This past week we have begun reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! I love the novel, but I had to wonder if interest in the book would fall along gender lines. I’m pleased that it hasn’t. Anyway, one of the reasons I love the novel so much is that it is deceptively simple yet filled with many seemingly insignificant lines that, upon closer inspection, are simply pregnant with meaning and significance. My favorite line in the book, and perhaps my favorite line (or at least one of my favorite lines) in all literature is uttered by a character named Carl Linstrum. Observing changes that have taken place on the Nebraska prairie during his long absence, Carl observes, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.†I like to throw that line to my students and ask them what they think the two or three human stories are, and then to ask them to identify those archetypal stories in works from different periods, right up to the contemporary era.
Over the years I have gotten lots of good responses to this question, but the students’ initial answers are usually pretty generic. They suggest things like Rags to Riches or Coming of Age, which are fine answers, but I press them to be more specific. Inevitably they want to know what I think the stories are. I preface my answer by saying that I don’t think my two or three are THE answers, but I tell them that there are a few stories I see recurring in literature more often than any others. To me, these are the stories of Odysseus, Adam and Eve, and Christ. To phrase them generically, I could say Life is a Journey, Loss of Innocence, and Deliverance through Suffering. One could even say that the generic examples I gave above from students are versions of these three stories. Coming of Age is essentially the story of Adam and Eve, and Rags to Riches is a materialistic version of the story of Christ.
Nonetheless, it’s a great question to use as a framing device for the course, and in fact the selesai paper the students have to write is on a version of this question. I began this fall’s course with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, and I use the line from Hemingway that “all modern American literature comes from†Huck Finn. I said to the students that I agree with Hemingway to the degree that I think Twain is using one of these three basic human stories (the story of Odysseus) but that he is telling a modern American version of that one human story. (I might argue that thirty-four years earlier Hawthorne had done the same thing with the story of Adam and Eve and The Scarlet Letter, but that’s an argument for another day). So for the selesai paper, after we have read nine major works of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century works, the students have to tell me an American version of one of the two or three basic human stories. They have to name the human story, identify its manifestation in at least two of the works we’ve read, and then connect it to a contemporary text (which can be fiction, nonfiction, print, film, whatever).
Half way through the second book of the semester, the students seem to be getting the hang of it, and this is, in part, because O Pioneers! is such an exemplary text for what I’m talking about. We had a great discussion this past Wednesday about how Cather was alluding to both the stories of the Garden of Eden and Pyramus and Thisbe, and treating them as versions of each other. At one point there is a beautiful description of an orchard (the apple tree from the Garden of Eden) bordered on one side by a Mulberry hedge (like the Mulberry tree from Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe) and on the other side by a new field of wheat (good old American ‘amber waves of grain’). I asked the students if they could see how this one paragraph of description gives readers a tableau that provides an interpretive image of Cather’s idea of a singular human story and three permutations of that story—one Biblical, one Classical, and one American.
I was especially pleased the following day when one of the students from my class stopped me in the hallway outside my office to tell me that her professor for her Milton class came in and wrote just the word “typology†on the board, and then proceeded to explain to the students what typology was and how Milton was using it in Paradise Lost, and, as the student said, she suddenly realized that I had been talking about basically the same thing without using the word itself. And she was right. Nice when that sort of thing happens.
For Tuesday, I have an invitation from a colleague to sit in on her Beat Literature class. They’re discussing The Catcher in the Rye and its possible influence upon Kerouac’s On the Road, two books about disaffected male youth—another human story that seems to repeat itself as if it never happened before. Can you think of a Biblical or Classical precedent?
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