What Is Literature?

The Lovers, William Firth, 1855

I

Literature attends to the structures of lived experience. As prose and poetry, it informs our understanding of the experiences we have had: of love, of friendship, and of loss. Our favorite books give us back the thoughts we formed only halfway, which we recognize fully formed on the page even though we have never seen them fully formed. I love to hear my thoughts given back to me with edits and enhancements. That is why I read. What belongs to my favorite writers is mine through a process of appropriation that is thoroughly literary. I like to think of reading aswalking through a field and stuffing petals in a jar. At the end of the day, it is up to me to piece them together in a new way, to create a new species of flower.

II

Literature is life on earth. The earth where I fell in love. Where–I can remember it so clearly–her governess, her disposition, were all around me. We used to lay ourselves down in the grass of the park on Sunday afternoons when the sun fell softly across the surface of the water. I felt like Adam in the garden with Eve in his arms. You can understand my dismay, then, when I woke one morning and it was not her when I looked around. I wrote a book of poems I burned throughout the years. The pages were about the strangers we become with the passing of so little time. I put down a great mystery to inspire in the Other the incalculable joy of remembering what it was like to feel like Eve in the garden with Adam in her arms.

III

The criteria by which I choose someone to fall in love with

do not exist before I fall in love, and this is part of the problem I apprehend when asking myself why I would set my eyes on this person and not another. When I fall in love, I do not even have an idea of what I want because love is a criterion-constituting choice. I discover myself in the presence of the Other, who becomes the object of my desire in the same moment. Then I say that I fell in love with her because of the sound of her voice and because of the smell of her perfume. Only after the choice is made do I recognize that I love her because her eyes inspire in me a desire to possess her and because her arms are a shore where I drop anchor. By the aspect of a work of magic, I finally accept that I am in love with someone who I am inclined to believe I was always meant to be in love with. Thus, the argument for the belief in God.

IV

I do not choose to believe in God because of the list of criteria I create daily to determine how I would like to live, breathe, and dream. I do not say, “I want to be in the presence of something greater than myself through the practice of prayer and I want to feel that I am being won over to the side of the Good.” As if the contract has to be read before the signature is put to the contract. First, I believe. Then I understand that daily my life is substantiated by that which it is not. God, for me, is representative of the being who brings about the completion of the fundamental project. The old school of philosophy taught that I was made in the likeness of God, though my lived experience was that of being something less than God. I was tasked with laboring faithfully to bring about the completion of the fundamental project, knowing that I would necessarily fall short. Then I was a ruined statue of God. But because I possess a Dasein that is at least non-thetically aware of its freedom to become what it is not, I am in the pursuit of an ideal and this pursuit is evidence of my desire to become God. Then the effort is original to me, and I surpass the inert life of a given object. I am less image and more image maker. The decisions I make today inform the idea of God I hold together with you at the center of my heart. God, as with Man, is therefore held in a perpetual state of to-be-determined.

V

Perhaps if I were God, it would not concern me what the poem represents. Then the poem is the universe, a totality commensurate with the completion of the fundamental project. But because I am an individual among individuals who likewise walk through life searching—and who, in searching, prove that they are lost, separated now millions of leagues from their source and code—I am always looking about me and always turning up empty-handed in search of a truth I felt I had lost before I was deposited on earth. God alone possesses this truth. It was Spinoza who wrote that God is nothing less than the universe. There is no coefficient of difference between the self and the Other in the case of God and His work. The embarrassing truth is that, in the attempt to make myself understood using the signifying power of the written word, I make myself unknowable to the greatest extent. What I am transformed into is the secret that the Other possesses, and this secret is perfect because it requires that I become the Other and read myself as the Other to apprehend myself as what I am. The embarrassment comes with the fact that I have to practice the humility of writing even when what I write puts me at the risk of becoming less than myself.

VI

As words on the page, I cease to be irreducible—as a freedom, as a subjectivity—and I struggle to represent myself honestly. Worse, I become preoccupied with the Other’s freedom to like or dislike what I have had to say. These moments I am like the soul passing through the Egyptian portal and experiencing itself weighed on a scale by hands that refuse to acknowledge it is a soul, which gets lifted into paradise or discarded like an object.

VII

I have not put a knife to my heart, but in choosing daily to commit to literature I have risked losing myself to the Other. It was Percy B. Shelley who wrote, “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pain and pleasure of his species must become his own.” To be greatly good in literature means to enact a self-destructive force that places the individual on the same plane of existence as the collective through the composition of the text. Every writer is called to this high purpose, and when the outcome is memorable—as in the experiments of the great writers of the literary canon—then the outcome, say it is a book, say it is a book on the shelves of libraries all around the world, a book by Shelley, say, then this book is the material evidence of a consciousness bursting toward what it is not. Nihilation is the word for the operation. The poet nihilates what he is in order to become what he is not, and this nihilation frees him from being inert matter like a stone. A stone coincides perfectly with itself. Consciousness is always more than itself, which is apparent in the work of writers who strike at the hearts of the species when they pen lines in the basements of brownstone tenements where they

live alone.

