There's something about the final scene of Wuthering Heights. The way Heathcliff and Catherine and Edgar are side by side in death, equal as they couldn't be in life. The scene serves as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. As Lockwood looks at the graves of the trio, their earthly feuds and problems meaningless in the dust they inhabit.
Memento mori is a common motif in art and literature. It basically consists of a living thing being confronted with a symbol of death. Take the title of this blog for instance. The Latin phrase translates into "even in Arcadia, I am there", the "I" being Death. Arcadia was a group of city states in Ancient Greece and is often referred to as a utopia. Therefore, the phrase represents the presence of death even in a perfect society. The phrase titles a Guercino painting in which 2 shepherds find a skull, a reminder of death and mortality. The phrase also appears on the barrel of Judge Holden's gun in Blood Meridian.
An anamorphic skull also appears in Han's Holbein's The Ambassadors. The skull appears beside a shelf containing objects such as a lute with a broken string and the Lutheran bible, representing the living world and the discord that prevailed over it at the time. Above the skull is a shelf holding objects representing the study of the heavens, such as an astrolabe and a celestial globe, hinting at a higher plane of being in heaven transcending the living world in all its chaos, as well as the spectre of death.
This is reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, where the earthly struggles and quarrels of Heathcliff, Catherine and Edgar led to their ruin. Ultimately their struggles were meaningless in death, and thus the final scene not only reflects the equality each found in death, it has a theme of vanitas, of the fleeting nature of earthly delights and pursuits.
I've often called the romance in Wuthering Heights between Catherine and Heathcliff a "cold romance", comparing it to romance stories such as Romeo and Juliet. I do this because the romance in Wuthering Heights is a very destructive one, evoking many dark emotions associated with great passion. I think it's time I expand more into these dark emotions, since they are what ultimately sets this story above other, more annoying romance stories. I'm looking at you, Twilight.
We can observe a triumvirate of emotions that lead to the ruin of all parties involved. Envy, wrath and pride. I've identified these emotions with names of three of seven deadly sins for a reason. As a friend of mine wrote on a blog far superior to mine, a religious writer will often have religious overtones in their work.
Heathcliff is, I'm sure many will agree, a very good example of wrath. Particularly revenge. A majority of the work is dedicated to setting up Heathcliff as this character with a tragic past who then brings ruin onto everyone in reach for something not really caused by any one individual like Edgar, Catherine, or even Hindley; but rather the society to which Heathcliff had the misfortune of being brought into. A society that says that he is different, and therefore inferior. That Edgar Linton is superior. That Catherine will be forever unattainable to him, that they may share the strongest romance in the world and he will still never be in his ideal reality. And so he lashes out, against anyone and anything in reach. And his revenge is silent and cunning; in the end he has taken the property of the two men he hated the most, he has spread a corrupting influence into the very souls of the Lintons and Earnshaws, and for all intents and purposes, he has elevated himself. But what has he accomplished? The woman he loved is dead, he drove another woman away from her family. Hindley died a drunk, too numb to reality to actually grasp how Heathcliff revenged himself on him. Edgar is dead, his son is dead, Hareton was only a means to revenge, never the object of it. All Heathcliff has left is himself really, he got his revenge; and he has nothing to show for it. The ending to Wuthering Heights is particularly reflective of this, which I shall have no guilt in spoiling because if it's okay to spoil Star Trek Into Darkness the day after it hits theaters then it's okay to spoil a 200 year old book about psychopaths who may or may not be vampires. At the end of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff becomes much more mellow, but also much more despondent. What exactly is he fighting for at the end of the book? What has he accomplished? More than Edgar? More than Catherine? Or much less?
