The Literary Soul
This class began nearly 4,000 years ago, far away, in Sumeria,
with the Epic Of Gilgamesh and the Ancient Hebrews. It ends in
Renaissance-era (or Elizabethan
(1558–
Taught this way, it would be easy to see history as progress: as a constant movement from the foreign, exotic and strange to the familiar – as a movement from then to now, a march from “them” to “us”, from, perhaps, bad to good. And that is one way to think about history.
I hope however that you see our place in civilization differently, not necessarily as progress; instead, I hope you see how this, our, moment in “history” began a long time ago: how today – and thus each one of us – is inextricably linked to all the moments that preceded it. We are, as a culture and as individuals, formed from all these "past" events, ideas and stories.
I also believe we cannot accurately or fairly tell the story of humanity by simply appreciating the best – or worst – each epoch had to offer; a marriage doesn’t end with the honeymoon, and it isn’t defined by its ugliest fights or even a divorce; a complete history includes the best and the worst, and the in-between. For this reason I’ve injected the bloody history story of Cortez, Monteczuma, the Conquistadors and Aztecs smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance. Because that is where and when it happened. An accurate appraisal of the Renaissance seems therefore incomplete without an examination of this element of its story.
So as we appreciate the utter brilliance of the Renaissance and all that humanity is capable of – human genius, human beauty and human brilliance – I think we should pause for at least a moment to appreciate what else humanity is capable of at that same historical moment – most likely the greatest acts of genocide known to history – and we should think about how the Renaissance was in a large part literarily funded by the lives of slaves who developed -- and gold and natural resources stolen from -- the New World.
So “he Renaissance didn’t just produce Shakespeare and Hamlet; it also occurred within a culture that produced Cortez and the enslavement and destruction of entire New World civilizations, and that destruction in very real terms fed great wealth into the European courts and coffers that in turn funded the artistic genius of men like Shakespeare.
And then let us consider that that “historical moment” has been with us all along: that Cortez is, quite simply, Gilgamesh invading Lebanon or Odysseus laying waste to Troy and the Crusaders sacking Jerusalem. Throughout our 4,000 year journey, nothing has changed, nothing really at all.
Thus I hope you see that we have always been with us, so to speak: that the mind and soul of Gilgamesh and Odysseus, the Hebrews and Beowulf, the mind of soul in all peoples in all places is your mind and soul, and “literature” is the record of that shared experience, the historical experiences -- writ both large and small -- that eventually shaped the contents of your own mind.
Because although studying history helps us understand literature (and vice versa), literature is not simply history, not just a record of events, of kingdoms and wars, but instead a record of humanity, of individuals – of what it is like and what it means for each of us to be alive, to strive and fall and succeed and love and grieve, to fight and win and lose, and, ultimately, to die.
The study of history is the study of colonization of the New World, but the study of literature is the study of Cortez’s – and Columbus’s and Las Casas’ – mind or soul.
In other words, from Gilgamesh on, literature is and always will be a moment that never ends: the eternal, unchanging moment of your own life, shared, it seems, by all people in all places, in all times.