The Best Books Reveal How People Think
The Summer Before the War tells a story that takes place in “The town of Rye . . .” (first line of the novel), a real place in the county of Sussex, England. Carefully researched, the idyllic coastal region contrasts not only the losses of WWI (World War I), but chronicles the end of an era––or rather the beginning of the end of an era––where class distinction slowly disintegrates under the weight of its own hubris.
“Here’s to taking the future at a run.”
Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War, Acknowledgements
The above quote is the last statement in the author’s note to recognize the contributions of others who made possible her book. This sentence captures the author’s relief and optimism, which at the end of a book about war urges readers to remember the past in order to protect the future.
To honor humanity in every beating, bleeding heart, the author showed the “slow accumulation of sorrows in a long war” and “the thin vein of sorrow that millions would feel down through the years.”[1]
The story also highlighted cultural changes for women. Much like a Jane Austen novel, women, particularly single women, faced rigid societal confines subject to the dictates of men in their lives. A good man was hard to find.
Details of the bloodbath in France reminded me of America’s Civil War. Young men went off to fight in a war they believed would end in a few months, returning soldiers home as heroes. The cemeteries in France attest to the toll of those killed along the Western Front.
The poem “In Flanders Field” describes fields of poppies growing between rows of crosses, graves to mark the tragic loss of life. From 1914–1919, estimates of casualties range from 20–40 million, the 1918 flu pandemic adding to those numbers. [2]
Simonson’s story though is less about the war and more about the people. The individual characters who populate her story hold up a mirror for readers to see pettiness and prejudice and meanness frozen in small-minded characters, while kindness, compassion, and sacrifice in other people combat the rigid self-serving class distinctions observed in that time and place. Love conquers enemies guns and knives cannot.
Shakespeare: Thinking from “the inside out”
The Summer before the War led me to search for a quote by Shakespeare. Instead, I read an article describing how Shakespeare in his plays “possessed an extraordinary ability to understand human thought processes from ‘the inside out.'” [3]
Shakespeare’s characters revealed what they thought by what they said and did.
Isn’t that what good writers do? Tell the story, showing how characters make their way through difficult situations and circumstances, talking to themselves as much as to others?
The best literary writers reveal their character’s thoughts so that readers can think about themselves. To identify with what’s happening, readers can see not only what’s reflected in the story, but also respond to changes in attitude and behavior that they might wish to make. To grow with a character, to learn from his or her thoughts and choices can expand a reader’s universe.
The Universal Language of Literature
What interested me in this article has to do with the deconstruction of literature by “literary theorists.”
“Before literary theory deconstructed how we read books in the 1960s, Shakespeare was thought to speak a universal language. Shakespeare tapped into innate, unchangeable and universal human traits and characteristics that his audiences trans-historically and trans-culturally recognize.”
. . . We [readers] understand the thought processes of thinking through a character’s thought processes. And––in the process––we also come to think about ourselves.”
https://thisviewoflife.com/what-did-shakespeare-understand-about-the-human-mind/
Deconstructionist ideas applied to Shakespeare, the article’s writer says, “came to sweep the field of literary studies, especially in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, there is little surprise that we find a different Shakespeare: no longer universal, no longer unknowable, no longer ‘for all time’ . . . His plays have not endured [these cultural critics claim] through their universality, but have been forced onto us by centuries of cultural imperialism, and policed by various education systems.”
Sound familiar?
One of my professors said often and with sharp wit, “Ancient people were stupid people. Right?”
So along comes “theorists” in the 1980s . . . Good grief, Charlie Brown . . . who sweep the shelves of libraries to plaster their opinions over the words written before these persons had breathed a breath, ever viewed a sunrise or sunset, to deconstruct, i.e. tear apart timeless works someone else had written.
UGH! No wonder we find ourselves in a cauldron of academic confusion and complexity, where deconstructionists exalt their own minds, place confidence in their thinking processes and opinions so that contemporary critiques displace literature.
This same mindset could apply to reading the Bible when academics, theologians, preachers and critics impose their own cultural and moral bias opposed to universal truths the Bible reveals.
Like literary theorists, men attempt to deconstruct the Bible, which amounts to believing the same lie in Genesis the serpent put to Eve in the Garden of Eden––”You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
All the great themes of Western literature trace their source to the Bible. Even those writers who refuse to believe in God stumble over biblical principles and end up serving God’s purposes.
God shows through the stories in the Bible how people think, or fail to think, complicating their lives through thought processes at work from “the inside out.”
For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
Proverbs 23:7
Good writing shows through the process of a character’s thinking what leads that character to act.
Shakespeare and Helen Simonson both exhibited through their writing good understanding of how people think.
[1] The Summer Before the War, 471, 464
[2] timeline of 1918 Flu Pandemic https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pandemic-timeline-1918.htm; https://www.army.mil/article/210420/worldwide_flu_outbreak_killed_45000_american_soldiers_during_world_war_i
[3] thisviewoflife.com