IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

by | Apr 6, 2020 | Alchemy of the Word

I have to begin by admitting to you that today’s commencement address was difficult for me to write. I have labored, not so much with words, but with myself, because since the national election in November of last year and in particular since 20 January of this year, I have felt bouts of disbelief, confusion, fear, powerlessness, and anger: hardly the right state-of-mind to write something that calls upon the speaker to offer hope, inspiration, good cheer, and confirmation of the bright future.

Like you, I’m a devotee of letters and the imagination, of Imaginative Literature, and what I have to offer you, writers poets dreamers storytellers, keepers and people of the word, in addition to my steadfast belief in the human capacity for love, are some thoughts on books and writing and art, for in my loss of what to say to you, and in my great worries about the times we live in, no doubt many years in the making but now firmly upon us as we face the consequences of our creations and of our politics, I returned over the last months to the library to seek in solitude and quiet the wisdom, the beauty, truth and good company of books—my great home since I was a child in Los Angeles, adrift in a world of TV and spectacle and vapidity and a deep unarticulated loneliness and out-of-placeness, where I learned and loved to read and found in literature the wild connections, understanding, and a chorus of voices that spoke to me across time, space, culture, and language, and encouraged and emboldened me then, and continue to do so today. I speak to you, one writer to another, without easy answers in my pocket that might be easily digested or packaged for consumption and as easily forgotten—for ours has always been and remains the work of reflection, complexity, of individual vision set up in deep contemplation of the world and manifested through and via determination, a calling, a love for words and stories, and an abiding hopefulness in the human and non-human — in life — and in what the scholar Henry Corbin called “the Mundus Imaginalis”: the imaginal world. For what really keeps us for years on end in our chairs, at our desks, except a drive which we ourselves cannot perhaps fully understand or even articulate—which the poet Rainer Maria Rilke simply called I must, when asked why write—to create from nothing the some things of literature: stories, poems, memoirs, plays, novels, books.

I returned to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Luther King Jr., Italo Calvino, William Blake, George Orwell and Federico García Lorca, among others, over the last few months, and then only last week to a book whose opening scene was haunting me, to Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s wondrous and hilarious satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a novel about the chaos that ensues when, “one hot spring evening,” Satan arrives in Moscow. The devil, called Professor Woland in the book, is more or less a trickster figure, a “magician,” who brings with him a colorful retinue, including a giant, gun-toting, vodka-drinking talkative black cat, and the group of them wreak havoc on the bureaucrats, venal literary elites, and generally on all whom they encounter, revealing the prevalent greed, vanity, hypocrisy, and gullibility of society.

Bulgakov wrote the novel during the 1930s, one of the darkest periods in Russian history, when Stalin consolidated his power by killing and purging anyone he deemed his enemy, what he called “enemies of state.” Ten to twenty million people were sent to the gulag (the labor camps); one million members of the Communist Party were killed outright; he purged the army of its generals, and most of the Communist Party of its leaders. There were show trials for the so-called traitors who had to admit their guilt publicly; countless artists and intellectuals were blacklisted and lived in fear for their lives. Bulgakov, the most famous playwright of his generation, had all his plays banned by 1929. After that, he was no longer permitted to publish, and worked on his novel for ten years with full understanding that he would never live to see its publication and that if anyone got wind of its existence, it might mean either banishment or death.

Why speak to you today of a dark period in history, of Bulgakov, whom you perhaps have never even heard of; why speak of the Devil? Hold onto the Devil for a moment, we’ll come back to him. As for Bulgakov and his work, I returned to it not only for its hilarity, its stunning achievement as Imaginative Literature, but because I have been thinking a lot, as perhaps you have, as Bulgakov did in his lifetime, about what the artist’s responsibility and duty is in his/her time. What is my responsibility? What is yours? And to add to that: Is art necessary? In Bulgakov’s lifetime, writers were reduced to being mouthpieces of the state, or they were silenced, or worse. What about us? We don’t have strong censorship laws (yet), and for now I don’t see writers being jailed for their writing in the U.S., but I do often wonder if art and literature have been reduced to mere entertainments, have lost their power amidst the hullabaloo of social media, the barrage of news sites, TV shows, movies, and video games that inundate our lives and fill our consciousness. (The average screen time for Americans, by the way, is 74 hours a week). 

Neil Postman, the media theorist, worried about Americans “amusing ourselves to death.” In 1986 he warned: “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”

What ought writers do? 

