Confessions of a Literary Elitist

When it comes to the entity that is literatue, I have gone changed my stance as many times as I change my undershorts. In this dynamic transitition into where I stand today (and I may change my mind again tomorrow), there have been two periods in my life: I started out as an extreme literary elitist, and now I have learned to appreciate good literature. For anyone who has met the poor soul who refuses to read anything besides the best, it is a struggle to talk sense into them. And when I say the best, I mean to best- only the finest, e.g. Shakespeare, Vergil, Geothe and Scott O'Dell would do. For the uber-elitist, it is difficult to find someting to read on a daily basis.

I believe that my extreme literary elitism came when I discovered Steinbeck, then Shakespeare. It happened in two stages. First, when I read Steinbeck in seventh or eight grade, it was head and shoulders above anything I had heretofore read. I thought, "this is what literature is." All that crap about the theme, plot and essential literary elements came to light. I had gotten my first taste of good literature, and I wanted more. Little did I know that literature was like crack in the sense that once you had it, you craved it maniacally and would not settle for anything but the best. For better or worse, I met The Bard next.

I still have respect for Steinbeck, but he is not worthy of wiping the behind of Shakespeare, but to his credit few are. Note here that I believe that the finest works of "William Shakespeare" were actually written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, but that is discussed in an essay I have hitherto written but it is not yet blogworthy.

So I moved on to Shakespeare, before I may have been ready. It has been a blessing and a curse. My middle-school self deemed it the appropriate time to read Hamlet. I appologize if this is making some readers sick to their stomachs, but I went for it, regardless of how utterly cliche' it was.

In reading Hamlet, which was not an easy task, I was stunned by the incredible language, and the construction of dialogue. From reading it I learned a skill that has been exceedingly beneficial to me as a writer- I have this system of taking the dialogue, and running it through my head in a specific voice, and it allows me to determine emotion and if the dialogue is realistic. Note I know I am not special in this regard, but I do now posess the skill of writing halfway decent dialogue. I also learned what a truely great masterpiece is. I did not at the time appreciate it, but upon completion of Hamlet I knew that I held some form of greatness in my hands.

After reading the text of the play, I went on to read Shakespearian Scholarship, mostly Harold Bloom. Professor Bloom has probably shaped my view of literature more than I know nor would admit, but his immaculate criticism and praise were so profound that his writings themselves border on great literature.

Freshman year I emersed myself in some more Shakespeare, specifically The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, some of The Sonnets and The Poems, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. That, coupled with Bloomian criticism lead me to be an elitist before I was ready to be one. Granted, I was exceedingly well read for my age, (as I still am) but I did not have the fifty years of reading under my belt that Bloom had. Also, I had not written enough works on my own to be able to make such judgements.

Sophomore year, I was still the same elitist that I had been the past year. I will not discuss the nature of my English class or the professor, but I will say it was not me at my best. Regardless, I came across two novelists critical to my development as an intellectual and artist- Kurt Vonnegut and Francis Scott Key (F. Scott) Fitzgerald. The former is by no means one of the greatest of all the time, but as a second teir literary master he is qualified. The latter produced my favorite novel of all time, his immortal The Great Gatsby. This was the first time that I had encountered a work that was beautiful that was not overwritten at all, as some of Dickens and Shakesepare is by contemporary standards. Upon reading Gatsby a second time, I grasped its greatness, and as I am in the process of writing my own work of fiction I feel as if I am an heir to Fitzgerald. (It is this mindset that allows me to overcome my exteme anxiety and self doubt and lets my pen/keyboard do the talking. As a sidenote, I have found that musically, the best muses are Beethoven, Mozart, Juanes and Schubert- don't ask me why). Fitzgerald and Vonnegut shaped my view of literature, and allowed me to appreciate the novel to a fuller extent.

Since then I have read a fair amount of novels, and I see myself reading a few more novels in the next few months. My English class this year is Comparative Literature, and we do not read any novels for a short while, being scheduled to focus on some poetry and Homer's Odyssey. In Latin class, we are translating Vergil's Aeneid, which is something I have been wanting to do since I began studying Latin. See my post, "Diez Libros Leer" for a reading list.

Since I have dropped my view as a super-elitist, I have found some highly credible works of literature. Some of the hilights include Kafka's Trial, Wharton's Ethan Frome, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Unfortunately, I have also met some "less than stellar" works, e.g. Clemens' Huckleberry Finn and Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God.

Over time, I believe that this shift in elitism is due to my dynamic definition of literature. At my most arrogant, literature was the finest and most reputable works of fiction the world has produce. Now I believe that literature is a work of fiction that has elements besides the plotline and is more complex than a short analysis of the plot. It is imperative to understand that all literature is not good literature. Good literature is much more difficult to define, and I am not ready to define it at this point in time. Regardless, I have come to appreciate all literature and I am now seeking out other works than just the immortal works to read, and contribute to my own personal style and understanding of written art.

Diez Libros Leer

As my last year a before I enter the semi-real world of University, I am inspired to make a vow to read ten wonderful works of world literature. I have been considering reading some of these works for a considerable amount of time. On a whim, I have decided to make a list of ten books to read by the end of the year. Here is my list:

1. Faust 1 and 2 or The Sorrow of Young Werther by Geothe
2. The Brothers Karamazov (finish) by Dostoyevski
3. The Odyssey by Homer
4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
5. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche
6. The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
7. The Three Sisters by Chekhov
8. Wuthering Heights by Bronte
9. The Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut
10. The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!
I am asking for more suggestions. I refuse to read Treasure Island by Stevenson, in order to spite my father. He has been attempting to persuade me to read it for some time, but I refuse. Hahaha.

Was Nietzsche an Ubermensch?

In the course of reading my favorite author, Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, I have come across a point that strikes me as paradoxical. Is Nietzsche an Übermensch? Is he this superman that he hopes to be, and encourages the intelligent of the masses to become. In reading his Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, there are points where Nietzsche stoops down to the level of the crazed religious fanatic, and points out the flaws in their way of life. It is as if he picks a fight with a child, over something the child has no control over. Nietzsche was, in some cases, just as fanatical as the religious fundamentalist! He can be described as a fundamentalist atheist, which is (probably) not any better than being a fundamentalist religious person.

The most telling argument is in Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. If he did indeed live by his own categorical imperative, and that lead him to spend over a decade of his life (and possibly more had he not passed away) unable to produce anything beneficial to society, does this negate his candidacy for being an Übermensch? How can he overcome the slave mentality when he was essentially functioning as an infant as a middle aged man? Would this lead one to believe that Nietzsche’s ethic is convoluted nonsense that leads one spiraling into a crippling depression? This is exceedingly troubling to me, and I see much of Nietzsche in myself and vice versa. I am BY NO MEANS the genius that Nietzsche was, but if we follow the same ethic are we doomed to the same fate as slaves to our own minds?

In ending, can Nietzsche be considered an Übermensch in his own sense of the word? I do not propose an answer to this, at this time, but I must say that I am shocked by the evidence that Nietzsche might not be the Übermensch, something he had spent his whole life trying to become, and may have not succeeded at it.