Since the end of World War II, there can be no understanding of the Jewish people, their writings and poetry, without the context of the Holocaust. The title of this post is “Arbeit Mact Frei”, German for work will set you free. This horribly ironic saying was emblazoned above the gates of the Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Berkinau, as well as many others. The only freedom afforded by the camps was death. The Holocaust is nearly impossible to grasp; it makes us deeply question what it means to be human. The Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire race of people, enacted with the brutal inhuman efficiency of a massive public works project.

Many of the survivors and their descendants have carved out a new homeland, Israel, surrounded by hostile enemies on every side. Others have settled all around the globe, modern diaspora, making their homes wherever they can find peace and tolerance. Their literature, from the unflinching realism of Taduesz Borowski to the haunting poems of Paul Celan, is the product of vivid memories of a very recent time when their entire people were nearly erased from history.

The Jewish people have experienced a great deal of hardship and persecution during the past two and a half millennia, often due to their religion, but also for any arbitrary prejudice which could be levelled at them. In spite of all of this, or even because of it, the Jewish people have endured. They turn to religion, their faith in God, and their faith in each other, to give them strength. Albert Einstein witnessed the aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as the use of the atomic bomb, which his theories helped to create. And yet, he chose to see everything as a miracle.

“There are two ways to live. You can live as if nothing is a miracle. You can live as if everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein

Jewish history and experiences have an indelible impact on their literature. There is no Jewish people without their collective shared experiences, often passed on through oral traditions as well as through the writings of The Torah. This sense of shared experience threads its way through all Jewish literature to this day.

After reading post-Holocaust Jewish literature, how would you use writing as a tool for dealing with such an event? Would writing about it be cathartic? What message would you want to convey? When we learn about modern-day ethnic cleansing during conflicts in places like Bosnia or Rowanda, how do we stand by and allow it to happen? How might education and literature help prevent such atrocities in the future?

What is real? There is no such thing as objective reality which exists outside of our own observations. Full stop. What we think of as real is nothing more than a macroscopic blurring, a gross averaging of phenomena which allows us to create a tenuous agreement with other people of what constitutes reality. Realism in literature was an attempt at describing an objective reality, without intentionally introducing the fantastic. Writers attempted to strip away the overly dramatic, the hyperbolic, and to capture in detail what is really out there in the world.

In contrast, Magical Realism sprouted from the seeds of realization that, upon close scrutiny, reality collapses like a house of cards. Some people experience the passage of time slowly when they experience pain, and equally fleeting when they feel joy. Other people like Cabernet Sauvignon, while to some it tastes like vinegar.  Even the immutable image in a photograph can seem beautiful to one observer, and horrid to another. One might argue that the pixels making up the photo are the same for everyone, so isn’t that objective? But the pixels are meaningless until we back out far enough, until they blur together to form an image. And then the image is meaningless outside of the context of the observer. It is the same with writing. The words I’m typing right now have no objective meaning. The reader gives them meaning based on his or her own age, education, cultural background, and myriad other factors.

Magical Realism recognizes the futility of plain old Realism, and mixes the fantastic with the mundane, without calling attention to it. The extraordinary is given no special rank or privilege; angels and cats, dogs and dragons, they are all on equal footing. In Latin American literature, this genre of writing was used to great metaphorical effect. The authors of Central and South America arose from cultures that already recognized and embraced the blurring of the so-called natural world with the supernatural. A climate of political and cultural upheaval proved to be fertile grounds for this type of literature.

While Magical Realism as a literary movement may have peaked in the early 1960’s, the genre left an indelible effect on writing and film. How do the works of modern authors and filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro compare with the works of earlier writers such as Pablo Neruda?

Europeans, in their euro-centric way, once referred to Africa as the Dark Continent. To outsiders, particularly westerners, Africa seemed enigmatic and mysterious. Although many different peoples of Africa had been trading with middle eastern and European countries for centuries, not many people from outside the continent had written about the people and cultures there, especially the interior of the continent. And when they did write, it was often through the critical lenses of white Christian European colonialism.  

