The Language Of Love

As writers, readers and thinkers, we are always, in a sense, reconciling our relationship with language. Because we are guided through life by our own reality, our own inner-monologue that cuts through the white noise of everything else, we seek communication, and witness. Language, the enigmatic toolbox with infinite permutations and even more significations, gives meaning to essence, evokes an element of life, as we have come to understand it, that extends beyond 26 letters, the spoken word, the page. But for writers and readers of literature, this love affair with language proves to be tumultuous—language seduces with its exoticism, it invites our advances but does not promise to requite them. In The Library of Babel, Borges writes the universe to be an infinite library and suggests that although they are all composed of the same elements of language, no two books are exactly alike; there is no underlying law to tie them together. While celebrating language, suggesting life is an infinite book, Borges also obscures the canvas of fiction: "You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?"

We all use language, it sounds differently, reads differently, writes differently for all of us, even if the words are identical. The question seems to then inevitably arise, is literature a representation, or is it purely aesthetic? I think it is both, it can't, and shouldn't be completely identified with either camp. Literature always moves me from one place to another, and even when it claims not to, the heart of it responds to something of life, most likely something the author has experienced. Even when a man from Australia writes about a woman from India, there is something that inextricably links the two that underlies any projections of gender, culture and society, and this is what fascinates most readers, informs them; when I read I watch language do things that it never thought it could do, it makes me want to do the same.

The emotional conditions that an author describes in his work of literature, and the way he describes them, is elusive, passionate, and sexy. When Salinger writes about alienation in Franny and Zooey: "We're the Tattooed Lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too" I get weak in the knees, but that's just me. Maybe because I feel tattooed too, maybe because I wish I could have expressed it that way, maybe I don't need to explain why. Somehow I feel comforted in not knowing what this language was meant to express, it keeps me wanting more, through interpretation I learn and I live more completely and I relish in some kind of subliminal uncertainty. Nothing else can do that for me the way these words do. I read literature in a way that seems necessary for my life, but am I, the reader, necessary for her?

She Don't Need Me Like I Need Her

Many critics have been perturbed by this question. Sometimes when people don't feel needed they do everything they can to convince themselves that they are. Surely literary theorists and critics have interesting, provocative things to say, but there are clearly no definite conclusions to be drawn. Sometimes trying to categorize or explain the inexplicable, the visceral, is minimizing. The danger in over-analyzing lies in adding meaning that isn't there, meaning that isn't necessarily drawn from the text itself, but projected over it to fulfill a different need, perhaps affirmation, perhaps understanding. Neither are evil desires, but they may be just that, desires, one's that may never be requited by literature herself.

In a recent article for Adbusters, Phyllis Rose, a Professor at Wesleyan University, writes about the perils of deconstructionist literary theory. Nostalgic for a time when students and professors alike looked to prose and "believed they could learn from literature how to live," she chronicles a change of tides with the emergence of Lacan and Derrida, who challenged the idea that literature referred to something outside of itself. Text became subordinated to projections of a different sort. There was nothing that a critic, or a reader couldn't reduce, everything could be explained; the text had no authority at all. Astutely, Rose notes the effect this has had on students, who are trained to be skeptical of literature rather than to appreciate it. "I think this may be why so many of our good students now end up as lawyers, trained to show that words do not say what they say.or as other manipulators of popular response."

To me, the response to what I read is anything but collective; it is the individualized nature of interpretation that seems to be the point. The polemic that arises from literature in classes, amongst friends, in life, between any group of people who are equally enchanted by language and literature truly results in something that seems to be proof that text refers to something outside itself.

I would instead turn to Oscar Wilde's assertion that "life imitates art." Everything I read adds a layer to my being which reflects itself, even if subconsciously, in the way I think and subsequently in the way I live. I have had affairs with books that made an imprint on my consciousness and have leisurely waned in and out of my memory unannounced. Of course I personalize literature, and I may even admit that I take from it what is seemingly pertinent to me, but as a whole, I appreciate it unabatedly, I want to leave it intact, even after my eyes have drifted from its pages. When Haruki Murakami writes that "One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harajuku neighborhood, I walk past the 100% girl" no matter who you are, you can't help imagining that you are that girl, or that you have noticed her, even though ".she's not that good looking.She doesn't stand out in any way." Perhaps Marukami writes from experience, maybe he has seen her. Knowing is not knowing, and instead relating. That is romantic. I don't want to know. I want to let it wash over me and figure it out for myself. That is why I read.

But is this a love letter that I am screaming into the abyss? I don't think so. People write to fulfill a desire. They read for the same purpose. Authors, readers, even the text itself want to get at something that words cannot even reach. It is the pursuit of that lofty notion, that undisclosed reality or thought, that makes literature sexy and tumultuous, because behind the black and white façade, the varying fonts and lengths and formats, there lies the potential for evocation that is truly your own. This is the dialogue, this is the lascivious love affair, between the words and how one reads them. And even when love is unrequited, when meaning slips through the cracks of language, or rhetoric, there is something missing that needs to be filled. Reading literature is my biggest inspiration to write myself, to return the favor, to confirm that words are, as Juan Carlos Onetti describes: "my vice" and maybe I have no choice, maybe I have more faith in the images represented through words than I do in the images themselves. Maybe they make the images themselves easier to see.

So it seems obvious that I would turn to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose Love in the Time of Cholera has immortalized the universal idea of unrequited love. His opening lines, "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love," are the signified to the signifier that comprises this idea. But often overlooked is the page that comes before, in which Marquez quotes Leandro Diaz, a famous Colombian songwriter, who in my estimation, most beautifully expresses why words are written at all. Because no matter what side you are on, if you read, if you write, you are in pursuit of something, and there is really no choice in the matter: "The words I am about to express: They now have their own crowned goddess."

ALEXIS ALMEIDA B'06 wants to eat your words.

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