translate this to persian:
Everywhere Is Just One Place
LET’S SAY YOU’VE HAD your great insight on the human condition. It’s about the desire for peace or
happiness or tomato soup. Something major, anyway. You want to reach the largest possible audience, but
PBS won’t give you a special. So you decide to write a novel to, you know, tell everybody a universal truth.
Stop! Can’t be done. In the world of the novel, the universal doesn’t have a zip code. If you want to write
about everywhere, you’ll have to stick to just one place. There are some medieval plays about the human
condition, with names like Everyman and Mankind. Their heroes, whose names are the titles, are earnest
representatives of us all—bland, generic, indistinguishable, and undistinguished. There’s a reason Stratford,
Ontario, has a summer Shakespeare Festival and not a Medieval Morality Play Festival.
There’s only one novel with any staying power that is overtly about a
generic figure: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). That’s short for
The Pilgrim’s Progress from the World to That Which Is to Come, just so there’s
no mistaking the didactic intent of the work. It details the journey of its hero,
Christian, toward a place called the Celestial City. He’s helped on his way by
characters called Evangelist and, well, Help, and impeded by Mr. Worldly
Wiseman, Obstinate, Pliable, and Hypocrisy, among others. You get the drift.
The problem, from a reader’s perspective, is that it’s an allegory. These aren’t
characters or places but types, and not very interesting types, either. The names
have had more lasting appeal than the things or persons to which they’re
attached: Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond, Doubter’s Castle, Giant Despair.
As allegory, I suppose it does what Bunyan wanted it to do. As a novel, it just
doesn’t get it. The characters lack depth or complexity, so the achievement of the
journey and the places and people encountered are the only points of genuine
interest. If you want tales of individual humans wrestling with their faith and
with issues of right and wrong, you’ll find much more satisfying reading in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) or The Scarlet
Letter (1850). Hawthorne sometimes veers perilously close to allegory, but his
people feel like real humans rather than cardboard cutouts, his ethical dilemmas
genuinely troubling.
And there’s the trouble with allegory: dull, stiff, two-dimensional. The
allegorist means well, and he doesn’t want us to miss the point. The point,
however, is usually all there is. The novel needs to be more dynamic if it wants
to engage our attention and our emotions. It needs to present characters as rich
and complex as those we believe ourselves to be, and they need to struggle with
problems worth their effort—and ours. This richness, complexity, and
individuation is what the novel’s best at. Yet novelists do sometimes want to
write about “the human condition” or “the problem of the past” or any number of
vexatious big themes. So, then, what to do?
First of all, get a handle on the problem. Understand the twin, sometimes
opposing, pulls of the local and the general. Here’s the Law of Universal
Specificity: You can’t write about everywhere or everyone, only about one
person or one place. If you want to write about everybody, start with one person,
in one place, doing one real thing. Bellow’s Augie March, now there’s a guy—
American, hustling, morally suspect, energetic, hopeful, a little out of control at
times. Representative? You bet. But individuated, not quite like anybody else.
You want to show the disillusionment and loss of World War I veterans? Jake
Barnes. You want a place that stands for everyplace? Joyce’s Dublin. Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha. Erdrich’s reservation. Bellow’s Chicago. Melville’s ship. If you
get the local and particular right, the universal will take care of itself.
Partly, this is a no-brainer. You can’t describe everywhere. Where would you
begin? How would it look? How many millions of pages is your novel, anyway?
And what does everyone look like? So obviously the novelist can’t go in that
direction and maintain anything like verisimilitude. Beyond that clear-cut
problem, though, lurks a trickier one: how can you convey universality to your
reader? How can you make sure that your characters stand for something like all
of us?