Africa is as diverse as it is vast in sheer land area. But when Europeans began to really travel and explore the continent in significant numbers, they imposed their own cultures and religions on the people they encountered. While Africa may have seemed dark to outsiders, it was already rich and vibrant to those who had lived there for millennia. The missionaries brought Christianity and western clothes, but the people they encountered often melded the old and new, vacillating between worlds in an odd juxtaposition.

When Africans were brought to America, either through the atrocity of slavery, or (later) by choice, they were still faced with the challenge of maintaining their cultural identity. Often, it was either stripped from them by force, or less overtly, implied that they must abandon the culture of their homeland to adapt to life in the west. And yet, no matter how much or how little they embraced the ways of their new country, they were (and tragically, often still are) excluded arbitrarily due to the color of their skin.

By way of disclaimer, I am a white male of northern European descent. I struggle to understand that which I can’t ever really understand. When I try to ask people of color about their experiences with regards to race and culture, they are often reluctant to discuss these topics. I imagine it’s like trying to describe the color red to a blind man. I haven’t experienced what they have experienced or felt what they have felt. I catch a glimmer of understanding through the writings of amazing people such as James Baldwin, and I’m incredibly grateful for their eloquence and candor. Regardless, I feel that I must try to understand.

What are some of the ongoing examples of duality of culture in American society? How do people struggle today, and in what ways does it differ from the experiences of African Americans in Detroit in the early 1940’s, or the Africans encountering Christian missionaries for the first time?

BlackFacts.com. “Why Was Africa Called the Dark Continent?” Blackfacts.com, 13 July 2019, blackfacts.com/fact/why-was-africa-called-the-dark-continent.

Grosjean, François. “Who Am I?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 30 June 2011, http://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-bilingual/201106/who-am-i.

If we talk about Native American literature, then that leads inexorably (in this writer’s opinion) to a broader discussion of Native American culture. Once we take that road, it quickly turns from pavement to dirt, from dirt to a trail, and then even the trail becomes lost and obscured. The native people inhabiting the Americas had their own share of wars and intra-cultural conquests, most notably from what is now Mexico and through South America. There was the usual ebb and flow of civilizations one sees when looking back through history: The Olmec faded, the Zapotec rose and fell, the Myans flourished for a time, and finally the Aztecs dominated the region. Not to mention all the vast tribes of North America, and the native Taino/Arawak people of Hispaniola and other regional islands.

The people of the Americas had incredibly rich, vibrant cultures, which were dynamic and diverse. They thrived for several millennia, and developed complex, prosperous civilizations. They spoke dozens of different languages, and developed unique art and religions. All of this happened over the course of thousands of years. But within a few generations of their first contact with Europeans, entire peoples were eradicated. It was genocide and ethnic cleansing on a scale never seen before or since.

One tiny part of that epic, mind-blowing tragedy is the destruction of the literature of the Americas. Not necessarily the written word, but even the loss of the oral traditions, the histories and stories gone forever. Those who survived disease or avoided slaughter were often enslaved; their cultural heritage pillaged, burned, melted down, and shipped away.

Can we point to any parallel in modern times? Can we even imagine the world today if things had gone differently 500 years ago, if Columbus had never sailed to the New World? How would events have differed if we change the countries that explored and settled the region?

Confucian Confusion

Confucian thought and teachings provided the foundation for Eastern culture throughout Asia for two thousand years. Although there was an ebb and flow to the influence and importance placed on Confucianism and the Analects, no serious scholar would deny the depth and breadth of their importance and influence throughout history. However, during the industrial revolution, China became less insular and more exposed to outside cultures, particularly European and American culture. For many centuries, China had remained largely culturally isolated, agrarian, and immune to the drastic social and cultural upheavals sweeping the rest of the world in vast, messy, often deadly, waves.

