My husband is the least pretentious person I know. He likes what he likes, and would never fake it for appearances. It’s part of what makes him so fun to be around.
One of the things he would never fake is his contempt for literature.
He has no patience for stream-of-consciousness, obscure poetic devices, tortured artists, star-crossed lovers, or ambiguous motives.
I am here for pretty much all of it.
Of course, we all have books we were pressured to read because they were mind-blowing or groundbreaking, but closed the back cover feeling confused, underwhelmed, or annoyed. Or all three.
For me, it’s Wuthering Heights. I HATED the characters and wanted them to either reform or die.
That’s just a book I completed, a book I truly hated. I rarely hate a book. Most books I don’t enjoy, I simply don’t bother finishing, and then forget all about them. Having completed a novel, I am firmly convinced that if I can’t keep my reader’s attention, I don’t deserve it. There are too many books out there to waste time on a story that might start to get good.
My husband’s contempt for literature does not spring from a lack of thoughtfulness or appreciation for art.
On the contrary — it’s because he hates pretense, and I must be honest — there are a lot of famous literary works which reek of self-importance and obscurity, all while claiming to be raw and honest. Perhaps one of the best examples is The Catcher in the Rye.
I haven’t read it in years, but as I remember it, the novel is about a rich kid who wanders around New York City, whining about how “phony” everyone is. And at the end, he makes a realization:
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”
It’s a lovely sentiment. For all of his selfishness and self-importance, the protagonist wishes he could do something meaningful with his life. This dreamlike purpose he imagines for himself is tragically grand, because it doesn’t have any equivalent in reality. It’s a lovely sentiment. And that’s it.
I finished the novel thinking that he wasn’t actually going to change anything about his life. All he did was have a nice daydream about nobly rescuing random, nameless kids.
The real catchers in the rye don’t often get to feel like they did something grand or noble. Most of the time, they are wiping someone else’s nose for them, or driving to their boring job, or doing their boring job, because bills need to be paid and people need to be cared for.
Like Prufrock, they measure out their lives in coffee spoons, and they live the Jungian nightmare of having unrealized dreams. They are the ones whom the protagonists pity. They occupy the lives that artists want to escape — the trivial, the humdrum, the monotonous, the unremarkable.
And yet, they are the ones on the edge of the crazy cliff. A special kind of love plants their feet — a love that feels like duty rather than passion. They keep standing there, waiting in the rye, even though they’re tired and wish to be doing something else. That’s what they do all day. And that is a worthy purpose. A noble purpose.
After all, God Himself condescended to conceal His magnificent, ageless Person in the form of a Man. A Man who did not despise the lowly and mundane. A Man who had an unremarkable family and unremarkable friends, and shrank the kingdom of heaven into something we could understand — a garden, a lost coin, a bowl of dough. The lilies of the field, the sparrows of the air.
In our world, we celebrate warriors and geniuses. We always have, and that’s never going to change. So when an artist becomes disillusioned with everyday life and writes a meandering novel about it, that’s not particularly groundbreaking or mind-blowing.
The truly great artist builds a world that for all its wonders, resembles our own. We can recognize the shades and forms of our very own lives sketched upon the background of lush poetry, textured characters, vibrant imagery, and a plot as big and broad as the universe itself. The truly great artist invites us to value our lives more, not less.
“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” – G.K. Chesterton
Katie Bertola 