20141103.0600

Unusually, I woke from a dream this morning.

In it, my wife and I were flying somewhere, and I had forgotten something. I left the secured area at our connecting airport, rented a car, and drove to where I knew I could get it--the town in which I grew up, which I reached in the dark and rain of a Friday evening. I drove by the county courthouse and saw preparations underway for an event I know goes on many months' last Saturdays, and I ended up parking the car and slogging ahead on foot. The event operators called out to me, and I ignored them, pressing on, until I saw sheriff's deputies arrive. Then I ran back to the car I had rented, which the event operators were having the deputies search; I made to intervene and was grabbed by a stereotypical caricature of a cop--in uniform with mirrored sunglasses and a moustache modeled after those of Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott. Then I woke--three minutes before my alarm was set to go off.

I will not again belabor the point of the oddness of my recalling that I dream or what I dream. And I will not seek to explicate today's dream, at least not today. (I rather suspect that it indicates a boundedness to my life and perceptions that I am uncomfortable approaching.) What I will do instead is note that the dream and its oddity point up the intrusions of the absurd into perception. Were I to include such a passage as narration in the main text of a story rather than framing it as events dreamt, I would be derided (and rightly so) as throwing together words in random sequence, as imposing nonsense upon a story. I might be lauded for working to connect the disjunction of insanity to sanity, but only by few, and those quietly. (I might note, now that I think on it, that the geography of the dream does not correspond with the geography of the events; I was not flying through either of the airports that can be reached easily from my childhood home.) It violates rules of sense and customs of narration that have grown up for centuries, and while adherence to tradition is not itself necessarily a promise of quality, it does lend itself to attracting the attention necessary to prove quality.

It is the kind of thing I have been having to discuss with students in my literature class: what makes literature good? Mostly, I have been fighting against the student tendency towards surface-level relativism, the conceit that "Literature is what you make of it" used as a way to excuse a failure to engage with text on its terms and wrestle meaning from it. There is some truth in the base assertion, of course; as art, literature will work variously on various people. But that does not mean that it is not to be examined--and that does not mean that the examinations which yield less-than-optimal results should be ignored. Nor does it mean that the matter is closed...