However, once the industrial revolution reached mainland China, people began to travel, gain other perspectives, and for the first time truly question (or outright reject) many traditional teachings, including those of Confucius. This was not the first time in history this had happened. 2500 years earlier, Confucius competed with Daoism and Legalism, and all schools of thought left their own deep cultural imprints. However, this was the first time in history that China as an Eastern culture began to question and reject some of their own wen in favor of more Western ideas.

The impact on Chinese literature was profound and lasting. Suddenly, we see imaginative stories filled with metaphor and layers of possible meaning. We see a break from the traditional wen of naturalist writing, and full embrace of literary fiction and short stories.

Most students today have lived their entire lives with the internet, but many have experienced the explosion of social media and smart phones. How do cultures maintain their identity in the global community? What parallels can we draw between the effects of the industrial revolution, and the advent of Instagram and Facebook? What is the Chinses government doing today to maintain control and cultural identity? What is good or bad about “the great firewall of China”?

This week we explored select pieces of ancient Chinese literature, specifically some excerpts from the Classic of Poetry, as well as some quotes and writings of Confucius (taken from the Analects, or selected writings). We were introduced to the concept ofwen, which is complex and possibly even alien to the Western mind. Wen is a term as old as the ancient Zhou kings, and the meaning probably evolved over time, as is true for most language. Today, it is often translated simply as writing, while in ancient texts it often meant accomplished ancestors (Von Falkenhausen, 1996).

Therefore, we must imagine the evolution of the term, where it started, and why it changed. We must delve into Chinese history, and understand the reverence placed on the founding ancestors of the Zhou kingdom, and what they meant in a historical context. Those accomplished ancestors provided the basis of culture, knowledge, art, and behavior for future Chinese civilization. The Zhou were idealized throughout the ages, and even romanticized. Therefore, wen as a term for writing is much deeper than it appears at first glance. It also means civilization, and the preservation and transmission of knowledge and cultural identity through writing.

Questions for teachers and students: Is wen strictly a Chinese concept? If so, why? If it is possible to apply the concept of wen to Western literature, what are some examples?

Wen is an interesting concept, and one that is necessary to investigate as part of any serious venture into Chinese literature and culture. I encourage everyone to explore the concept further by reading the excellent articles in the references.

References

Longxi, Z. (1996). What is wen and why is it made so terribly strange? College Literature, 23(1), 15. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-com.lopes.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=9603264011&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Von Falkenhausen, L. (1996). The Concept of Wen in the Ancient Chinese Ancestral Cult. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), 18, 1-22. doi:10.2307/495623

The theme this week involves the human condition of making major life decisions, and the effects on our psyche when we feel trapped, helpless, or unable to make decisions that affect our own lives. We may not wake up as a literal insect, as is the case in Kafke’s “Metamorphosis”, but we have all been carried along by circumstances at some point in our lives. In the Metamorphosis, the main character may look forward to his fate as a form of escape, and we never really know how deep the metaphor goes. Is Gregor Samsa a literal insect; did he turn into a giant cockroach? Or did he suffer a mental break, and this is his mind’s method of coping with stress? These are some of the questions left for the reader to decide, and some of the topics that teachers may discuss with their students.

In Goethe’s “Faust”, we meet a protagonist who makes a deal with the devil. He sells his soul in exchange for knowledge and power. Unlike the helplessness of Kafke’s Gregor Samsa, Doctor Faust enters the bargain intentionally. However, the story is still steeped in metaphor, and causes the reader to imagine what they would give up in life in order to get what they want. Again, people make these decisions all the time, whether consciously or not. The news is filled with stories of politicians and CEO’s who sell their own souls in the form of turning their backs on ethics and morals in order to obtain money or power. A teacher might ask students if they would enter a Faustian bargain to get straight A’s, or score a 1600 on their SAT’s. If so, what would they be willing to give up in return?