Are you a poem or a novel?

I’m one of those people who find it difficult to work without some noise in the background, and so I usually keep the TV on while I’m writing—tuned in to CNN or the Discovery Channel or National Geographic—without really listening. But now and then I overhear something so fresh and startling that I drop everything to focus on the program. This happened the other day when—in the course of pecking away on my keyboard at a project I had as much enthusiasm for as watching paint dry on a wall—I heard the CNN announcer ask: “If you were a grape, would you prefer to be seedless or non-seedless?” It seemed so silly that I just had to stop and figure out what was going on. As it turned out, the segment was about the questions that interviewers asked applicants wishing to enter Oxford University—one of the world’s premier universities, and therefore one of the toughest to get into. But seedless grapes? The questions depended on which department you were seeking admission to. Literature applicants had to ponder this: “Would you rather be a poem or a novel?” The mathematically inclined were asked: “How would you define infinity?” As the Brits would say, there was a touch of the daffy in these questions, but the more I thought about them, the more I was intrigued by the value of asking not only the unexpected, but also the truly thought-provoking. It almost didn’t matter what the question itself was—they were, after all, questions which had no single, “correct” answers—but rather what was important was how the applicants formed their responses. As one of the examiners noted, the point wasn’t to bring in more academic robots—the kind of smug hyperachievers you just hated to be seated next to in class, who knew all the formulas (or formulae, as they were bound to correct you) and who could tell the difference between “hypotaxis” and “parataxis” (don’t ask me how I know)—but original thinkers, people who could think on their feet and relish a problem like a child would a new toy. So how would we have answered those questions? Let’s take that poem-or-novel one. It’s a question that presumes some familiarity with both the form and purpose of both genres, and a good answer would reveal the extent of that familiarity, but even that’s not much fun. Having to choose and seeing yourself as one or the other is, because it then becomes an act of self-definition, of presenting itself to the world (or, in this case, to Oxford) as someone, well, interesting. A poem or a novel? It’s a tough call, but let’s see. A poem is generally short and compact, and therefore complex. If I were a poem, I wouldn’t be talking much—but everything I say will or should be meaningful and precise. Like much of modern poetry there’ll be a certain raggedness and restlessness about me, but don’t be fooled, because all that’s a pose; everything—from the cut of my hair to the color of my socks—will be absolutely deliberate and will accept no substitute. There are, of course, all kinds of poems; we were talking at the Christmas party the other night about how Tennyson’s “Ulysses” continued to stir our ancient English majors’ hearts—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—but one could very easily prefer e. e. cummings’ playfulness such as when he says “I like my body /when it is /with your body”…. If I were younger I would prefer to be a poem, with all my brashness and sureness (or so I imagine) of footing. To be a poem would be to demand very much of oneself as planner and performer. There’s nothing more difficult to write than a great poem—and if one aspires to anything less than greatness, why even bother? (In truth, of course, if we were poetry, the city would be full of bad verse—malformed lines, images as cute and as plentiful as busloads of schoolchildren, thunderous preaching from pulpit and streetcorner.) But where I am and how I am—too late for Oxford and for fevered, furtive clutches beneath the blankets of strangers—I might resign myself to the novel’s slow shuffle to often predictable endings, delighting now in recognizing the familiar more than in heart-stopping surprises. Novels are much more prone yet also kinder to mistakes; they can survive bad chapters, immemorable characters, narrative dead ends, and silly dialogue. Like life. All this reminded me of a similar though more fateful choice that confronted the hot-blooded Achilles: did he want a short, glorious life or a long, uneventful one? Time has taken that choice out the hands of many of us (“Goodbye, early death,” as a poem by my friend Ricky de Ungria puts it) but the “what-ifs,” as ever, amuse and sometimes torment us. And we weren’t even thinking about getting into Oxford. + + + Let me share a snippet from the lecture of this year’s Nobel Prize laureate for literature, the French-Mauritian novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whom I must admit I’d never heard of before. You can read the full lecture, titled “In the forest of paradoxes,” here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2008/clezio-lecture_en.html. “Culture on a global scale concerns us all. But it is above all the responsibility of readers—of publishers, in other words. True, it is unjust that an Indian from the far north of Canada, if he wishes to be heard, must write in the language of the conquerors—in French, or in English. True, it is an illusion to expect that the Creole language of Mauritius or the West Indies might be heard as easily around the world as the five or six languages that reign today as absolute monarchs over the media. But if, through translation, their voices can be heard, then something new is happening, a cause for optimism. Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw—and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular—is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages—which are often clearly in the majority—would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.” Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.