494 Paper

This is my paper for capstone class:

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” writes T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding.” We toss this quote around in class now as if it were meaningless—just something you say in certain situations. So it goes. I have, however, found that this quote is very meaningful in the story that is my life.

When we explore, we are interested in something new to us. We invest our time in examining, searching, digging deeper, and completely immersing ourselves in this thing. To me, exploration and education are meant to serve the same purpose. My exploration is my college career. Now, I concern myself primarily with exploring English Literature, but this was not always the case.

When I came out here for school was my first time in Montana. My major concentration was in film. All of my professors were eccentric and quirky. One of them, Walter Metz, would stand in an awkward position with his hand on his chin. He would say, “um” and then he would tell us about intertextuality.

Intertextuality is the relationship between pieces of art that have anything in common. As this was a film class, he usually discussed it in terms of film. Say, for instance, that someone liked Happy Gilmore with Adam Sandler. He would probably like The Waterboy, too. They are basically the same movie. Anything else with Adam Sandler that he saw thereafter would remind him of these films and affect the way he thinks about the new film. Sometimes Metz’s ideas about intertextuality were reasonable, like with Adam Sandler movies. Another time he compared Greek mythology to an episode of South Park. Looking back, I think I agree with him. But other times these connections he made were ostensibly more loosely based. He told us that Gilligan’s Island was the same as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He said that while Gilligan gives us crude humor, Shakespeare gives us both eschatological content and that which challenges and stimulates our minds on a higher level. We watched clips of Gilligan and film adaptations of The Tempest to justify his claims.

We read Hamlet and watched two adaptations—Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s. Having read the play, I knew that Shakespeare’s original was much longer than either film. In order to condense the text, the directors removed many scenes. Because Olivier’s adaptation investigates the psychological tolls taken on Hamlet caused by his options of taking revenge or forgiving his uncle and Kozintsev’s examines the political workings constituent in the play, the directors removed almost exactly the opposite scenes. That is, almost all scenes in Olivier’s Hamlet do not appear in Kozintsev’s Гамлет and vice versa. For this reason, without a crippling obsession with intertextuality, which is to say, to most freshman film students, these were two totally unrelated films that just happened to fit into Metz’s category of the mentally rousing.

Around the same time, however, I came to my own conclusions about intertextuality. In Paul Monaco’s class, The History of Film in America, we watched Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. I had seen the film once as a child because it is my father’s favorite movie, but I could not remember it well. When Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, told Sam to play “As Time Goes By,” though, I remembered it fully, but not because I remembered Casablanca per se. Rather, I remembered a snowboard comedy called Out Cold with a similar scene where a girl wants Sam’s counterpart to play a song from a jukebox. It was during that scene that I had two epiphanies. First, I realized that these movies had the same plot, the differences were only that in Out Cold, the characters had snowboards, Rick hangs out in El Matador instead of Rick’s Café Americain, and the major was no longer in the military: instead he had been renamed as Mr. Majors and had performed not martial but sexual conquests through Europe. Secondly, and more importantly, I realized then that intertextual relationships are just as real as Professor Metz believed—that certainly all texts are related. Without this belief it would be impossible to compare or contrast any works of literature.

Imagine Columbus arriving in America and believing himself to be in Asia. The feeling I had was likely similar to his when he realized that his exploring had led him to discover a whole new world. The difference is that Columbus was able to travel from world to world at will. I could no longer return.

When I was in film school, I found that nearly all my electives were in the subjects of philosophy and religious studies. In an introductory religion course, we read texts from major religions around the world. We read bits of the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible to learn about what the followers of Christianity and Judaism believed. When we learned about Hinduism, we read from the Bhagavad-Gita. Because it was only an introductory class, our exploration of the Gita was slight.

