The Cycle of the Highlow
“Youth cannot know how age thinks and reels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young” (“Phoenix” 826). While it might be strange to begin an scholarly essay with a quote from Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the quote above draws an important parallel to the huge gap that grows every day in the realm of literary study: “high” vs. “low”, “old” vs. “new”—“vulgar” vs. “transcendent”. The establishment of merit within the literary is a hotly debated topic—a classification scheme which deems what should be read, and what is a waste of time is commonly heralded—“We must read Hamlet, but stay away from that Stephanie Meyer!” When attempting a defense of the “lowbrow”, the rhetorical questions abound—are “low” works derivative? Often. Do they simplify complex ideas and compress the aesthetic to a simple, easily marketable form? Frequently. Are they necessary, even as important, as the “high” literature they are derived from? Absolutely.
A reader might be confused at this point. How is it that a work can be derivative, simple, lacking in aesthetic merit—and valid and important at the same time? This assumption would create much confusion—if the view of literary scholarship is a linear one, in which the starting line is Everybody Poops, and the finish line is Finnegans Wake. Operating under this assumption, it would obviously make sense to jump right to the end of the race and experience the best rewards literature has to offer—rather than wasting time with the quite literal refuse at the beginning. It is likely true that a great majority of “lowbrow” works that are widely read today are quite generational and will fade away, never to be seen again; and, when they have gone, more will spring up to fill the place they have vacated. Perhaps it is in light of this that works of “lowbrow” literature are often shunted to the side, as something of not great importance. Yet a reader does a great disservice to himself/herself when they forget that “lowbrow” literature is a portal, not a road or a race, to greater and more “intellectually stimulating” works—a portal that travels both ways—cyclically, rather than straight to the end—as T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets wisely shares: “In my beginning is my end” (Eliot 23.1). Applying Eliot’s wisdom, we must travel down multiple rabbit holes, experience many different stories, so we may appreciate all—rather than being confined to pure academia, or childish fancy.
It is easy to say this, but does evidence exist to back this claim? The answer to this question lies in examinations of “high” and “low” narratives of chaotic plerosis, ordered kenosis, and the Nabokovian “mysterious mental meneuver” required to create a synergy between both. The deep connection between plerosis and kenosis is no different than the connection of “high” to “low”, they depend on one another. It is through this thesis that the conventions of “high” and “low” are challenged, reminding the reader and potential scholar that one does not grow to become an adult by forgetting what is is to be full, nor can they remain an unemptied cup forever.
“As language approaches either order or disorder, it fails; yet language is most interesting at these points of failure…the movement towards disorder I call plerosis, meaning to fill, or more accurately here, overfill” (Peer 38). This language, and the literatures that follow it, are an attempt to present an audience with ideas and concepts that are fantastical in nature, and if the most simple and easy term were to be used to describe what literatures of plerosis are, it would be love. For what is love but “warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion” (Miriam), a chaotic vortex of emotion? The attachment to worldly ideas and concepts is the essence of plerosis, and the “filling” this creates is a direct parallel to its dark “emptying” sibling, kenosis. Plerosis in literature is the written expressions of this love—this chaos—and its expression through love of others, love of the physical form, and love of the mind.
The love of other physical beings and forms is at the heart of plerosis of others, embodied in literature by none other than Theodore Seuss Geisel, more popularly known as Dr. Seuss. The writer and illustrator of many fantastical rhythmic works that are still enjoyed today by the most often underestimated audiences—children. His simple rhythmic schemes do not contain the complexity and portmanteau of higher literature, but in the context of plerosis of others, his work speaks rich volumes. “A person’s a person, no matter how small!” The elephant Horton shouts, bluntly stating how imperative it is for a human society to exist that values the worth of all human beings—regardless of their physical appearance. Geisel implores audiences to look at groups of people as people, not enemies or dangerous “others”. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (arguably a “highbrow” work) also echoes the themes of Horton Hears a Who, furthering the idea that difference is something often ignored and should be celebrated: “You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There are five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers” (Morrison 40-41). The main character, Milkman, travels on a journey of discovery and ignorance, ultimately realizing that one cannot deny their past, but it shouldn't keep them from flying either. Haroun and the Sea of Stories also celebrates this difference, with the Shadow Warrior showing that “silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly)” (Rushdie 125). It is through this plerotic love of others, requiring both the “high” and the “low”, that a reader begins their journey through literature.
Works of plerosis also attempt to fill the reader with love of the body, and the physical form of existence. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book provides its own wisdom on the subject of death and mortality, the character of Silas advising the main character Nobody (more on that name later) “You’re alive Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name” (Gaiman 179). To which Bod, after a few moments of personal reflection, responds “I want to go to school” (Gaiman 180). Ultimately, it is through knowledge that one enhances the perception of the physical world, and Gaiman realizes this, subtly slipping it into a “children's” book. Conversely, however, it is an easy thing to forget the physical world, and migrate into the realm of the mind, though a person does themselves a great disservice by neglecting experience, and not going “Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden” (Eliot 13 lines 11-13).
One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of works of plerosis is their ability to disconnect the reader from reality, sending them into a world of myth and dream, where the celebration of the plerosis of the mind/imagination occurs. It is only here that the celebration of the human imagination, of storytelling, can occur. Tim Burton’s most underrated film, Big Fish, follows the character of Edward Bloom, his life presented as a series of fantastical stories told to his son, William. William is greatly disillusioned with his father, because he claims to know nothing “true” about him, having only ever been filled with his father’s wonderful, entertaining stories of plerosis. As the film follows William’s disillusionment (more on this later) he and the audience learn that the fictions that Edward created are Edward—that we are unable to divest ourselves from our stories, they are our essence, all we are, a basin that is filled and then slowly emptied. Perhaps the ultimate work of plerosis, Finnegans Wake, is a work that, as John Bishop says, “is one of the easiest books in the world to generalize about” (Joyce xiv). But this romp through a dream, containing everything and nothing, reminding that we are “from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends” (Joyce 455) and that the dream, our dream of imagination and illusion may be that “we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? You may so” (Joyce 597). The final question of course is, if the enjoyment and illusion ofstorytelling was a dream, does that make it less valid? To return to Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” (“Hallows” 723).
