English Essay

Concluding Remarks (102)

First, let me say, thanks so much for a great semester! Everyone’s work has been, by and large, of excellent quality and on a par with anything I’ve seen out of other colleges and universities around the country and around the world.

I introduce my concluding remarks with a question: of what value and/or use is a course in literature to those of you pursuing majors other than a liberal arts one? I start these remarks with one possible answer to that question.

Literature is an art and belongs in the same category as any other formal art; painting, music, dramatic and performing arts, sculpture, design, etc. As an art, and also like the other arts, literature deals in and expresses, beauty. The ability of a writer to express and convey a sense of the beautiful, is what raises that writer to the status of a Da Vinci, a Mozart, a Caruso, a Shakespeare or a Tupac.

If one asks, what is the use of literature in one’s life and one’s profession, one may as well ask, what is the use of one’s favorite artist or musician or designer or anyone who gives inspiration to the human journey? To put it very bluntly and simply, one does not live by bread alone. Poetry may not be counted for much in the world of practical affairs, yet each day, people die, in spirit, substance and soul, for lack of it.

In order to shape our discussion, we should distinguish between a ‘beauty’ that resides in the content of a story, poem or play; i.e., in the subject matter of the work; and a ‘beauty’ that resides in the superb way that the author has expressed him/her-self. This is not an easy distinction to make or to keep in mind.

In King of the Bingo Game , Ralph Ellison gives humanity and voice to the young black man, trying to scrape together a semblance of human dignity in post-Civil War, ‘Jim Crow’, America. Certainly there may be no beauty in the social traumas that the protagonist is subject to, yet were it not for Ellison’s talent in painting us such a vivid portrait of what the young man was experiencing, we should never know him as a sensitive human being, with the same cares and desires as ourselves and perhaps never strive to work more for human equality and dignity. Ellison’s beauty of style and structure is made to serve human progress, growth and healing.

In John Updike’s A&P, a young grocery clerk (foolishly perhaps) casts aside his job and reputation to (heroically?) stand-up for beauty in the shape and form of the feminine figure. In Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers , a dead songbird becomes a symbol of a women’s suffering in a world of toxic masculinity; a world that leaves little room for understanding the suffocating position of women in such a culture.

In A Hunger Artist , Franz Kafka presents the reader with a question that tests the very limit of art and artistry: does performance, no matter how absurd it might seem, serve the cause of beauty for someone, somewhere, be they audience or performer; or does such performance simply lapse into meaninglessness? (In considering this question, recall that Vincent Van Gogh died penniless, in poverty and misery, because he could not sell a single painting. Today, only a little more than a century after his death, even his small, postage stamp-size sketches go for upwards of 15 million dollars! Consider what’s wrong in a world that utterly fails to recognize such beauty in its lifetime?).

To close out our fiction/prose section, A.S. Byatt, in The Thing in the Forest , places beauty side-by-side with the grotesque and with fear and death. The two female protagonists of her story find a degree of solace and care in the “safe home” to which they’ve been removed and enjoy their walks in the woods: until something ugly and destructive appears to threaten them; bodily, spiritually and psychologically—something to destroy their sense of well-being and something that stays with them throughout their lives. We trace the course of this “thing” through Byatt’s amazing talent for beautifully scripted prose and through it, her ability to put the reader directly into the dreams, nightmares and ambitions of her female characters.

Poetry, is perhaps a world where language and beauty come as close as possible to one another—and sometimes, where the poet is superb, fuse, one to the other. In Hades Welcomes His Bride , the poet A.E. Stallings takes us directly into the world of mythology, where we witness the dark leader of the underworld welcoming his child sacrifice and seeking to comfort her in, what is to be, her seasonal dwelling place; a place where goodness certainly does not reside but one where she will reside so that men and women above can reap a decent harvest each year. So here we witness beauty being “sacrificed” for the sake of survival or for the sake of the “greater good.”

Perhaps this is why an age-old tale like Beauty and the Beast, remains so popular: beauty co-exists alongside of its opposite in a symbiosis perhaps necessary to human affairs. Exploring that symbiosis really goes to the heart of the thematic structure of this course and, in my opinion, to the heart of human affairs in general.

