Ancient Text With Modern Text Essay

Download this Essay in word format (.doc)


Excerpt from Essay:

Ancient Text With Modern Text

Because written literature is capable of being transmitted from the person who wrote it across generations, it acquires the status of communal wisdom simply by being recorded. Yet there are limitations to the applicability of such stories, and to a certain degree wisdom consists in knowing that there are limitations to the theoretical knowledge one can acquire in this way, or human error can misinterpret the text. I would like to look at the way in which three texts -- one ancient (by Rumi) and two modern (by Siije and Soyinka) -- offer wisdom at the same time that they suggest limits to our own knowledge, and limits to the applicability of any such wisdom.

The poems of Rumi, by virtue of their age, seem almost to define the way by which wisdom can be transmitted in literature, but also can acknowledge its own limits. One particular lyric from The Essential Rumi encapsulates this paradox nicely, and I would like to examine it more closely. The lyric in question reads as follows:

This piece of food cannot be eaten, nor this bit of wisdom found by looking.

There is a secret core in everyone not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. (Rumi 72)

This seems to be in the same basic genre as the Old Testament's Book of Ecclesiastes: a work of wisdom literature that specifically warns against overreliance on such wisdom literature. The central metaphor to this epigram compares the "bit of wisdom" that cannot be "found by looking" to a "piece of food" that "cannot be eaten." This suggests a whole wealth of associations -- particularly to religious food prohibitions, such as those in the Old Testament and indeed the Koran. Anthropologists have yet to discover a human culture which eats every available source of protein in its environment: the food prohibitions that are familiar to westerners through religion are universal through cultures everywhere. To a certain degree, the inaccessibility of wisdom here is troped as the inaccessibility of prohibited food, or possibly spoiled food. The basic purpose of the verse, though, is to set limits to the reader's attempt to find meaning: it warns us that even an angelic intelligence like that of Gabriel is capable of comprehending any person in full.

Coming down to modern times, we can see two examples from contemporary world literature in which this same topos, in which a work of wisdom literature warns of over-reliance upon its tenets at the same time that it offers its own applicability, playing out differently in modern adaptation. Both Siije's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman dramatize twentieth-century scenarios: Siije's novel takes place during Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in China in the later twentieth century, and Soyinka's ritual drama takes place during the British colonial occupation of Nigeria. Yet to a certain degree each writer incorporates the techniques of wisdom literature in order to demarcate limits to the way in which readers may actually apply such wisdom. We may see this very clearly in Siije's novel, which is (to a certain extent) a novel about the construction and the reading of stories. The novel's narrator will say relatively early in the work that "The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers -- more's the pity" (Siije 18). This already raises questions in the reader's mind about the value of such storytelling: the narrator concedes it is "pleasing" (which defines literature as a form of entertainment or escapism) but there is faint irony in his sense that "modern man has moved beyond." What is the person reading that sentence for the first time to then think of Siije's novel? It is a modest way of asking the reader to understand what it is that is customarily found in stories, especially the oral tradition. The narrator will later note that, when he first reads the Balzac novel that plays…[continue]

Cite This Essay:

"Ancient Text With Modern Text" (2011, May 03) Retrieved October 22, 2016, from

"Ancient Text With Modern Text" 03 May 2011. Web.22 October. 2016. <>

"Ancient Text With Modern Text", 03 May 2011, Accessed.22 October. 2016,

Other Documents Pertaining To This Topic

  • Ancient Near Eastern Values in

    The use of physical suffering as a symbol for emotional and spiritual suffering is also well-known in the Western tradition. Centuries later, men and women would disappear into the desert in search of God. They would live apart from all human companionship, and deprive themselves of all physical comfort. Gilgamesh does the same. Gilgamesh is also like the lover who pines away for his beloved and wastes away in

  • Ancient Jewish Weddings in Ancient Jewish Custom

    Ancient Jewish Weddings Weddings in Ancient Jewish Custom There is an example of a wedding feast from the gospel of Luke that is not of the famous Cana Wedding Feast that takes place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, but a gathering in the house of a Pharisee. The Pharisees and scribes invited Jesus there because, as always they were trying to test Him. It was on the Sabbath, and there had

  • Ancient Egyptian History While Attempting

    For the most part, he appears to make the most of the sources of evidence that are existent and available to scholars today to reach his findings regarding aspects of Egyptian communal life. Still, the most convincing aspects of that identity are the external ones that exist in relation to tangible markers of culture. The many illustrations, hieroglyphic text, and analyses of Egyptian architecture allows for some relatively simple

  • Ancient Greece Developed Eastern Side Mediterranean a

    Ancient Greece developed eastern side Mediterranean a series loosely connected City-States. Here seeds modern science. Greek philosophers / scientists, Plato Aristotle (Hellenic Era) wealth devote time study natural phenomena, abstract ideas mathematics, astronomy..ID Ancient Greece: Overview Ancient Greece is often called the cradle of civilization because the city-states of Greece, most notably Athens, gave birth to concepts that still inform modern life, such as the significance of empirical, rationalist science and the

  • Ancient Historians

    Ancient Historians Influential Ancient Historians Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder by Donald R. Kelley In his book, which is written in a scholarly, colorful, and interesting style, and is as rich with thought-provoking questions as it is lean on assumptions, author Kelley goes to great lengths to set the stage for every historian's work that he discusses. On page 3, he says that "the difficulty" in writing about ancient

  • Ancient Israel the Connection Between

    Oddly enough, modern Judeo-Christian teachings overlook the important role that women played in the economic security of their households in the ancient Israel period. In ancient-Israel, households were largely self-sufficient. People did not specialize and trade was not a substantial part of the society. (Meyers, p.143). It seems likely that animals were stabled inside with people, on the first floor of the home, which also had space for other agricultural

  • Ancient Literary Sources How Reliable

    For example, in the United States, the Civil War occurred less than 150 years ago, and yet different historians provide conflicting perspectives about the causes of the war, why it was lost, and the consequences of the war for America's history. Moreover, it was only after the Civil War and the end of slavery that one began to see widespread, reliable publication about various slave rebellions that had occurred

Read Full Essay
Copyright 2016 . All Rights Reserved