Literature and Non-literature, Truth and Stories

In “The English Apparatus,” Robert Scholes questions the hierarchy of “literature” and “non-literature” that has been established and reinforced by the institution of the English department and literary studies. He urges us to rebuild the English apparatus by reconceptualizing what the “truth” of literature is, by acknowledging that the lines dividing texts within this hierarchy are not fixed but overlapping: “There is a difference between practice and earnest, which we must acknowledge. We err only when we make the gesture of erecting this difference into two ‘worlds,’ one of which is held to be all practice, the other all earnest” (Scholes 10). He compares the English apparatus’s reverence for literature to a reverence for religious scripture but argues against this, saying that “the varieties of literature must be seen as temporal rather than eternal. If literature is not scripture, then it cannot be outside of human time” (Scholes 13).

By the Sea does not deal with the exact same hierarchy of literature vs. non-literature, but its characters do reveal a common bias for knowledge and truth over stories, only to undermine this distinction in the telling of their own stories. My blog posts have yet to mention the character of Latif Mahmud, which reveals my own subconscious bias in interpreting the novel as primarily Saleh’s story. To clarify and fill in some of the gaps that I’ve left open: The novel is composed of six chapters, the first and last two narrated by Saleh, but the middle two narrated by Latif, the expatriate Zanzibari professor called in to help translate for Saleh. It turns out that Latif and Saleh come from the same town and that their personal histories are deeply intertwined: Because of a loan to a third party that was never repaid, Saleh took possession of Latif’s childhood house; in the present tense of the novel, Saleh has entered England using Latif’s deceased father’s passport (and hence his name). A central question is whether Saleh was in the right when he took the house — whose inheritance was it? And although I’ve told you only about Saleh so far, we readers of By the Sea do get to hear both sides.

Scholes writes, “If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text” (14). By the Sea, as a text, is very aware of how it makes its readers question the truth in the stories it tells, and this interplay must be central to any interpretation of the novel.

Latif is an English professor, and within the first few pages of his section, he has this outburst, disconnected from and interruptive of the narrative that he is telling: 

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own bits of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day. (Gurnah 74)

Not only does he set up a hierarchy of prose over poetry, but he reinforces the idea that truth and clarity are the aim of literature, that obfuscatory stories are of less value. (And here we need to keep in mind: Saleh and Latif’s flashbacks in the novel themselves operate on the level of legend, a mixture of timeless cultural (Islamic/Zanzibari) tropes and local gossip.) Even though Latif claims a preference for the lucid truth, he can’t help reading the world in myths and stories. When Latif is asked to help a refugee named Rajab Shaaban, his father’s name, he suspects that it must be the man who claimed his parents’ house, but he only confirms his suspicions upon finally visiting Saleh:

I knew this man, had seen his eyes on the streets, had seen the way they looked at Hassan years ago, and had even taken a letter from him to deliver to my brother. And if it wasn’t him I had taken the letter from, then it was a man very like him. And if those weren’t his eyes from years ago, then they were very like them. That secret smile made me shudder. (Gurnah 100)

Saleh, while also privileging knowledge over stories, makes the reader aware of his precarious position as a storyteller: “I feel that I am an involuntary instrument of another’s design, a figure in a story told by someone else. Not I. Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself heroic, without making itself seem hemmed in, arguing against an unarguable, rancouring with an implacable?” (Gurnah 69). At the same time that Saleh is being read/written as an archetypical asylum seeker, he is telling us his “true” story, which strips away the first-person “I” from any other character and does not allow for Latif’s version of the events. (The reverse of course goes for Latif’s telling, as well.) Yet Saleh is wary of making himself out to be heroic — or maybe not, but he is at least warning the reader that, just like the British officials spinning him into a yarn about refugees, he may not be trusted to tell the real “truth.”

These thoughts are themselves resistant to concise summation, so I’m going to end with some questions. Should we read stories that seem clear and “truthful” as legends, as poems? Does the first-person narrator ever not make him/herself out as a hero? Can this tell us anything about the arbitrariness of the literature/non-literature hierarchy? Am I right to extend Scholes’s prescription for teaching writing/literature to the idea of reading how texts situate, undermine, and question themselves?