And of course, how might we have an effective love triangle without envy? Not even just romantic envy, Wuthering Heights feels like it's teeming with social commentary, since it is very much the rigid class stratification that leads to the struggles of the book. Sure, each character is responsible in their own way of the events of the book, but really their warped personalities are a result of what society has fed them all their lives. Heathcliff is inferior, Catherine's responsibility is to marry upward, Edgar is high class, the list goes on. And then we also have classic romantic envy. This combination of both social and romantic envy is the result of human passion, and so it is evident that human passion is a major driving force behind the events of Wuthering Heights, which is sort of obvious, but at the same time I was personally impressed by the way passion was depicted in Wuthering Heights, which is why I mention it here.
Pride is the third of the triumvirate. The characters of Wuthering Heights are all very proud characters, and for them to match their wills against each other is akin to an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Or rather an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object and the immovable object marries the unstoppable force's best friend who is also an unstoppable force and meanwhile the other unstoppable force went to brood.
Emily Bronte basically presents these things as a part of human emotion and therefore a part of being human as a whole. It further makes Wuthering Heights "a book about everything."
The uncanny valley is a phenomenon where we feel discomforted by something just falling short of looking human. The uncanny valley is inhabited by zombies... and Michael Jackson. But I repeat myself.
Let me start off by saying that Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte has turned out to be a much more interesting read than I thought it would be. In contrast to romance stories like Romeo and Juliet where the romance is sickly sweet and torrid, the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw actually feels very cold, and I think Emily Bronte did a very good job of portraying all the dark emotions that passion can spawn. Emotions like hatred and envy. It is a dark romance story, and I respect it for that.
Today, our discussion of Wuthering Heights in English class went over two things. The characters and cultural literacy. While most of the discussion about cultural literacy and literary canon went over my head, it did get me thinking about characters now compared to characters in the past. The discussion about characters was basically about how much the class hated a bunch of characters because they were unrealistic and too stock character-like.
Say what again.
I don't want to offend or anger anyone... but I find that a little ridiculous. In a generation that has seen Bella Swan and Batman, a robot and a much larger than life character respectively, the cast of Wuthering Heights is, by leaps and bounds, far more realistic than the characters we follow today (and just to be clear, I don't hate Batman, I like Batman. Bella Swan... not so much.). My point is that our generation does not have a problem with unrealistic characters or scenarios. Unrealistic characters are the par for the course in every form of media today. Whether it's Master Chief from the Halo video game series, Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games or Jules Winnfield (the character played by Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction.
In Wuthering Heights, we have a man who fancies himself an introvert, despite clearly not being one and being taken aback when he meets a real one. We have a manservant whose faith in god leads him to condemn everyone else to hellfire, simply so he can deal with his fear that he himself might not be worthy. We have a rich kid who is used to the world being the way he likes it, but is so insecure that that might fall down around his ears; and we have his wife playing at being the aristocracy, trying to both keep her closest childhood friend close while also trying to distance herself from the low that he represents. And of course we have Heathcliff, who loves Catherine, and can only watch as she moves away from him, with him powerless to catch up because society dictates that his place was not at her side. So he simply rejects humanity as a whole. All of these characters have very real hopes, real fears and real problems. Very human problems. The problem isn't that they aren't realistic. I think the real reason people hate these characters is that they simply fall short of the realism we need to be comfortable with them.
This is the phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. It is a very prevalent problem for video game developers, and it's clear to me now that it's not just video games that experience this phenomenon but all forms of art, be it movies, paintings, TV shows, novels or comic books.
This video explains the uncanny valley better than I can really, but if you don't want to take the seven minutes to learn about video game theory, I won't hold it against you. The history of the uncanny valley is that there was a maker of robots some time in the past, and he decided to give his robots more human features. He found that giving these robots some features actually made people think they were cute. However, as he added more facial features to his robots and gave them facial expressions as well, people began to see them not as more appealing, but repulsive and grotesque. This led to the formation of the theory of the uncanny valley. The curve at the top is a representation of the uncanny valley, basically as you start adding features there is a lot of appeal and familiarity, and when you have something that spot on resembles a human, there is a lot of appeal. But along the line, appeal takes a drastic drop when there are a certain amount of human characteristics that makes what we are looking at seem human-ish, but something seems off. We recognize that the thing in front of us is playing at being human, but it doesn't quite achieve the semblance, and we become repulsed by the much more noticeable non-human characteristics.
