With or Without Feathers
BY KARDELEN KALA (TRIN/I)
kala@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
"Hope is the thing with feathers," wrote Emily Dickinson, a brilliant American poet who was born today (as I write this), December 10, some two hundred years ago. By all accounts, she was a reclusive, eccentric and all-round difficult person. She wrote almost two thousand poems, an incredible number for any poet of quality, but only a handful were published during her lifetime. Her major theme was death, and she wrote obsessively on loose pieces of paper, on the backs of envelopes, on receipts and shopping lists. This made it very difficult to later compile a full collection of her poetry. She also wrote extensive letters to a number of friends. In fact, most of her human interaction was in writing. While she did seek advice on her poetry from several correspondents and literary critics, there's no record of her wanting to be published or gain fame as a poet. Almost no one saw her during the last fifteen years of her life, as she rarely left her house.
So how did we get the chance to read this gifted woman's literary oeuvre? She was published posthumously, and against her will. Before she died, she made her sister promise to destroy her work. Luckily for us, Lavinia was one of those "traitors" who break the promises they make to literary geniuses. Of course she didn't destroy Emily's work - why would she? Max Brod didn't keep his word, and neither did Nabokov's son. Salinger's children won't either. Neither would I. I don't even think the writers themselves believed that the promises would be kept -- they could have simply destroyed the manuscripts themselves if they had wanted to. Maybe they didn't want the responsibility or feared the reaction. I wouldn't know. No one has ever wanted to publish anything I've written. Not that I've written anything worth publishing anyway. All I know is that I'm thankful to all those people who ignored the last wishes of their loved ones, as horrible as this may sound. What these writers didn't know and will never find out can't hurt them, after all, but it may enrich human thought and thus benefit mankind. Culture is cumulative - each person improves on existing works, references them, uses them and respects them. Each new word can be considered a gift to world culture.
Thanks to Lavinia Dickinson, for example, the public was able to get acquainted with Emily Dickinson. Her poetry became famous and widely available. Almost two hundred years later, her influence continues. In the 70s, an equally gifted (and neurotic) American challenged Emily's definition of hope. "How wrong Emily Dickinson was!" he wrote in a short story. "Hope is not 'the thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich." This famously absurd wit, who named his first collection of musings and short stories "Without Feathers," is Woody Allen, one of my favorite directors and comedic writers in the world. He is a great example of the cumulative nature of literature, because he makes active use of everything and everyone that has ever influenced him. He frequently references his Jewish identity (if not beliefs), a result of his upbringing; has alluded to many directors he admires in his cinematic work, describing Ingmar Bergman as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera"; and admitted the great influence Chekhov and Salinger have on his writing style… It is basically possible to create a map of Woody Allen's mind. And he, in his turn, will continue to influence and affect other people's art.
"How does this chain work?" one may ask. What can a spinster from rural Massachusetts, a neurotic New Yorker, filmmakers with vastly different styles, a Russian doctor and a reclusive writer with only a single novel and several short stories to his name possibly have in common? The answer is simpler than the question. To quote Mr. Allen, "I may have different cosmetics, but in the end we're all writing about the same thing. This is the reason why I've never done political films. Because the enduring problems of life are not political; they're existential, they're psychological, and there are no answers to them - certainly no satisfying answers." Whether hope has feathers or not may be disputed, but there is something with feathers going around the world, something that defies definition, and links everyone together. When someone has the talent to exploit it, and improve on it, that person can be the creator of beautiful things. This is one of the very few upsides of being human.