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National Literary Figures
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| Lebezniatnikov |
A professor of mine once wrote that in order to truly fall in love with a culture or people, you have to immerse yourself in the prominent artists and writers of that nation while you're in their home - preferably in the native tongue. The experience of reading Milan Kundera in a park in Prague seems a formative one, and I still remember enjoying reading Fitzgerald's short stories in St. Paul.
Most nations seem to have a literary figure that symbolizes the cultural heritage of the society. The Czechs have Kundera; the French Dumas; Mexico, Fuentes; Spain, Cervantes; Egypt, Mahfouz; Russia, Tolstoy; Kenya, Thiong'o; Sudan, Salih; Japan, Soseki.
Obviously picking a central literary figure in many societies would be difficult - would America choose Twain or Hemingway? Britain Dickens or Shakespeare?
My sister is moving to Beijing, and as a gift I wanted to give her a personal work from China's literary figure (prose, not poetry). But in all honesty, I can't think of one. Casting aside the obvious explanation that I'm just forgetting someone, is it possible for a country to not have a central literary figure? Is China's jumbled cultural identity a result of not having a central figure with which to project its image?
In any case, this thread is to explore the idea of a nation's cultural identity centralized in an artistic or literary figure. Is this an oversimplification of a nation's cultural diversity or a process involved in constructing a collective identity? |
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| akalouda |
| Czechs have Kafka...he was a jew, but not the darkside jew... |
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| The17sss |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
In any case, this thread is to explore the idea of a nation's cultural identity centralized in an artistic or literary figure. Is this an oversimplification of a nation's cultural diversity or a process involved in constructing a collective identity? |
For China I would say yes it's oversimplification. I'm no expert on China, but I wonder if the Mandarin people or the Cantonese people have totally different ideas of who would be a central figure... or those who practice Buddhism vs. Confucionism or Taoism. I think if you're looking for "a" centralized figure in a nation with the history, populace, and cultural differences beneath the "China" umbrella, it's going to be too hard. You might have to customize that figure, so to speak, based on your sister's identity as well |
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| akalouda |
| China has Jackie Chan. |
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| Lira |
hmm... I'm going to talk about Brazil's Machado de Assis.
I think there are several reasons why he's considered our national literary figure. Mainly, I think the reasons behind the choice of every national character of any sort are political. On the one hand, it's easy to understand why someone from Rio de Janeiro, then capital of Brazil, would be picked as the greatest writer of our country - there's always some sort of regional elitism behind this kind of choice. However, given the economic disparity in Brazil, it's only natural that it was someone from a more influent city that had the necessary access to whatever it takes to be a good writer. So he's got the merit and the people necessary to propel him to success.
This can be summarised by the aura created around him. The fact that he was an orphan child of both freed slaves and Portuguese settlers captures really well what it means to be Brazilian. He was also influential in the society he lived in, having founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1896.
But, I also feel this oversimplifies our culture as being extremely Rio-centric. Being a more São Paulo person myself, I can't help considering São Paulo as our greatest cultural centre since The Week of Modern Art in 1922. Although it happened 14 years after Machado's death, it represented a strong paradigm shift in Brazilian art. And that's a really weird thing. Who is Brazil's national musical figure? Tom Jobim? What to make, in that case, of Heitor Villa-Lobos, perhaps the greatest Latin American classical composer of all time?
Now that I've written all this much, I think it's time to summarise this post into one single sentence: Yes, I think it is an oversimplification of a nation's cultural diversity because it is a process involved in constructed a collective identity. Because it's more important to focus on what a society has in common in order to create a greater social cohesion, it's perhaps even expected to supress diversity on behalf of common characteristics.
And, being the romantic individualist I am, there's nothing I value more than diversity. |
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| Renzo |
Don't forget Colombia and Marquez.
Dickens is magnificent, but I cannot fathom Britain choosing him over Shakespeare. Shakespeare is arguably the greatest playwright ever. How he would not be their central literary figure I just don't see.
But yeah, maybe it doesn't have to do with cultural diversity as much as it has to do with the yearn to be associated with a winner. Everyone loves a winner. So when a great writer comes from a certain country, the country clings to him. Sports and life are really not that different in this respect. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
I wouldn't really consider myself "well-read" or anything like that, so keep that in mind...
