Writings

Preamble

This was originally my End-of-Course assignment for ELT107. Previously, my TMA on Colby scored a dismal 65 because I focused a lot on readerly response and neglected the theme, which was something the course repeatedly wanted. This ECA gave us a quote – Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try” and wanted us to take two short stories and discuss the idea of trying. Parts of the thinking from earlier stories persist in this ECA. At one point, I was making logic operators in my head – If Try (P) ^ Fail(Q), then ___, if P ¬ Q then ___. In the end, against a deadline, I decided to write whatever I could, but not before adding some little things of my own. The “sementic” field was a deliberate spelling error because it’s fun, for example. The reference to readerly response at the end and exceeding by 1 word just to make a point about trying and transgression was also deliberate. I thought, “What if they strictly deducted 5 marks and I ended up with a B? Should I play it safe?” But in the end, what is a literature essay if there isn’t some fun in it? So those things stayed and I really got a B+. I regret nothing.

“Alright, I’ll Give It a Try”: An Essay on the Necessity of Essays

Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try” reduces human action into a binary that denies the possibilities brought about by trying. It further assumes clear intent and execution lead to a stable goal – do X, get Y. Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1983) and William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily (1930) resist such assumptions, as evinced in their characters’ actions and interactions. Carver’s narrator and his wife cannot understand each other through the use of different registers. The narrator’s failure subsequently allows him to discard language for art and experience something transcendental. Faulkner’s titular Emily occupies a liminal space that represents inertness as the townsfolk tries in vain to subjugate her to order; Emily’s lack of trying also serves as a counterpoint – as Yoda’s aphorism made flesh, with grotesque results. Through exploring the use of diction, register, motifs in setting and narrative revelation, I argue for trying’s value in revealing the structural constraints we must overcome; in its absence, we produce grotesque results.

Language is an inadequate medium for bridging humans’ inner experiences when there is no shared foundation for understanding. In Cathedral, the narrator’s wife tries to instil empathy in the narrator through emotional manipulation – “If you love me… you can do this for me”, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died… The man’s lost his wife!” only to be met with flat and insensitive answers – “I don’t have any blind friends”, “Was his wife a Negro?”. Similarly, the narrator tries to verbally describe a cathedral’s functions (“…be close to God”) and features (“tall…big…massive”) and fails before admitting “I’m just no good at it”. The juxtaposition between the wife’s emotional register and the narrator’s blunt diction reveals two fundamentally different starting points that do not overlap. Specifically, the narrator’s non-sequiturs – “blind friends” and “Negro” fails to answer the wife’s imperative appeal and exasperated tone. The disconnect accentuates the difference in worldview between the two characters. Likewise, describing physical features and functions to a blind man whose experience precludes sight is ultimately futile. The attempt to use language here reveals two things – an assumption of shared referent and the impossibility of bridging inner worlds when that referent does not exist. More broadly, the characters’ failure at overlapping their experiences of the world with others shows that the limits of our language is the limits of our world. Without a shared foundation of understanding, we cannot access other people’s inner worlds through words alone.

Yet, the failure that comes from trying also makes it possible to experience transcendence. After failing at an oral description, Cathedral’s narrator draws one at Robert’s suggestion. The narrator notes how Robert “fingered the corners” of the paper, said “Let’s do her” and “Press hard… That’s right. That’s good”. The narrator also describes his motions in a flurry of paratactical constructions – “I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors” and so on in the climactic part of the drawing. Ostensibly, the literal register is that of two men participating in an intensely exciting drawing exercise. However, diction such as “fingered” and “press hard” and the fast pacing generated by the parataxis also create a sementic field of physical intimacy. The ambiguity in meaning birthed from these effects accentuate the transcendental quality of the experience the narrator eventually has, such that he cannot properly name it. Ultimately, this ambiguity also suggests that genuine experience exceeds the linguistic framework we use to approach it, as evidenced by the narrator’s description in negative construction – “like nothing else in my life” and “didn’t feel like I was inside anything”. Whereas Yoda’s quote asserts that one simply does and assumes no value in trying, the narrator’s experience shows otherwise – sometimes, we must jab flaccidly at a problem and realise our impotence before we exceed the mundane and experience something deeper.

Not all trying leads to the possibility of transcendence, however. Performatively trying within institutional frameworks shields us from the friction needed to realise the constraints we must exceed. In Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, the townsfolk’s interactions regarding Emily consistently uses an institutional register –“Nothing on the books…”, “Send her word to stop it…Isn’t there a law” and “ministers…doctors…trying to persuade her”. All these indirect addressing of the issue collide against Emily’s imperative command (“See Colonel Sartoris”) and her setting or position in each instance (“in the door…in the [window]…at the door”). Emily’s liminality can be read as the threshold between the old Southern order to which she belongs, and the new sensibilities that the town now espouses. In effect, the townsfolk is using the language of the new order against someone who operates in the logic of the old, but who also can never return to that order. The fundamental logical mismatch evident in their registers doom their interactions. The most damning evidence of this comes in how Emily is described by the town. The diction of “fallen monument”, “tradition, duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation” suggests a denial of personhood. Even when the townsfolk get their way, the parataxis in “They crept…into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away” suggests that the success is incidental, just as the burial succeeded only when Emily happened to “[break] down”. Ironically, the frameworks we inherit and work with are the very same frameworks that remove the necessary friction for discovering the limits we must go against. Within such a system, we try perpetually and can only hope to achieve our goal incidentally.

In the absence of clarity provided by trying, merely doing produces results that reveal our lack of understanding of what we want. Emily, in trying to retain Homer Barron permanently in her life, takes direct action to reach her desired goal. She uses a declarative register against the druggist – “I want some poison”, “I want arsenic”. These commands sidestep the druggist’s appeal to law. She wins the power struggle when “he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up”. The parataxis here accentuates his quick capitulation. Setting-wise, it is a rare instance where she is outside of her usual liminal threshold – both at the druggist’s store and out with Homer “on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable”. These signify her bringing the old Southern aristocratic order to bear upon the commercial and legal sensibilities of the new Jefferson town. Homer’s fate, in turn, is sealed when he crosses from the town and into Emily’s abode at the liminal threshold of “kitchen door” and “at dusk”. The denouement upon her death – the discovery of “what was left of [Homer Barron]” who had “apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace” and “a long strand of iron-gray hair” – ties together the foreshadowed elements from the nonchronological narrative. Emily’s desire for a permanent man and direct actions contributed to a death beyond constant love that fulfils the letter of the goal but destroys its spirit. More broadly, the corpse reveals that our actions, devoid of the friction from trying, produces outcomes that reflect our lack of understanding towards what we want in life.

Trying, as both texts show, produces the necessary friction by which we discover what constrains us. It opens the possibility of exceeding the constraints as Carver’s narrator does. Whereas the narrator’s wife and the Jefferson townsfolk stop at discovering their constraints, Emily typifies Yoda’s binary literally, achieving a perverse version of her goal. One unexplored possibility lies in what happens if characters realise their limits and consciously choose not to exceed them; analysing another text might answer this. In the end, to essay is to try; whether my trying and exceeding of limits produces a transcendental essay must, unfortunately, be left as an exercise in reader response. (1301)