He barely looks human... and we don't care.
That is the uncanny valley, falling short of the realism expected. There are a lot of examples I can think of from video games, like the afore mentioned Master Chief from the Halo universe, who has a lot of appeal even though he looks nothing like a human. He occupies the left side of the curve, the side with just enough human characteristics to make what we look at relatable, but few enough that it doesn't throw a glaring spotlight on his non-human characteristics, characteristics that would repel us. The same could be said of Nintendo's star character Mario. And as PCs and consoles become more advanced, we can expect to see more developers try to go for the realistic side of the curve, the one with high fidelity to real life. We see blockbusters like Call of Duty try for that side of the curve a lot.
These are scary...
But not as scary as these guys...
But at the same time there are very good examples of falling into the uncanny valley. I could cite more examples from video games, but I'm going to go ahead and talk about the Walking Dead instead because it raises a point that will be important a little later on. Zombies (or should I say roamers?) are an obvious example of the uncanny valley at work. Shuffling around in various states of decay, their human features only serve to highlight the grotesqueness of their appearance, right from the first time we see them we think, "That is not natural." And they become unnerving because of that. But even more unnerving than the roamers are some of the humans that Rick and co. encounter in their search for a single moment of peace. People like the Governor or Negan. They are human, they look human, they look normal. But their sadistic nature is repulsive, and the fact that they look like humans only serves to make their acts all the more horrifying. It is disturbing to watch them carry out their acts of cruelty because they aren't grotesque and different like the roamers. They are human, they are us. They don't fall into the uncanny valley because of their outward appearance, but because of their inward grotesqueness. But here is that point I wanted to go over: this isn't an accident. The writers didn't accidentally make the zombies revolting, or the Governor or Negan's presence uncomfortable. They wanted them to be disquieting, they wanted them to be menacing, they wanted them to be grotesque. The uncanny valley isn't inherently evil, it can be a very effective tool used in the right hands.
We see that with the Southern Gothic genre as well, and with authors like Flannery O'Connor. The Misfit (among other characters) from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" falls into the uncanny valley because, despite his being the quintessential Southern gentleman of good parentage and stock, he is a killer. Those gentlemanly characteristics of The Misfit only serve to highlight that stark fact. It creates the grotesque convolution that the Gothic genre is known for.
So what does this have to do with hating the characters of Wuthering Heights? Well, my belief is that people are simply repulsed by these characters falling into the uncanny valley. It is true that these characters are, to a point, exaggerated, melodramatic. But I'm not quite prepared to chalk that up to the medium of the novel being in its infancy at the time. After all, video games are in their infancy, and we have gotten a lot a very good games that present poignant social commentary and/or moral dilemmas. Games like Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored or Papers, Please. A medium being in its infancy doesn't mean that it has to make missteps. I'm more inclined to believe that these characters are falling into the uncanny valley. It feels like characters like Catherine or Joseph or Edgar are a caricature of being human, a shadow, a parody. Their humanity only accentuates those disconcerting characteristics, Catherine's vanity, Joseph's... well, Joseph, and Edgar's insecurity and foppishness. But as I said before, you don't have to necessarily be stumbling into the uncanny valley. It's entirely possible, I'd even wager likely, that Emily Bronte intended for her characters to fall into that valley. To use that repulsion a reader would feel at these characteristics to highlight them, to comment on them, to create discourse by making us do a double take as we read. In other words, you're meant to hate them, but don't hate them because they are unrealistic; hate them because, at the end of the day, they are hateable people. They represent the dark emotions that come with passion, emotions that all people are susceptible to, love is a double edged sword.
