The Holy Grail of Exams

I am so glad that my exams are over. The english lit exams, i have noticed, tend to test you on a number of different levels. You have to go through the views of about a thousand critics for a work about which you have formed your own strong opinions. And besides, there is the constantly nagging need to excel in the exams. And when i say 'excel', i mean that you need to put what the examiner might make of your answers above what you really think about the works that you have studied.

Of course, I made some great discoveries regarding the masterpieces that were listed in my course. For example, I came to know that Sir Phillip Sidney's name might have been the inspiration for the character of Phillip Pirrip (nicknamed Pip) in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Also, that the name of the heroine in that novel, i.e., Estella might have been derived from the title of the sonnets by Sidney named Astrophel and Stella.

I had the chance to acquaint myself with the passionate and almost spiritual love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights. These two, though they could not unite in holy matrimony, could never imagine being apart from one another and thought that their separation in life or death was 'impracticable'. Catherine tells the narrator Nellie in the novel, "Nellie, I am Heathcliff. He is always, always in my mind. Not as a pleasure anymore than I am a pleasure to myself but as my own being. So, don't talk of our separation again, it is impracticable". The character of Heathcliff in the novel is perhaps more grand in his range of action than the Shakespearean Caesar from the play Antony and Cleopatra. His ability to love and hate with an equal amount of ferocity is almost inhuman. After Catherine has died, he has the sexton dig up her grave to catch one glimpse of her and then he hugs the dead reamains of her body to his disquieted bosom. Perhaps for these two insane lovers, the words 'let go' were never invented. Which is why, perhaps, we are still talking about them.

I was charmed by the writings of Miss Jane Austen. Her novel 'Pride and Prejudice' was eloquent from start to finish and shone like silver pearls in terms of its compactness of plot and the flow of its fashionable dialogues. I was infinitely baffled when i read the likes of Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Bronte shower with thunder and storm their scathy criticism of this book. Virginia Woolf said, “Whatever ‘Bloomsbury’ may think of Jane Austen, she is not by any means one of my favourites. I’d give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontës wrote—if my reason did not compel me to see that she is a magnificent artist.” I could add, at this point, the comments made by Mark Twain and Charlotte Bronte on her work as well but suffice it to say that it wasn't exactly kind.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad remained as ambiguous as ever and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding was demonstrative of how lax a moral system was followed in the Britain of the mid 18th Century. I wonder if we are morally ahead of them or not.

The findings of the linguists like Noam Chomsky on internal grammar and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which propounds that language comes before thought was incredible too. And the fact that the origins of language have yet not been definitively discovered adds to the mystery of the world we live in. 

Well, I am happy that the exams are finally over. And I can, for some time at least, set the ghosts of literature past aside. Or can I, really?