Turning Over a New Leaf; or, What Is Literature? By Sheldon Kranz

Everyone has complained of how things are boring and tedious and how we're stuck in a rut.  The fiction of the world, as well as the poetry of every country, says: Look again.  The everyday world that you take for granted and are bored with may be more interesting than you know.  In fact, I will show it to you in such a way that you will find it hugely enjoyable.  I will show you that art can be made out of the ordinary events and people that you despise.

How the everyday is wonderful is described by Eli Siegel in his definition of "Everydayness," from Definitions and Comment, Being a Description of the World. He writes:

Novelists have shown that the ordinary life of people is deeper and more exciting than one knew, not by inventing strange and remarkable events, but by showing people simply as they are in their everyday lives.

A novelist who took the prosaic business man in all his dullness and conformity, and made him into literature, was Sinclair Lewis. In 1922, he gave the world George F. Babbitt, and the world loved him. H.G. Wells, after reading Babbitt, wrote enthusiastically to Sinclair Lewis: "Babbitt is one of the greatest novels I have read for a long time.  He is what is called a 'creation,' but what we really mean is that he is a completely individualized realization of a hitherto elusive type.  He is the common American prosperous business man got. You have got him.  He lives and breathes. . . . He moves about. ..."

Here is George Babbitt, age 46, a prosperous real-estate man of Zenith, a medium-sized city in the Midwest.  The year is 1920.  George has just finished shaving:


Then the critical eye of the author becomes sharper. Babbitt's wife comes into the bathroom:

Reading this in 1922, persons laughed and winced and recognized something of themselves on any morning.  Sinclair Lewis was showing that our dull contempt for familiar details was a mistake. The familiar was alive.

And in the midst of presenting a man lost in conformity and cliches, who talks of Pep, and God's country, and fair return on investments, and Americanism, Lewis shows us another George Babbitt:

So George Babbitt is self-critical, and he becomes deeper. We feel wonder and pity for this bustling real-estate man, even as we criticize him.  Lewis gives him something which is the last thing we would grant Babbitt if we met him: an inner life.

There are greater novels about everyday people than Babbitt--the novels of Balzac, for example--but Sinclair Lewis does show us what we need to know for our own day-by-day lives: that what is real, no matter how prosaic it may seem, is never dull. To see a thing truly, is to see it with pleasure. And to see a thing truly, is to see it as a oneness of opposites.  To see a person as a oneness of surface and depth, humdrum and deep, conventional and unique, as Lewis saw Babbitt, is to give a person life.  Babbitt has life and is evidence for Eli Siegel's statement: "In reality opposites are one; art shows this."


People have complained about things being dull.  But a childhood problem I had that extended into my teens and later, was my fear of the unknown and the new.  To move to a new neighborhood was agony; to go to camp was a nightmare.  Starting a new job would cause my stomach to be in knots.  I did not like the world as remote and different.

While literature shows us that the exciting can be found in the everyday, it also shows us that the expected is within the strange and remote.  That was one of the essential purposes of Romanticism as stated by Wordsworth in his Preface of 1800 to the Lyrical Ballads, and which he and Coleridge exemplified in their poetry. Wordsworth, in a poem like "The Solitary Reaper," showed that there is wonder in the everyday. Coleridge showed in a poem like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," that there was order and even everydayness in the wonderful.

Many writers have shown in poetry and prose, that in the strangeness of reality, one could find good sense and the reasonable.  Sometimes, the way the familiar meets the strange makes for terror.  To have Frankenstein's monster like a real man with human feelings, is much more frightening than if the monster were just some outlandish creature that had no relation to us.

The opening sentence finds the opposites in a wild dance. The sentence starts off so sedately: "There was a table set out under a tree in the front of the house..." And then two realities, as calmly as you please, are mingled: "... and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it; a Dormouse was sitting between them fast asleep and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head." So the world of animals, a huge rabbit, and the world of humans, a man who sells hats, are having tea together and chatting cozily: and between them is a sleepy mouse.

Fantastic things are treated as if they were the most reasonable things in the world, as in the following exchange. I did not know when I laughed over this in college what I was laughing at.  I had a desire for precision and reasonableness in one part of my life; my gaiety and abandon were in another part. The two were aching miles apart. Here, gaiety and precision as well as the strange and the everyday are the exact same thing. My pain was being explained by Carroll, but nobody then could tell me so.
 

So we are in a world where butter is put into a watch to oil it. And what is objected to is not that butter is used, but that crumbs got into the butter because a bread knife was used. Watches are dipped into cups of tea, and most casual of all, watches are used to tell the day of the month, not the time of day. Then Time is the subject of a mad discussion, and again two realities join.