And that brings me to why I like Heathcliff. When I tell people I like Heathcliff, the general response is, "he broods too much." I will grant that. However, the reason I like Heathcliff is because I can sympathize with him, personally speaking. I can understand him, the pain of unattainablity. He kind of reminds me of myself. I have been described as cold, cruel, merciless and just straight out mean by the people I respect the most. Does that hurt? No, not really. But I can at least understand who Heathcliff is and why he is what he is. He becomes a real person for me, and so he doesn't fall into the uncanny valley, he sits on the right side of the curve, having attained a state of verisimilitude his companions fall short of.
Humans throughout all of history have sought immortality in one way or another. We see the myth of Heracles, embarking on twelve labors in order to achieve this goal. Qin Shi Huang of the Chinese Qin Dynasty drank mercury in the hopes that it would make him immortal (this did not work out quite like he hoped), even in today's "enlightened" age of science and rationalism, we still try as hard as we can to escape the progression of age. We may be taught that with age comes wisdom, but this seems low compensation for the loss of the youthful vigor that flows through our veins; and worse yet, the gradual fading away of an easier time. Even today, people desperately try to escape such an inevitable progression, seeking to restore at least the facade of youth by way of Botox or hair regrowth technologies. We are also prone to place our hopes in the science of today to reveal some way that we may escape age, by way of stem cells or repairing telomeres or 3D printing in the body or something.
People cling to this fantasy, and yearn to make it a reality. Indeed, one of the most defining characteristics of gods compared to humans is their immortality, their permanence even as we fade away.
What do we hope to gain by immortality? On Wednesday, our English class was made to practice 24 multiple choice questions of the AP test variety (I scored a 20/24, and suffice it to say, that discouraged any possibility that I may take the AP test...), on this multiple choice practice, a particular passage stood out. The passage dealt with a hypothetical society of immortal people. These people could be divided into two types of people, those who made haste to do everything they could possibly do in an infinite amount of time, and those who sat back and waited, believing with infinite time, all things were eventually possible.
Is this what we hope to gain with immortality? The time to do everything we may ever want to do with our lives? The prospect is certainly tempting, one could be a beggar and a prince, an officer of the law and a thief, a soldier and a professor. One could do all things and travel all places and still not have experienced all of what an infinite life has to offer. Is what we want as people the ability to not only experience all things, but to know that we are able to experience all things, that death has no hold or limit on us?
Friedrich Nietzsche, master of existentialism... and mustaches.
Perhaps we want to be free from the obligation to impact the world, to make a mark and be remembered. As John Green said, "You are going to die. And what's more, everything you ever make, think and experience will be washed away by the sands of time. And the sun will blow up, and no one will remember Cleopatra ruling Egypt or Watson and Crick untangling the structure of DNA or Ptolemy fathoming the stars." To look oblivion in the eye is difficult, if not impossible. When you stare into oblivion, oblivion stares back, to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche. It stares back with an eternal gaze, and when it stares back it can strike fear into our hearts, fear of the existential meaninglessness of what we do in our lives when we face this inevitable prospect. We may look for a shadow of immortality by affecting the world in some way, leaving behind people to immortalize our memory, if not our bodies. But this too is finite, the Sun will blow up, and just as no one will remember Cleopatra and Ptolemy, so to will our mark be forgotten. We may escape this with infinite life and infinite time, we don't have to face oblivion in the eye if we do not one day have to succumb to it.
But the passage from the multiple choice also went on to reflect on what we lose when we shed mortality. We lose meaning in our actions, for everything we do, everything we could do will have already been done. We lose our freedom from the past, as those who preceded us will live forever as well, and thus we may not be free from their expectations, we may not be free to make mistakes. But immortality cuts deeper than freedom. Relationships become fleeting, countries become mere lines on a map, rather than a subject of loyalty and pride. And all along we must watch as the world around us crumbles and rebuilds, as the world as we knew it is replaced over and over until we must ask the question of how much of it actually matters.
We aspire to immortality, we want to live forever, but immortality can be a blessing and a curse, just as mortality can be.
