Wisdom and Its Limits in Rumi, Sijie, and Soyinka

Introduction: Literature, Wisdom, and Its Limits

Because written literature is capable of being transmitted from its author across generations, it acquires the status of communal wisdom simply by being recorded. Yet there are limitations to the applicability of such stories, and wisdom consists in part in knowing that there are limits to the theoretical knowledge one can acquire in this way — or that human error can misinterpret the text. This essay examines three texts — one ancient (by Rumi) and two modern (by Sijie and Soyinka) — each of which offers wisdom while simultaneously suggesting limits to our own knowledge and to the applicability of any such wisdom.

Rumi and the Paradox of Wisdom Literature

The poems of Rumi, by virtue of their age, seem almost to define the way wisdom can be transmitted through literature while also acknowledging its own limits. One particular lyric from The Essential Rumi encapsulates this paradox nicely. The lyric 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 lyric belongs to the same basic genre as the Old Testament's Book of Ecclesiastes: wisdom literature that specifically warns against overreliance on such wisdom literature. The central metaphor compares the "bit of wisdom" that cannot be "found by looking" to a "piece of food" that "cannot be eaten." This suggestion carries a wealth of associations — particularly to religious food prohibitions such as those in the Old Testament and in the Quran. Anthropologists have yet to discover a human culture that eats every available source of protein in its environment; the food prohibitions familiar to Westerners through religion are, in fact, universal across cultures. To a certain degree, the inaccessibility of wisdom here is figured as the inaccessibility of prohibited or spoiled food. The basic purpose of the verse is to set limits on the reader's attempt to find meaning: it warns us that even an angelic intelligence like Gabriel's is incapable of comprehending any person in full.

Sijie's Novel and the Ironies of Storytelling

Moving to modern times, we can see two examples from contemporary world literature in which this same topos — a work of wisdom literature warning against overreliance on its own tenets while still offering its own applicability — plays out differently in modern adaptation. Both Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman dramatize twentieth-century scenarios: Sijie's novel takes place during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution in China, 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 Sijie's novel, which is, to a certain extent, a novel about the construction and the reading of stories. The narrator states 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" (Sijie 18). This already raises questions about the value of storytelling: the narrator concedes it is "pleasing" — defining 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 reader encountering that sentence for the first time supposed to think of Sijie's novel? It is a modest way of asking the reader to reflect on what is customarily found in stories, especially in the oral tradition.

The narrator later notes that, when he first reads the Balzac novel that plays such a large role in the plot, he is encountering it after having read "nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life" (Sijie 57). This taps into the paradox of overreliance on wisdom literature: when reading for wisdom becomes its own kind of folly. Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, of course, contained gnomic poetic observations not unlike Rumi's, but it was used as part of a totalitarian reeducation structure. Propaganda is a form of written communication that aims to produce a specific behavioral effect in its reader. How is a work of literature different? And if a work of literature makes no palpable demands upon its reader, how can it hope to have any effect in competition against propaganda that does?

The great irony of Sijie's novel is that the narrator takes his Balzac novel — which he understands as nothing more than a story told 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 kind of work can be used for propaganda. Yet the deeper irony is that the seamstress escapes from the narrator and goes on to live, the reader hopes, a fuller life. Balzac did provide some wisdom — but it did not benefit the narrator, who instead learns the same lesson Mao did: that contradictory meanings can be found even in the most tendentious forms of instruction. Sijie's work does not conform to the expectations of Maoist educators, just as the narrator's intentions in teaching Balzac to the seamstress are, in one sense, gratified but, in another, wholly frustrated.

Conclusion

Soyinka's proverbs point in the same direction as Rumi's original example: they indicate that there are limits to the sort of knowledge that can be acquired from instruction, because some forms of wisdom are innate. Across three culturally and historically distinct works — Rumi's medieval Persian lyric, Sijie's Chinese novel of the Cultural Revolution, and Soyinka's Yoruba ritual drama — the same topos recurs: wisdom literature that interrogates its own authority and reminds its readers that no text, however ancient or authoritative, can fully substitute for the knowledge that lies beyond the reach of instruction.

Works Cited

Rumi, Jalal al-Din. The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition. Translated by Coleman Barks. New York: Harper-Collins, 2004.

Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. New York: Norton, 2002.