Not all my exploration happened in school, though. Perhaps the reason I had such an aversion to Montana was my roommate. Eric was not a bad person. Living with him just made me uncomfortable. He was socially awkward. He had poor hygiene and smelled something like the horses that lived across the street from our dorm room. For several months, I was convinced the only thing he did was play minesweeper. I began reading to distract myself from Eric. After concluding that my textbooks left me unsatisfied, I had a small epiphany. My problem was, never having been a reader, I had no idea what I wanted to read. I did not know what was good. My epiphany was my solution.

It came to me; I went to the bookstore. If I did not know what to read because I did not read, the people who do know what to read are the people who do read. I went to the textbook department in the bookstore and found the English section. These should be the best books, right? I picked out a few with titles I recognized. I also asked people what they were reading for school. Then I found series of what were called ‘classics.’ If books had survived over time, there must be a reason, I figured. Again, I recognized many titles, but now I had read most of the titles I knew. I had moved on. I read all of the classic books I could get my hands on. I read any suggestions I got, and I sought suggestions sedulously. Most of what I read was required reading in upper division literature classes. Sometimes I did not care for a book, but because the purpose behind my reading was to keep occupied, if I stopped reading a book, I would no longer have anything to keep my mind off of Eric, so I persevered through seemingly endless lists of descriptions of fish in varying habitats and how many times Dean Moriarty drives across the country. Despite my frustrations, I fell in love with my reading.

After that year, I realized film was not for me. Soon, in fact, I questioned whether I belonged here at all. I applied to transfer to the College of William and Mary, a prestigious university much nearer to home. I had been taking Arabic classes, and William and Mary has the best foreign language program in Virginia, where I live. Arabic is becoming an increasingly useful tool in today’s world, and I thought it would benefit me to further my exploration in that discipline.

I was waitlisted, but ultimately I was not accepted to William and Mary. I had no choice but to quit my exploration of the Arabic language. I knew I did not want to study filmmaking, but I did not know what I did want to study. I decided that I would explore as many things as I could and eventually I would find not only where I was, but where I was going—little did I know…. I took math courses, psychology courses, anthropology, sign language, stats. I took biology classes on plants and on microorganisms. I took English classes, and I continued to take philosophy, too.

After one of my religion courses, I rejected philosophy as a potential major. Looking in the course catalog, I found I was closest to graduating in English literature. At the end of my junior year, I finally switched out of film.

Maybe English literature is not a perfect fit for me, but I get to explore more deeply the literature I used to enjoy only for its aesthetic value. I am even reading some of the same texts that I encountered back in film. In English, I get to see the texts from an entirely different perspective. In the capstone class, for instance, we read Hamlet and the Bhagavad-Gita. We did not discuss Kozintsev’s use of lighting in the ghost scene like when we watched Гамлет in film class at the start of my exploration, nor was it too important how the Hindu beliefs formed from and influenced neighboring religions and philosophies. Instead our focus was on epiphanic moments and how they function in the texts.

Other times we read books, and I recognize them from films I have seen, like when Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. They have the same relationship that Casablanca had to Out Cold. The Emergent Literature class is even structured on this relationship. There we deal with a number of themes from “highbrow” literature and we see the themes again in the texts’ “lowbrow” counterparts. One of the very last courses in my college career is based on this idea I discovered where I started my exploration those years ago.

One of the themes from Emergent Literature is what we have called “Dulce Domum,” which we have translated as “Home Sweet Home.” The idea here is that of return. The boy in The Alchemist, for example, travels from Spain to the Pyramids of Egypt in search of treasure only to learn that the treasure is buried next to a church in Spain: the very place he began his journey.

In this story, I am the character who returns back where he starts. I traveled through this never-ending cross-reference to return to themes, ideas, texts, concepts, and motifs that I started from at the beginning of my college career. Like the characters in any other work, I, too, have come to see these things in a new way—from new perspectives, with deeper knowledge and understanding. Whether I am watching a movie I swear I have seen before—déjà vu—reading a book for school that I read to ignore my roommate, or even just coming back to Montana to learn, my life is intertextuality, and no one could describe my life better than when Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”