But what is really interesting is the basic desire to be immortal. This desire to become more than mortal, to transcend, is reminiscent of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the hypothetical "overman"; one who, according to Nietzsche, transcends the ordinary man through enlightenment. We seek to escape the inevitabilities of being human, the mortal coil that holds us back. Not only does this desire remind me of Nietzsche, it reminds me of the trans-humanism movement, a cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to transform the human condition by way of technology from multiple disciplines. Technologies such as nanotechnology or robotics, which hold the potential to transform life. The trans-humanism movement represents the desire of people to move past our limitations, just as our aspirations toward immortality reflect the same thing.
So, what is the point of immortality? Time, freedom from fear? Perhaps none of these, perhaps such aspirations, such a desire to transcend, is just the nature of man.
I, for one, hate weekdays. I hate weekdays because I can't play any video games on weekdays. This restriction isn't even the result of parental pressure or decree, as such things typically are, neither is it because I don't actually have the time to play video games. In fact, this year I find myself with more time rather than less, even though I'm taking 6 AP/MSTC classes this year as opposed to the four I took last year.
No, the reason I can't play video games during weekdays is that I am entirely incapable of keeping time when I play video games, and before I know it the sun is rising again outside. This problem stems from the fact that when I play games like Deus Ex Human Revolution, games that allow a great amount of player choice and decision when it comes to how to tackle a level, I am driven by a compulsive need for perfection. Every point in a plan must be executed to perfection: no getting caught by guards, no falling from top of a building to the streets below, no falling to the streets below and getting caught by guards.
Let's try that again... but cleaner and quieter this time...
As one might imagine, perfectly executing a plan is very hard, if not close to impossible. There isn't just a possibility that something might go wrong, there is a certainty that something, anything, everything will go wrong. And when something does invariably go wrong, instead of trying to escape the sticky situation I've gotten myself into organically, I'm more inclined to turn back the clock by loading a saved file of my previous progress and redoing the entire segment until everything goes according to plan. Like this, the process of completing a single level can take about two hours. But I do it anyway, because I am driven by a compulsive need to execute everything perfectly, until i do, a small part of my mind nags me until I finally do get it right. The problem though is that that mistake still happened... I'm just pretending it didn't. It's easier to pull stuff like that when you can basically go back in time and erase your mistake like some digital demigod.
Quite recently, our AP English class was assigned to read "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekov. The story follows Ivan Ivanovich and his friend Burkin when they are caught by a storm and decide to stay at their friend Alehin's manor for the night. Ivan Ivanovich then tells the story of his brother Nikolai Ivanovitch, who decided after living a dreary life as a government employee to become a country gentleman with a big estate with gooseberry bushes on his property. Why gooseberries? Because... symbolism. Nikolai eventually gets his manor, though it's hardly his dream manor. A stream runs through it, through the water resembles coffee more than it does dihydrogen monoxide, and there are none of Nikolai's dream gooseberry bushes. It took him years of scrounging and hoarding every copeck and it even resulted in the emotional destruction of a rich widow Nikolai married but had no love for and possibly even her suicide to make this dream possible for Nikolai, and here he is with a farm that doesn't actually meet his vision of his dream manor.
"But no matter!" Nikolai exclaims, "I'll plant gooseberry bushes myself!" And so he does, and later he invites Ivan Ivanovitch to see what he had built. Over dinner Nikolai has gooseberries from his own bushes brought to the table, and popping one in his mouth, declares how delicious they are.
