For several centuries, however, the emphasis has been shifting from questions of ends to questions of origin. When we seek to explain something, we are no longer likely to ask, “What was the end for which this object has been created?’ but “What was its source?’ To understand something, we tend to want to learn where it has come from and how it works; we think of facts as items to be calculated or explained to help us understand how things have developed.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher identify one sign of our culture’s move away from Christianity: we ask for something’s origin instead of its purpose.
The “origins” move is genealogical. My wife and I joke about how literary theory’s constant dictum is “everything is constructed.” What that discussion tends to obscure is the purpose or end of the cultural practice under examination.
As I put together biographical notes for my upcoming literature classes, it’s far easier to find facts that explain the origins of an author’s work. Jhumpa Lahiri was a Bengali immigrant who had academics as parents and spent a key time of her life in New England. This would go a long way towards explaining where the key elements in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies came from, but it does very little to explain why she wrote the stories in the first place.
In an interview last year, Lahiri commented, “I know that writing is a way of expressing oneself, of communicating. But it’s not made for the reader. Of course there will always be a reader; but when I write I don’t think about that hypothetical person.” Writing, she contended, is “an internal dialogue.” Given the role that interpretation, translation, and just plain old communication play in her collection’s stories, this claim about writing’s purpose can go much further in helping us figure out what her writing is doing than simply providing biographical facts that can be matched one-to-one with details inside the story.
I will take Lundin and Gallagher’s admonition to focus as much if not more on something’s purpose than its origins and will attempt to direct my students to do the same.