Bulgakov, when faced with the prison-like conditions of Stalin’s reign of terror closing around his country, wrote his masterpiece in private, for no money or fame. His only wish, according to a note he left in his journal in 1931, was the following: “Lord, help me to finish my novel.” He died in 1940, long before the atrocities became known and condemned by the world. His widow published his book twenty-six years later, and it became and remains until today one of the most popular books in Russia. 

What did Mikhail Bulgakov do in his book?  He left us encoded in this beautifully imagined work of art a great resistance to tyranny through beauty, art, love and laughter: we laugh with the devil and his entourage as they wreak havoc on an absurd, corrupt system. The magic and wonder in the book allow the reader to acknowledge other possibilities outside of a reality of political repression, poverty, and war. 

Part of my response to the times I live in, as I’ve said, is to return to books. To find solitude, quiet, and reread The Master and Margarita and, in this way, to deeply engage with the world. Perhaps we can say that reading is a kind of service, for not only does it increase cognitive power, but it also increases our sympathies, our capacity for understanding ourselves and others; when we read, our consciousness aligns with that of the book, and this has the radical potential for the beautiful expansion of our imagination. 

Or, as Calvino said, “Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of politics; it is like the eye that can see beyond the color spectrum perceived by politics. Simply because of the solitary individualism of his work, the writer may happen to explore areas that no one has explored before, within himself or outside, and to make discoveries that sooner or later turn out to be vital areas of collective awareness.” Calvino himself came of age in a time a dictatorship and war in Italy. 

In addition to reading, what is our duty? To Write. 

Emerson said in his essay “On Poetry”: “Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.’” 

Bulgakov persisted. Calvino persisted. Which is to say, as I always say to my students: Do your work. The joyous, troubling, unsettling, meaningful, mysterious, prophesying and vital work of discovering and writing stories, of mapping human life and consciousness and hopefulness and tragedy, and the invisible world, and of bearing witness to your times in symbolic form, of being an “eye” and an “ear,” and of always saying to the world as the artist does in her way, via her vision, a wild, complex, enthusiastic, life-filled yes!

I think this is our job as writers. We are officiants at the world table of letters, and ours is to add to the great ecology of stories. Not as superficial amusements, although as in Bulgakov’s book, we may very well write the absurd and funny, but not as distractions from the world, rather to enable us to see it more clearly.

Let’s return now to the Devil. In actuality, it’s not he who is the supreme evil in Bulgakov’s novel. There is something else that lurks unspoken in the background: it is the unnamed figure of Josef Stalin and his totalitarian state, which George Orwell allegorizes along with Nazism in his book 1984. This is an evil that is not interested in bringing individuals to awareness, but rather, seeks to shape the reality of the world so that it bears its imprint for its own power and domination. An evil which seeks to normalize its view. To normalize terror. 

Against this normalization, this nihilism? A blacklisted writer in his small flat in Moscow who made meaning, saw patterns, told his story and yelled his “yawp” of the human, the connected, the erotic, the life-affirming, the fantastic and hilarious in his imaginative vision. 

So, my friends, your job: “to sound your barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” as Whitman said in his “Song of Myself.” My great hope for some as yet undetermined future lies in our community of lovers of the Word and devotees of truth and the Imaginal World, where all things are possible, and where the long view of justice is made manifest. What could possibly be greater than you, attending to your work each day, not only for yourself, but also for the wide “us” of this world: the living and the not-yet-born. 

You will struggle, no doubt. And when you do: read more. Write more. Find your solitude. And don’t forget to play and to listen to the trees, the moon, the stars. And remember, as Emerson still exhorts us one hundred and sixty years later in his essay “Self-Reliance,” to, “trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” 

I said at the beginning of this small ramble of mine that there were no easy answers, but let me now contradict myself in the continuing spirit of that wonderful essay: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Here’s one answer, simple and stated in every world religion I am familiar with, in all the old texts, and John Lennon said it, too: Love. “Love is the answer and you know that for sure.” 

Let your heart, your intuition, your imagination be your guide. 

— Delivered Winter, 2017, Port Townsend, Washington

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Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles. She has published five novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the twentieth century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her fifth book, A Brief History of Yes, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2014. A film version of Marcom’s first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, is currently in pre-production with a screenplay by Oscar-nominated writer Jose Rivera, and Shekhar Kepar to direct.

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