The gooseberries are actually sour and unripe. And herein we come to the symbolism. When Nikolai declares how delicious these gooseberries are, when they are exactly the opposite, we come to a key observation by Chekov. Nikolai has to lie to himself that the berries are in fact delicious, for what was anything he had done worth if these berries were not what they had been in his perfect world? Just like it would have destroyed Gatsby's ideal world and fantasy to acknowledge the futility of his endeavor, it would have destroyed Nikolai's ideal world to acknowledge that in fact the gooseberries he so wanted to believe were delicious were, in reality, distasteful. The gooseberries symbolize Nikolai's efforts to hide the truth, to instead indulge in a lie that let him continue to believe that he lived in his ideal fantasy. The difference between me hiding my mistakes on a video game and Nikolai hiding away the truth from his own sight, though, is that I can erase my mistakes. Once I start up that saved game and start playing again that mistake practically never existed. It is vanished forever from the game's memory, and eventually it would pass from my memory as well. Nikolai can't erase reality though. He can't do away with the fact that his stream is an aesthetically unpleasing brown, or that the gooseberries he eats are sour. He would rather believe that the truth is congruous to his fantasy, that the gooseberries are sweet.
Herein we come to happiness and the asymptotic relationship. Happiness is like a hyperbola, approaching what is called an asymptote. An asymptote is essentially a line that a graph of a function will come ever closer to but never touch. Like a hyperbola, we can come close to true happiness, but to do so necessitates forgetting about the ills in life. Approaching true happiness can only happen when we hide from our view the imperfections of the material world, choosing instead to focus on our ideal metaphysical reality.
The function f(x) = 1/x, where x equals the imperfections we are faced with or that we acknowledge, notice as x approaches 0 we come closer and closer to touching that asymptote (which in this case is the vertical axis), we come closer and closer to pure happiness. Can there ever be a situation in which we are entirely free of these imperfections?
Can we truly be entirely happy at any point in our lives? In an ideal world, in each and every one of every person's ideal worlds, every problem can be solved, and thus we can touch that asymptote of happiness. But the world we live in is far from an ideal world, and sometimes the gooseberries will be sour, and sometimes one will miss that crucial jump in a video game. Ultimately being happy requires us to push these things out of our sight, though that does little more than create a facade of perfection, and a fragile one at that.
At the end of "Gooseberries", Ivan Ivanovich's friend Alehin is disappointed with Ivan's story, feeling it had no bearing on his own life. Alehin is entirely indifferent to the idea that people around him suffer and that we, consciously or unconsciously, hide such truths from ourselves to remain contented. In doing so, Alehin himself engages in this process. Is he wrong in doing so? Perhaps not. While it is important to be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy, Alehin is simply doing what we as people do on almost a daily basis. We have to hide certain uncomfortable truths from ourselves or we would go mad over the weight they would have in our mind. For instance, we know people are starving in Africa, or being bombed to bits in Syria or even simply subsisting in a state of squalor right here in the United States of America. Yet our every waking thought is not toward such problems, we hide these truths from ourselves so we can at least maintain a facade of happiness.
The world is a dark place, it can be a depressing place, and ultimately it can be necessary to ignore the imperfections in reality: the sour goose berries, the hapless guard in a game who looked in my direction at the wrong time, the problems of the world like war, starvation and disease. The necessity in doing this is a reminder, as always, that we chose the reality we live in, for better or for worse, and the gift of literature is to be able to see others as they see themselves, to quote John Green. By being able to communicate, by being able to synthesize all these worlds and grasp all these truths, we can understand, and thereby actually solve problems, instead of shoving them to the side.
The world may be a dark place, but by no means is it entirely hopeless. We may not be able to make x equal zero, but we can come pretty close. I think .00000000000000001 is a fair compromise. Until then though, I guess I will just have to wait till the weekend to play video games.
It was a pleasant surprise to find out that we were to watch a CrashCourse video featuring John Green as a warm up in Literature class. Pleasant because John Green and Hank Green are part of the 1% of the internet that is not cats, business or sexually explicit material, but actual, interesting content.
The video was about how and why we read literature. Green says that literature's purpose is for communication, for communicating to people near and far, both now and forever. He states that the purpose of literature is to be able to communicate with someone who may be very different from us, who may not even speak the same language, and who may or may not even be born yet. He then goes on to talk about how we use figurative language; similes, metaphors, hyperbole and all the other things you learn in English class in 10th grade, to communicate more effectively. He also talks about how using cliched or obvious figurative language can actually be a hindrance to communication.