VIII

Adults have a more difficult time than children acknowledging the truth of their reality as Dasein, which is that they are subject to change. This is the quality that we first notice in adults as children: they seem defeated by life. The attitude of the adult is, too often, characterized by the refusal to partake in that process—that of becoming—since by now the adult has certainly learned to find comfort in the saying, “This is just what I am.” There was a time when we once dreamed of becoming astronauts, not on the ground that we were learned scientists but on the groundless ground that we were subjectivities and could make of ourselves what we desired. Without giving it a second thought, we took flight toward the ideal image of the self through the operation of nihilation. The motives for this operation are capable of being lost in the delicate balance of life wherein we experience failure and victory, but overwhelmingly failure, since we never do complete the fundamental project and feel the dreadful weight of reality settle over us at the last breath.

IX

I go on marking pages, burning pages. My love for the Other is an all-consuming fire. There was a day I headed out the door of the apartment and rode the train into the city. The evening was bent out of recognition when I felt that I was in the middle of the nightmare—the nightmare I have had since my earliest years as a child—of becoming lost. I rode the train to a corner of the city I had never been to and searched my pockets, coming up with nothing helpful. I realized I would have to ask for directions. The stranger pointed the opposite direction I had travelled. I made the turn, and rode the train into Midtown. The Empire State Building rose into the clear sky. I was to meet with my lover at an Irish bar. There were two, maybe three, Irish bars along the same street. I asked people in the cold open night and they smiled with their eyes. I circled through the neighborhood until I found her and her friend outside the bar. I felt the sensation of relief wash over me. Because I was in the presence of the Other, because her hand in mine was a powerful reminder that I was where I was supposed to be.

X

That was many years ago. The point of saying as much is that I know what it is like to be in the first stages of love. It has something to do with the feeling of being found or discovered. But the person I was then is the antithesis of the person I am today. Between then and now, time has worked on the materials of the world and has worked on me and my materials. By the same logic, the woman who was once my lover has become someone altogether different than the woman I had intended to fix as the object of my desire. If we were to run into each other in the street, brought together by the whim of this morning in summer, then there is a good chance that one of us will hide their face at the sight of the Other. This is natural. The relationship between the self and the Other is underpinned by conflict, and this conflict is something my love and I experienced more intensely because we were in love.

XI

Between friendship and love, friendship is the greater of the two. We have friends who have betrayed us in the past and who are nevertheless good friends. Friendship, as opposed to love, does not require the effort to make ourselves the key reference by which the Other apprehends themselves as a freedom or as an object of desire. Our friend may leave the scene at any moment without making us feel that we have been slighted. Friendship has the special quality of arising when we are devoid of being and when we are in the need of the presence of the Other to substantiate our being. Friendship, like love, is coordinated along the subject-object axis; yet it is coordinated by two persons interested in increasing each other’s freedom. Love’s difficult truth is that when I say, “I love you,” I implicitly say that I desire for you to love me and no one else. The future is plundered. Furtively, I throw up the walls of a labyrinth around both of us because I want for you to be bound to me by the most intricate design. The two of us end up with a little less freedom than before—to act spontaneously, to exchange

our avatars for new ones, to invent and be reinvented tomorrow.

XII

Love is the operation by which we allow the Other to strip us of freedom, in an attitude of masochism. Love, by the same logic, is the operation by which we strip the Other of freedom, in an attitude of sadism. Sex is debasing to the intellect, yet is the most ordinary and powerful means to accessing the Other. Nights with the woman I love are nights full of horror and charm. I am charmed because I feel my being suffused by her being. That—and I participate in the interest of the species by making love to her. My movements are not mine alone and implicate all of humanity. Thus, the anxiety of the sensation that I have lost myself by degrees. Thus, the horror. The French, through a play on words, make orgasm synonymous with little death. But I do not even have to be naked and entwined to feel this anxiety. It is enough to be held in the regard of the Other, whose gaze empties me of myself and places me at a disadvantage.

XIII

The woman I love has immense eyes that alienate me. When I see her looking at me, my awareness of myself as an object—an object situated relatively to her as a subjectivity—is heightened. Then I am the thing she beholds and not another, when the truth is that I am a freedom whose contours cannot be determined since they are by definition subject to change according to the principle of the fundamental project. She feels that it is so, too. This is what is meant when she says, “He consumed me with his eyes.” We love the eyes, and we learn also to fear them. The regard of the Other is the evidence that I am not what I am; because the Other possesses me in ways I could never possess myself if I were alone in the world. But I am surrounded by a crowd, and this crowd possesses me in a million ways and I feel that I am being robbed of myself everywhere.

XIV

The night we broke off ties with each other, I walked through the streets feeling that I was half of what I was. We got back together later that winter. But by the same powers that pulled at our cores at the beginning, we ended up splitting and getting together and splitting again in a whirlwind of emotions. It was, I confess, I who did not board the plane to see her in New York that March. It was she who said that was that, and I have not seen her since.