When you next consider (or someone raises) the question of what good are the liberal arts (especially literature); you might remind yourself (or them) what you have learned/discovered from Mr. Perrotta’s course on literature: that beauty is absolutely necessary for the survival of the human soul and spirit; irrespective of whatever else is taking place in human affairs—including all forms of human catastrophes and cruelties (e.g., wars, sickness, pandemics, poverty, hunger and grief). Certainly, man-and woman-kind must take care of these forms of danger to survival first and foremost; however, such efforts may ultimately be doomed to failure without our emotions (beauty among them) surviving intact.

Poetry gives us song, spirit and beauty. It does not, however, accomplish these things without its own ‘toolkit.’ This ‘toolkit’ is called poetic meter. Without metrical discipline, poetry, as our rap and hip-hop artists demonstrate every day, falls far short of its striving for artistic dignity and greatness. This of course, is not to denigrate the style of “free” or “blank” (i.e., unmetered, unrhymed) verse; only to point out that even this type of verse adheres to some metrical or imagistic pattern that fuses language to meaning.

If one had to choose a single poem that (among thousands) can truly be labeled a “classic”, one could do far, far worse than John Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn . Here, we see the apotheosis of language and beauty personified! (No one accuses me of flowery language!). What poet (except perhaps Shakespeare) can exceed the absolute loveliness and beauty of a phrase like, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”?

Certainly the rest of Keat’s poem matches or surpasses that line in exemplary beauty. Then, of course, comes the poetic tour de force of that final, world-famous line, equating beauty with truth. A single line which also, like the tale of Beauty and the Beast, penetrates to the heart of this course. If one wants to know the “truth” (i.e., the felt, lived, experienced reality of) the immigrant experience, one needs to turn to poets like Pat Mora—poets who, like marginalized peoples of all types, grasp onto the “beauty” of literature and the poetic form to best communicate that truth and heal themselves and the culture around them.

The third major genre we studied this semester is that of drama and the dramatic arts. Good drama combines the expressiveness of prose with the architecture of the poetic. Indeed, approximately 70% of the lines for actors in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , are written in poetic verse form. The actors in Sophocles’ Antigone speak with a poetic dignity that lends gravity and seriousness to their dramatic parts. The lines scripted by most dramatic playwrights are designed to highlight a certain depth of meaning to what their characters say to one another and to the audience in general.

In drama, beauty finds its home in the hearts of the actors and actresses and in what motivates them to say and do the things that they do in living out their various roles. Antigone is doggedly faithful to a certain spiritual and religious principle which she must sacrifice all to—she cannot, no matter the cost, leave her brother unburied. Audiences are empathetic to her plight (for they too cling to the same beliefs) and find a certain beauty in her faith.

The fact that her actions and beliefs result in tragedy for all of the parties concerned does not necessarily diminish the beauty of her faith; and it allows the audience to leave the theatre “purged” of their own internal conflicts between their private beliefs and their public duties (obedience to the sovereign). Thus even tragedy can possess a certain kind of beauty.

Finally, if we can find beauty anywhere, certainly we can find it in Shakespeare; and most preeminently, in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The beauty of ‘fairy dust’; of leaving the repressive atmosphere of government (Theseus’ Court) to seek romantic love in a natural setting (the forest); the delightful antics and theatre of Bottom and his troupe of artisan/players; the ‘fairy court’ of Titania and Oberon; the magic of Robin Goodfellow (aka ‘Puck’); the wonderful confusion of mixed and mistaken identities and gender roles; the beauty of the final reconciliations and multiple weddings—all of these elements combine to reawaken our childlike sense of beauty and wonder; senses that may have long gone to sleep in us in our modern product and work culture; yet senses we need to survive as loving, caring individuals capable of both giving and receiving love.

In these concluding remarks, I have chosen a single literary concept or idea (beauty) and traced its development through multiple literary works we have covered this semester. As students and writers, you shall have the opportunity to do the same on our Final Exam (with unifying concepts or ideas of your own choosing). Please consult the posted instructions for that Final Exam on Blackboard and good luck! I am confident, based on the quality of the work I have received thus far, that all of you will do well in this Final Exam essay.

Sincerely,

Martin Perrotta

856-313-9531

Fall 2020