All this made me think about why we need figurative language in the first place. After all, one of the biggest gripes that people hold against figurative language is "Why can't the author just say what they mean?" Figurative language can be seen as roundabout and unnecessary, and it may seem that the author could be more clear about what they are trying to say about life and the world around us if they would simply write that down instead of making a reader go on a scavenger hunt.
But figurative language isn't unnecessary. Quite the contrary, it is an essential, and might I say fundamental part of communication as a whole. Humans would not be able to communicate without a lot of figurative language. And that's because of the inherent limitations of language. Any language; be it English, Spanish, Esperanto, Klingon, or something that J.R.R Tolkien came up with and wrote a book about, is and will always be unsatisfactory when it comes to actually being able to express ourselves. The reason for that is that we don't think in language. Computers think in language (languages like C++, Java, BASIC or Python), but humans aren't computers. We think in an abstract mass of emotions and memories. Transcribing that to a language is secondary.
Furthermore, there comes a point where language becomes incapable of expressing the definition of things outright. My favorite example is the color red. The only true way to define red is the wavelength of visible light that is red, but that fails to capture how we experience red, the emotions we feel and what we think of and what we associate with red. But this extends to emotions as well, how do we define happy? Sad? Anger? Envy? There is no one way to define these things, so we can't truly talk about emotion with language alone, and if we can't talk about emotion with language alone, we can't truly capture the essence of a thought in language. Simply put, language by itself; letters, words, clauses, sentences, are mere shadows of what we think.
This is where figurative language comes in. We need figurative language to actually be able to convey these thoughts, or get as close to actually conveying them as we can. Figurative language goes beyond language by itself, and through figurative language we don't just hear what the author thinks, we can understand it. Figurative language resembles that abstract mass of our thoughts because like our thoughts, it too is abstract. When we try to understand figurative language, we grasp at ethereal gossamer threads, fragile and almost incorporeal. Figurative language compares the world we know and perceive to the world the author is trying to show us, and because of that, it not only shows us a topic, but it goes beyond language and expresses thoughts as emotions and memories as well. So while figurative language makes literature mindlessly difficult at times, without it, literature is entirely meaningless.
For example, would the message of Crime and Punishment be anywhere near as effectively communicated if we had not experienced Raskolnikov's guilt over his actions and his need for redemption? Would it have been more effective for F.Scott Fitzgerald to simply talk about how humans struggle against time and society and inequality of opportunity, instead of telling the tale of Gatsby, who longs to repeat the past with his advantages from the present?
We need figurative language to bypass a barrier that comes with the inadequacy of language. I mentioned computer languages earlier, and computers do think in languages. We can write code in languages like Java, C++, Python, or what ever strikes your fancy, and any computer will be able to process and understand it. And yet humans cannot do this, we cannot feed a human a sentence in the English language and expect them to understand it the same way another person does.
The reason computers think in languages is because they all think the same. There is no ambiguity between computers, no complicated emotions to convey, nor thoughts that transcend form as humans do. Computers perceive logically and uniformly. Humans are not nearly that simple. We all perceive the world in different ways, we all think in different ways, and ultimately language alone cannot communicate to people of infinitely many worlds, infinitely many backgrounds and infinitely many ways of thinking. Figurative language is the language of thoughts, and using figurative language we can come to understand the thoughts of another person, whether they be near or far, family or strangers, alive or dead.
It is easy to talk about the truth as if it is some universal aspect of life that people must embrace, lest they become deluded; to an extent this is true, the truth makes itself known, despite our best efforts. People cannot hide or erase reality, no matter how much we yearn to do so. And we do yearn to change the reality we find ourselves in, we can look to Jay Gatsby as an example. Always chasing after that green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock, trying to escape his reality in favor of his ideal fantasy, which he found in the past. He desperately tried to, "beat on, boats against the current." Gatsby aims to ignore the truths of his reality, that his world was not perfect and that he could not make it perfect. We tend to call this denial.