“Why are you making everybody die?” asks Alexandria, a young girl in Tarsem Singh’s film The Fall. She asks the fundamental question that lies at the heart of kenosis—the emptying—the movement towards order. The basin that is full must be emptied, reduced to its bare components so true examination can begin. The themes of plerosis (there are many) that are echoed throughout high and low literatures are the fall of the teacher, the failure of language, and the inevitability of death.
The idol must topple for order to exist. In order for her to find her way home, Dorothy must reveal the man behind the curtain, so she can understand what lies within herself. When one is filled with the magic and fantasy of plerosis, the teacher, story, or fable that it arrives in is a chaos that is accepted as truth, it becomes a belief. But it is absolutely necessary that that belief is questioned and challenged so that further intellectual growth can occur. Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “The Lame Shall Enter First” is one of the more telling works about unquestioning faith, and the dire consequences it brings. When the main character realizes that what he believed himself and his son to be is completely wrong, it is too late, realizing that “He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself” (O’Connor 481). The imposed ignorance towards kenosis can destroy a human. While it is one thing for an audience to parrot the words of Morpheus in The Matrix, challenging the nature of reality—but it is quite another to explore the idea of The Matrix being a movie itself, and yet another illusion. Harry Potter’s idol is shattered as well in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when he realizes that his mentor and hero is flawed and human, and can make mistakes. When Harry sees “a tear trickling down Dumbledore’s face into his long silver beard,” he knows that things will not be the same (“Pheonix” 844). It is through this transformation, this reordering of things, that Harry can grow to become a complete human being. Additionally, the reader makes an interesting discovery (foreshadowing the event above, in an oblique way) in the third book in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when Harry is about to kill the man whom he believes killed his father. He doesn't commit murder, separating himself from his metaphorical father/villain Voldemort by choosing to perform a different series of events. This is also reflective of the kenotic movement away from disorder to order.
Following Jacques Derrida’s treatises on deconstruction and the recognition of language as a flawed system that is incapable of fully representing the human mind, Samuel Beckett critically examines the nature of words as an arbitrary concept, The Unnamable exploring the idea of language as a futile system, the main character wanting to do nothing more than stop talking, and inevitably realizing that “I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett 414). It is a common phrase in all literature that “words cannot express my (insert emotion here)” and this is the lower, more easily recognized form of Beckett’s words. It is through the absence of meaning in Beckett’s works that a reader makes the realization that as important, pleasing, and immersive as stories are, they are “such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (Shakespeare 4.1.156-8). The story must ultimately be revealed, the language, like the teacher, must be exposed for what it is, yet another vanity that must fall away.
This fall is what leads into the darkest part of kenosis. It is the final moment, when death becomes a very present force in a life, whether it is the death of the story, death of the physical form, or death of the mind. Death is the illusion, death is what is faced when the explorer in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave arrives and finds “...that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision.” It is when someone finds this clearer vision that Plato takes a great interest, stating, “what will be his reply?” This approach toward the ultimate order, the ultimate certainty, death, can completely destroy an individual—as it does with the villain of the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, who fails “to understand that there are things much worse than death” (“Pheonix” 814).
While the “mysterious mental maneuver” that Nabokov speaks about in his novel Transparent Things likely refers to the difficulty of passing from one state of being to another, the metaphor must be pushed further, to address the concepts of high and low, plerosis and kenosis. This maneuver is not the one of simply reading works, but recognizing that they all depend on one another to contextualize and validate their own existences. The work that explains this concept in a deceptively simple form that transcends both plerosis and kenosis is the children’s book The Giving Tree. This simply illustrated story by Shel Silverstein is about a tree that gives herself piece by piece to a boy that she loves, until nothing remains but a stump. The final pages of the book drive the point home:
“I am sorry,” sighed the tree. “I wish that I could give you something…but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump. I am sorry…” “I don’t need very much now,” said the boy, “just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired.” “Well,” said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, “well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.” And the boy did. And the tree was happy. (Silverstein 48-51)
The tree, and the boy both realize that while life may become empty, there is always room for it to be filled again, and emptyed, forever a cycle. The “mysterious mental maneuver” is not that mysterious after all. It is so simple that it can be “written on the surface of an emerald” (Coelho 83). It is the idea of Tao, that, as Alan Watts says “I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing.” (Alan Watts). The glass might be filled, but it must be emptied eventually. This is the perpetual cycle, the “mysterious mental maneuver”.
Finally, the answer to Alexandria’s question, with a small piece of wisdom from yet another fictional character in Big Fish—“Have you ever heard a joke so many times you've forgotten why it's funny? And then you hear it again and, suddenly, it's new. You remember why you loved it in the first place.” So, why must everyone die? So there can be life. So there is context and meaning to everything, from the lowest of the low, to the highest of the high.
Works Cited
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Big Fish. Dir. Tim Burton. Perf. Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, and Billy Crudup. Columbia Pictures, 2003. Film.
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The Fall. Dir. Tarsem Singh. Perf. Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, and Marcus Wesley. Googly Films, 2006. Film.
