Books and Identity
What book has formed you above any other? A version of this question was put to me by C— some 8 months ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Not the least because I did not have an answer. There were a number of worthy candidates and this blog is named after one of them. Note however that this question has nothing to do with the practice of asking what one’s favourite book is. The question of formation gets at the very core of one’s identity. When Florence Welch was asked the same question she offered the perfect candidate: the first one.
In my appropriately sepia-toned memory its a misty morning around 1995. My mother and I are crossing a deserted town square on the way home and are passing by a bookstall. In a moment, to her surprise, I’m going to ask her to buy me a Bible. It wasn’t my first book. Mom has been a really good sport about reading to me ever since I was born, but those were her choices. This was the first time I have asked for a book – the very first instance of literary curiosity. It was supposed to be the most important book to have ever been written. It was going to teach me everything I would ever need to know. It didn’t of course. Even if I could understand it, then and now, it would still be too much to ask of any book.
I envy the sheer brilliance and profound weight of Welch’s answer but I’d be lying if I claimed that my love affair with books began in childhood. Don’t get me wrong, I liked reading. I mean, it was fine. But have you ever played Mario Kart?
My fascination with literature began much later on. As I started reading myself, my attention shifted from books to people who wrote them. Writers - the wise sages who not only held eternal truths but, more importantly, had the means to communicate them. Art is a mode of communication and one of the the central question of all communication is not ‘What is being said?’ but ‘Why is it being said?’. You see, for most part, art comes to us without context. Its why we have such polarising responses to art – you either get it or you don’t. Which is to say that you are either able to glimpse/create a context or not. Every artist wants to say something through their work whatever their medium. It is that relationship between the art and the artist that I find most intriguing.
Salinger wrote first few chapters of Catcher in the Rye just before his unit was shipped off to Europe. Early pages of Catcher in the Rye travelled in his breast pocket throughout WWII – they have stormed beaches of Normandy on the D-day and witnessed horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Salinger saw more WWII action than perhaps any other american writer. Yet, unlike them, he came back to write a book about a 16-year old boy walking around New York, obsessing over ducks in the pond. That was his way of coming to terms with scars that war has awarded him.
This singular decision makes the phantom of Salinger the second, if not the first, most interesting character in the book. Because Holden is not really obsessing over ducks, he is trying to find some small measure of assurance that he is going to be okay. Later on, having glimpsed what is on the other side, he feels his own innocence slipping away and wants nothing more than to stand in the field of rye and protect the children from going over the edge, to prolong their innocence for as long as possible.
Contrast this vision of innocent children playing in the field with another work inspired by WWII – Lord of the Flies. About his experience of the war, William Golding wrote: ‘Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man… Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.’ This personal belief in the innate evil permeates much of the book as the children of his imagination descend into blood lust and murder. For Golding, face of humanity was evil whatever its age.
Identity is formed in opposition and, though I may not subscribe to Golding’s views, understanding of his perception of innate evil and innocence was critical to the development of my own views. His views in turn find origin in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Whether your own views lie closer to Hobbes or Rousseau, it is hard to appreciate one without the other. The entire body of literature is interconnected and closes in on itself.
Giving credit to forebears, Newton wrote: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants’. This is all to say that I cannot pinpoint the book that has formed me the most for I too stand on the shoulders of giants; and mine are doing much more heavy lifting than Newton's. Diminish the value of any one, and I’ll see infinitely less.