XV

And literature is spontaneity... Let us write the equation as follows (it is a sound equation): X cared for Y insofar as he acknowledged that she was, first of all, a freedom—to become what she was not—as the woman who had chosen to be with X but who could change her mind tomorrow about the choice. Y cared for X with as much passion and concern as he cared for her from the beginning. Thus, the impossibility of love. Because love does not care for the Other’s freedom; rather, love binds and cuffs the Other with a strong metal.

XVI

Hers was the hand that made its way across my back and made me feel the confirming power of the fundamental project. The project was one by which she would end up belonging to me and no one else. My pleasure consisted in expressly reducing her to something less than what she was as a subjectivity. By the same token, she took pleasure in stripping me of freedom. Toward the end of the relationship, we were plotting a design by which we could belong to each other for eternity. I remember, once, she found my hands in the folds of the sheets. She gathered me together, thinking, I will sum him up! then blew on my eyelashes until they were downed and my eyes fluttered and the lashes sprung back in place, and when one of them, the longest, became detached, she asked me to make a wish. We played like this until we grew restless, then simply held onto each other in the plush of a sofa. We discussed the uncertainty of our future. It was hard to deny the separation. She was staying in the city. I was headed West. “What we will need to do,” we told ourselves, “is that we will need to circle back to this point and hope that everything along that slow arc lasts no longer than a blink.”

XVII

I have spoken of love and friendship, the analysis of which is unsatisfactory since life plays on the mixture and at times the two are indistinguishable. It will take all of human lived experience to be written down, then read carefully, if we are to get at the truth of the situations we are cast into by love and by friendship. I speak for myself, then, when I say that love is the ideal I intend as a youth when I set my eyes on a woman; but which, later in life, becomes a series of operations through which I alienate and am alienated by the Other. In the first stages of love, there is, as in friendship, an interest between two persons to increase each other’s freedom. Love presents itself as a choice to be made, and it makes a person feel freer for having made the choice. In the last stages, love is the interplay of the attitudes of masochism and sadism in two persons wishing to hold out against losing each other. When I write, I lift onto the canvas a world that has started over again and where I am not myself but the Other I was many centuries ago. When one morning, I woke, and there was this beautiful woman at my side. When we gifted each other rings to remember it forever with: we had fallen in love. I write because I want for my memory on the earth to be that I was once placed under a powerful spell.

XVIII

As readers, we are infinitely invested in the plot of a fiction that encircles us like a horizon and signals the underlying depth of the firmament that is our possibility. All our lives are spent trying to pin down who we truly are, and the effort is contradictory since we can never be reduced to something less than the freedom to become other than who we are.

XIX

Literature is the most honest expression of Dasein as it commands its essence. To live is to experience becoming. To become implies that we are not yet what we are. It was Pindar who—like all of us from time to time—woke one day and felt the gravity with which the whole world revolved, and wrote, “Become what you are.” To attend to the structures of lived experience in a meaningful way, to be reconciled with the world we are thrown into and with the Other who alienates us, to be given over completely to the process by which the person in the mirror changes faces— these are the motives upon which one acts when reading and writing literature. It requires that an individual touch on what is particular about himself and, by the same stroke, touch on what is universal about Man.

XX

Literature, then, is not the novel tucked neatly along the shelves of a bookcase. Literature is the consequence of the concern with the force and speed with which time modifies our substance. Dasein commands its essence, but it is not free to move as pure transcendence and must work within the restrictions of what constitutes it factically, space and time. Tomorrow, I may make something of myself that I can either feel proud or shameful about. Yesterday, I was someone who I am alienated from when I look in the mirror. The questions in literature arise naturally in the mind of a child. Questions like, “Why did someone I love have to disappear all of a sudden?” The analysis of such questions must be rendered in the fashion of a lawyer, with a rigorous defense for the treasures claimed in everyday life and an indictment against the indifferent forces that plunder these treasures. The author is child-like in his inclination to question and play, yet there is a depth to him that suggests we are dealing with a serious legal power armed with clauses and exclamation points.

XXI

For all the good that describing literature has done for us, it has not gotten us any closer to seeing it through to its core. Because literature conceals itself just when we know how to get near enough to describe it. As an encompassing power, literature is out of reach for the consciousness that it delimits. So the whole order of the analysis at hand undergoes a reversal. If I had set out to define literature, then I have ended up being defined by literature. I am the one who had set out to say a thing or two about the written word, and who ended up being written down like a character in a fiction. I am the one who has been won over one word at a time, or lost.

"What Is Literature?" is a lyrical essay by Luis Torres — a philosophical and literary exploration of what literature is, what love is, what God is, and what it means to be an artist. Drawing on existentialist thought and the philosophical frameworks Luis studied at Emory University, the work speaks honestly to love, friendship, and loss as the author lived them.