Ancient Text With Modern Text

Ancient Text With Modern Text Because written literature is capable of being transmitted from the person who wrote it across generations, it acquires the status of communal wisdom simply by being recorded. Yet there are limitations to the applicability of such stories, and to a certain degree wisdom consists in knowing that there are limitations to the theoretical knowledge one can acquire in this way, or human error can misinterpret the text.

I would like to look at the way in which three texts -- one ancient (by Rumi) and two modern (by Siije and Soyinka) -- offer wisdom at the same time that they suggest limits to our own knowledge, and limits to the applicability of any such wisdom. The poems of Rumi, by virtue of their age, seem almost to define the way by which wisdom can be transmitted in literature, but also can acknowledge its own limits.

One particular lyric from The Essential Rumi encapsulates this paradox nicely, and I would like to examine it more closely. The lyric in question reads as follows: This piece of food cannot be eaten, nor this bit of wisdom found by looking. There is a secret core in everyone not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. (Rumi 72) This seems to be in the same basic genre as the Old Testament's Book of Ecclesiastes: a work of wisdom literature that specifically warns against overreliance on such wisdom literature.

The central metaphor to this epigram compares the "bit of wisdom" that cannot be "found by looking" to a "piece of food" that "cannot be eaten." This suggests a whole wealth of associations -- particularly to religious food prohibitions, such as those in the Old Testament and indeed the Koran. Anthropologists have yet to discover a human culture which eats every available source of protein in its environment: the food prohibitions that are familiar to westerners through religion are universal through cultures everywhere.

To a certain degree, the inaccessibility of wisdom here is troped as the inaccessibility of prohibited food, or possibly spoiled food. The basic purpose of the verse, though, is to set limits to the reader's attempt to find meaning: it warns us that even an angelic intelligence like that of Gabriel is capable of comprehending any person in full.

Coming down to modern times, we can see two examples from contemporary world literature in which this same topos, in which a work of wisdom literature warns of over-reliance upon its tenets at the same time that it offers its own applicability, playing out differently in modern adaptation.

Both Siije's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman dramatize twentieth-century scenarios: Siije's novel takes place during Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in China in the later twentieth century, and Soyinka's ritual drama takes place during the British colonial occupation of Nigeria. Yet to a certain degree each writer incorporates the techniques of wisdom literature in order to demarcate limits to the way in which readers may actually apply such wisdom.

We may see this very clearly in Siije's novel, which is (to a certain extent) a novel about the construction and the reading of stories. The novel's narrator will say relatively early in the work that "The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it.

Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers -- more's the pity" (Siije 18).

This already raises questions in the reader's mind about the value of such storytelling: the narrator concedes it is "pleasing" (which defines literature as a form of entertainment or escapism) but there is faint irony in his sense that "modern man has moved beyond." What is the person reading that sentence for the first time to then think of Siije's novel? It is a modest way of asking the reader to understand what it is that is customarily found in stories, especially the oral tradition.

The narrator will later note that, when he first reads the Balzac novel that plays such a large role in the plot here, he is encountering it after reading "nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life" (Siije 57).

This taps into the paradox of overreliance on wisdom literature, and when reading for wisdom becomes its own sort of follow: Chairman Mao of course published his own Little Red Book, which contained gnomic poetic observations not unlike Rumi, but which was used as part of a totalitarian reeducation structure. "Propaganda" is, of course, a form a written communication which aims to have a specific behavioral effect upon its reader.

How is a work of literature different? Or if a work of literature has no palpable designs upon its reader, how can it hope to have any effect in competition against propaganda that does? The great irony of Siije's novel is that the narrator takes his Balzac novel, which he understands as nothing more than a desire to tell a story for its own sake, and decides to use it the way Mao used his Little Red Book: "With these books I shall transform the Little Seamstress.

She'll never be a simple mountain girl again" (p. 100). The transformation succeeds, which suggests that virtually any sort of work can be used for propaganda: the irony is that the seamstress escapes from the narrator and goes on to live (the reader hopes) a fuller life. In other words, Balzac did provide some wisdom -- but it did not benefit the narrator, who instead learns the same lesson that Mao did, about the ability to find contradictory meanings even in the most tendentious forms of instruction.

Siije's work does not match up to the expectations of Maoist educators or reeducators, as surely as his narrator's intentions in teaching Balzac to the seamstress are in one sense gratified, but in another sense wholly frustrated. This is a novelistic form of irony, but there are different rules in drama, where there is no strong narrator to guide a reader's interpretation.

Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman uses transmitted wisdom literature -- although in this case it is oral wisdom contained in Yoruba proverbs -- instead to define society within the drama. Of course any drama -- which requires multiple actors, and is performed in front of an audience -- is in itself a little microcosm of society. To some extent an audience assembles in judgment, like a jury. The difficulty here is that Death and the King's Horseman dramatizes a clash of societies, between.