But I would consider H.P. Lovecraft to be one of the greatest American writers. Of course, he is one of my favourite writers, period, so I'm admittedly biased, but the man represented a great deal more than just alien gods and phantom hounds. For all intents and purposes, he was a contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe, forever to live in his shadow in the minds of most people, and made much of his actual writing career doing short stories for pulp science fiction magazines in the early 1900s. Sounds pretty kitsch-y, eh?
Lovecraft however wrote with a prose every bit as elegant in its disconnected specificity as his ability to elicit a great sense of cosmic dread and helplessness. He wrote of strange and immensely imaginative creatures, forces and characters of equal strangeness, often relating obscure channels of ancient mythology and fantastic surreality in his weaves - all the while implying an encumbering sense of utter insanity and secret truths bearing down upon the world of man, obscured only for our protection by right of repression.
But what made Lovecraft uniquely American was not necessarily his stories, but his personality. He was a sickly, pale youth, and ultimately a nerd at heart - he edited a national amateur astronomy magazine as well as headed numerous astronomical organizations in the US. No doubt, his pondering of cosmic movements was often the pool of his appeal to massive alien entities constantly underlying our perceptions and willpower, even living in unseen parts of our very planet. Most interestingly of all however, is the fact that Lovecraft was a staunch and utter atheist - he knew his tales were complete fantasy and his supreme interest in science above all things was most certainly what lent itself to his ability and appeal to equally as fanciful fiction. In this sense, Lovecraft had to write his fiction as a way of coping with the loneliness he knew laid in our immediate portion of the universe; his resilience as an author however, quite stems from his ability to correlate this fact without reprieve. Ultimately, however, his exorcising was the result of his sort of neo-romantic albeit fundamentally meticulous scientific background - he knew that man was a speck of dust in a wide, wide reality, and that there was plenty we did not know and had yet to learn - however horrifying these implications could possibly be.
He was a nationalist and a racist, often writing treatises on New England architecture and quick in his writings to exemplify the savagery of mongrel races of man as well as the horror of our undeniable derivation from them. In essence, he was a man of his time, echoing antique European themes of horror and a Gothic lieu that has remained largely unrivaled in its objectiveness.
To address the central theme of this thread, I think that any given nation is defined through the works of those who both seek to define it through art, literature or other humanistic endeavors as well as those who seek to define but for the sake of definition. I see a difference in "cultural identity" from what could be actual, cultural identity - that is to say, critics and scholars and historians try to define a people but for the sake of archiving, but this has little bearing on the actual aims of true art, it is merely a mnemonic faculty used as the crutch of the talentless and "cultural" - it is not free nor is it creative, though it is quite often branded as such. Thankfully, every now and again, a true innovator comes along and this happens to often be someone, in America at least, of the most misanthropic variety, if you ask me. |
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| Konijn |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
I wouldn't really consider myself "well-read" or anything like that, so keep that in mind... |
lovecraft's writing was comically bad; the only reason i bothered reading some of his cringe-worthy fiction is because i lived next door to one of his providence homes.
on topic, and for the u.s.: melville |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by Konijn
lovecraft's writing was comically bad |
Hahahahaha yeah, but keep in mind he wrote a lot for pulp magazines, just as I said. Not all of it was that terrible, not even close. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
Granted, I don't think any one country or national group has one single literary figure - my first post was perhaps misleading. In some cases (such as in the US) - there are many. And depending on regional idiosyncrasies and differences, there can be literary figures of sub-groups as well. As famous as Faulkner may be, I dare say he is more prolific in the South than in Seattle.
So it would follow that a diverse place like China would have many. Of course, I'd be interested in knowing who they may be.
It's interesting to me that there are places, however, where there is one central literary figure. For instance, Kundera and Prague seem so intertwined that they are almost synonymous, despite the fact that Kundera wrote the majority of his work in exile in France. The intersection of culture and place is personified by the individual(s) who best represent the collective ideals and memory of the nation. Kundera himself talks about the nation as being the product of shared memory - a writer who can accurately express that memory in words is a conduit through which that collective identity is shared with the world, and thus becomes synonymous with what it means to understand and share that identity. |
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| The17sss |
| quote: | Originally posted by Konijn
on topic, and for the u.s.: melville |
I'm down with Hawthorne (who definitely influenced Melville). Both great writers IMO |
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