Literature and the Human Condition

By George Vos

Language is one of the basic human senses, like sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.  Along with our other senses, we use language to perceive reality.  When the writer combines his knowledge of the human condition with his imagination and language skills he creates a specific and unique reality; we call this reality “literature.”  When we read literature our language sense enables us to enter the writer’s reality and learn from him; we improve of our own reality, starting with a better understanding of the human condition.  To put is more simply, literature edifies and improves us.  This essay will focus on three examples of literature and how they teach us about different facets of the human condition: misperception in “The Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri; alienation in “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” by Lorrie Moore; and the meaning of life in “The School” by Donald Barthelme.

Misperceptions abound in “The Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s tale of the Das family’s India tourist jaunt with Mr. Kapasi as their guide.  These misperceptions stem from boredom and loneliness, self-deception and the deception of others, and most important, not seeing someone as who they really are.  Lahiri skillfully builds a ladder of misperceptions toward the story’s climax.  Mrs. Das, the mother in the tourist family, is of Indian descent; Mr. Kapasi sees her differently than other Americans he has worked for; to him her revealing western clothing and casual manners are a sexual come-on.  Mrs. Das, disinterested in her family and bored with life, talks to Kapasi to relieve her ennui; he sees this as the start of a relationship.  Mrs. Das learns Kapasi interprets patient’s complaints of illness for a doctor who doesn’t know the local language.  She thinks he is a healer, which he is not.  Mrs. Das, trying to relieve her anguish from living with deception, tells Kapasi a terrible secret; one of her children was fathered by a family friend.  When she requests succor from her pain he asks, “Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?”(Lahiri 202).  Kapasi’s truthful words erase their misperceptions.  She sees that he is not a healer.  He realizes he not her friend, but just a driver and she remembers how to be a mother and wife.  The author’s wisdom and advice on the human condition in “The Interpreter of Maladies” can be summed up with two phrases: to thine own self be true; and be true to others as others would be true to you.

Alienation has poignant consequences for Ginnie, the protagonist in “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” by Lorrie Moore.  She stops loving a man because she believes she cannot trust her affections.  She never marries and her adult life is consumed with caring for her ailing mother.  She feels isolated, and seems unable to have a regular social conversation.  While riding on the bus she stares at children, but looks out the window when their mothers look back at her.  When her mother dies Ginnie’s alienation intensifies to the point where she sits alone in her apartment talking to her refrigerator.  Moore reverses the chronology of this cautionary tale so one first reads about Ginnie’s sad state.  As one reads back through her life one sees when Ginnie could have helped herself.  After emotional setbacks she should have learned to trust herself again.  When her mother became ill she should have found an alternative to giving up her life for her mother’s care.  These roads not taken should have changed the story’s first paragraph.  What “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” says about the human condition is that tragic endings are not inevitable and choices made along the way can shape the future.

Donald Barthelme wrote “The School,” in the first person, so it feels more personal than the other stories.  The narrator is a teacher, as was Barthelme.  In the prelude of this meditation on the meaning of life the narrator and his class are surrounded by death.  First the plants and animals die, then parents, grandparents and children die; the narrator calls it a run of bad luck.  This tsunami of mortality is the genesis of a metaphysical discussion in his classroom; the students ask where dead beings go after they die.  Barthelme creates a catechism between the teacher and students to explain: he doesn’t know what happens after death; he believes life gives meaning to life; he understands death is a fundamental part of life but it is still terrible; he sees value to life everywhere that transcends the fear of death.  The story ends on a note of hope.  Barthelme’s “The School” is a beautiful, life-affirming statement. 

Although Lahiri, Moore and Barthelme say different things, with characters that are unlike each other, and in a wide variety of settings, the stories share something very powerful.   Each story transports the reader into its reality and teaches him something meaningful.  Taken together, they say: be true to yourself and others; make positive choices; and understand that life has meaning.  If literature helps one better understand the human condition then all three stories are very good literature.