I had a few uninterruptible hours on a plane out to Stanford last week, and I used the time to reflect on some reading I’ve been doing recently. I’ve been rereading a bunch of works I have already read and then considering them from the standpoint of a postmodern literature and philosophy seminar I’ll be teaching next fall. The upshot of that reading and reflecting is that I think that as people, we basically have stories that we tell ourselves and each other as we try to make sense of our lives and the world. And in explaining our lives and the world, our stories also shape, perhaps even in a sense create, them.
If stories are so central, then one question that arises immediately to an English teacher is “What stories should we read to help us make sense of ourselves and the world?” Should they be simple or complex ones?
I find the interaction of people with each other to be complex, and therefore I favor complex stories as revealing more possible situations we can encounter than do simple stories. A well-told simple story may have more emotional power than a complex one because faced with a complex-seeming world, many of us long for simple answers, simple rules, simple conditional rules: “If you do this then that will happen.”
Certain aspects of life are simple, and for these aspects, simple rules work reasonably be well. “Be mean to people and they will be mean back.” “What goes around comes around.” Even, unfortunately, in some environments, Lucy Van Pelt’s famous dictum, “Walk all over them before they walk all over you!”
Most of us have internalized these sorts of rules by adulthood–indeed, such an internalization might be the condition for a general definition of adulthood–whether we act on them consistently or not.
The more dangerous, challenging–perversely, more interesting–situations are more complex. It is for precisely that reason that I prefer complex literature to simple. Long ago, I absorbed the simple truths of life (intellectually, at least, if not always viscerally) whether I always act on them or not. Today, it’s the more complicated situations that are interesting to me. And as a teacher, I prefer more complicated literature because with more different perspectives, situations, and potential interpretations “in it,” it can appeal to a wider audience with more differences among themselves.
One of my colleagues asked in another context where Honors projects in English couldn’t be developed from simple readings. Probably so, but such a development is more difficult to manage for older students, I suspect, because the complications from simple things come from certain of their interactions. That set of interactions is not perhaps as easy to manage as finding, creating, and then taking apart the complexities arising from or already present in complicated stories.
Does my suggestion that the complexities of much human life imply that the source of these complexities is also complex? Not necessarily.
All the natural world stems, to a first approximation, from the interaction of essentially three things: protons, neutrons, and electrons. If you’re not a Darwinian, add one more thing–a soul–and all human life is essentially reducible to the interactions between four things.
Nuclear power, plague, war, music, famine, the Eiffel Tower, 9/11, the Second World War, the works of Michelangelo, the Quran, the pleasures of sex, the pleasures of the mystic communion of saints, the tortures of Hell, the lust for power, the internet, your car, a beautiful sunset, a freezing rain, your cellphone, a child’s smile. All come from three or four things.
Clearly, complexity can come from simplicity–or at least from a small number of distinguishable things. So, what do I need to find enjoyment and utility from simple stories? Paradoxically, one of two things that seem opposed to each other: I either want to find pleasure, usually reassurance, in what I recognize is an idealized–or idealizing–oversimplification of the world. Or, I want to try to figure out how apparently complex situations, structures, and behaviors can arise from simple principles or objects.