This is not some phenomenon unique to Gatsby, at some point or another in life, we ourselves will come to lie to ourselves, whether it is about money or a relationship or grades; we have and will continue to lie to ourselves at various points in our life. That is what came to me when I read Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway.
Throughout the story, the central couple avoid talking about some operation (which i only just found out is an abortion... apparently I'm dense and this was obvious to the rest of the class. I actually thought the operation was trepanation.) Though this operation drives a wedge between the couple, neither truly want to discuss it. Further we have the symbolic white elephants. The symbol of the white elephant originated in Thailand, where the king would give white elephants to people he didn't like. This was because it was obscenely expensive to own a white elephant, both because they are picky eaters and also sacred and must be worshiped. Gradually the meaning turned into a gift that the recipient doesn't want. We may also consider the common expression "the elephant in the room", which is to say, "the blatantly obvious thing that everybody is thinking about but no one wants to talk about." Taken together, the white elephant symbolizes our aversion to being told the truth.
Humans don't hate the truth. Quite the contrary, we hate being lied to, especially to our face. But at the same time we dislike being told truths that we find disagreeable. This is what Emily Dickinson wrote about when she wrote "Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant". When Dickinson wrote "The Truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind" she referred to this very aversion of truths that we don't like to hear, the hard truth. We can't accept some truths because to do so would cause pain to ourselves. In our minds, acknowledging something gives that thing more power over us than if we exile it to the dark recesses of our minds.
Gatsby can't acknowledge that going to his ideal world where he has his money and Daisy loves him and has always loved him is impossible because to do so would leave him empty, he would have climbed the social ladder for naught in the end, and to acknowledge that would leave him powerless. Better to pursue a dream always just out of reach, coming ever closer to it but never truly reaching it; rather than acknowledging the futility of such a pursuit.
It is why the couple in Hills Like White Elephants can't bring themselves to really think about this procedure that weighs on their minds. Because to acknowledge it would be to obligate them to do something, and that meant change, one way or another. And change hurts, change is a hard path to walk, essential as it may be.
We can't acknowledge such unpleasant truths because to do so makes life harder, it makes life more painful. It forces us to relinquish control of our fate, and it abruptly tears us from the world we build for ourselves to face stark reality. Sometimes, its just easier to believe in something we may know to be false, even though we don't want to know it. This is what causes people to spend wildly out of their means, to find solutions at the bottom of a can of beer, to cling to relationships already dead, to ignore the world around them and pretend that for one moment the world is what we make of it, not what it makes of us. We prefer our facades to our truth.
Ultimately this calls to mind a section in my favorite video game, Dishonored. About midway through the game, you start a mission called "Lady Boyle's Last Party", in which you are tasked with assassinating an aristocrat funding a tyrannical regime. The mission takes place at a large party with the city's aristocrats in attendance, with no expense spared in a lavish mansion. The mission takes influence from the Edgar Allen Poe short story "Masque of the Red Death", and the two share common themes. In both, the elite try to hide away in their lavish bastions, they try to forget the plague that rages outside their doorstep, the truth knocking at the door.
They forget their own mortality, they have forgotten that death visits all equally, regardless of class. But it was easier to pretend that it was safe and everything was alright in their mansions, to pretend that for a moment the plague didn't actually exist, that they had control over their own fate. It was more painful to acknowledge the plague and the flaws of the world, as well as mortality, rather than give the truth absolute power over the aristocrats.
Whether it is Jig or Gatsby or Lady Boyle or Prince Prospero, people don't like unpleasant truths, and will go to great lengths to maintain their own ideal fantasies. It is another reminder that we choose the world we live in, by virtue of perception, that we desperately cling to our perception of what was and what ought to be when all else fails and our perception is the only thing remaining.
"Strange, how there's always a little more innocence left to lose." -the Outsider, Dishonored (2012).
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