UNDERSTANDING LITERATURE

1. No culture that is genuine 'sells out' to the bourgeoisie, for they are the born enemies of culture in any higher, or religious, sense.

2. Genuine culture is always 'beyond the pale', so to speak, of the bourgeoisie, and hence of the market place; for it is akin to religion in its joyful transcendence of the world.

3. In literary terms philosophy, when genuine, which is to say metaphysical, will most approximate to higher culture, and thus to that which transcends the mundane parameters of, for example, fiction, the economic form of literature par excellence.

4. Philosophy, on the other hand, which is less than genuine, or metaphysical, will either approximate to the world, as in the cases of essays and dialogues, the physical and chemical 'bovaryizations' of philosophy, or to that which prefers to rule over the world, which is to say, to what is furthest removed from genuine philosophy (and culture) in a diabolic alignment, through verse, with metachemistry.

5. In fact, whereas essayistic philosophy is quasi-narrative and dialogistic philosophy quasi-dramatic, the most 'bovaryized' order of philosophy will be quasi-poetic in its verse-like aloofness from the world and antithetical standing, necessarily, to aphorisms.

6. Thus that which is less than genuinely philosophical, or metaphysical, can be so on three different levels - the levels, namely, of verse (like the Bible), of dialogues, and of essays, as approximating to fire, water, and vegetation in what transpires to be diabolic, feminine, and masculine shortfalls from or alternatives to the airy divinity of aphoristic metaphysics.

7. Obviously if metachemical, chemical, and physical approaches to philosophy are less than genuinely philosophical, and hence metaphysical, then that which is not even philosophical but either fictional, theatrical, or poetical, viz. novels, plays, and poems, will be even further removed from genuine literary culture, which is to say, from the most genuinely cultural approach to literature - namely that of philosophy, and in particular that which is both aphoristic and metaphysical.

8. Thus far from being examples of literary culture, in any genuine sense, novels, plays, and poems, or fiction, drama, and poetry will be examples, by and large, of literary philistinism, civilization, and barbarism, which is to say, natural, supernatural, and unnatural shortfalls from or alternatives to a subnatural mean.

9. It is as if, scorning cultural associations with religion, fiction is the literature of economic philistines, drama the literature of political civilians, and poetry the literature of scientific barbarians. For only philosophy can be described as the literature, when genuine, of religious cultists, as of the more genuinely cultural people in general.

10. If the philosopher is a kind of literary god, then the poet is very much a literary devil, obsessed with willpower as opposed to soulful contentment, while the novelist is a literary man and the dramatist a literary woman, the one given to egocentric form and the other to spiritual glory.

11. Hence to contrast the truth of philosophers with the beauty of poets on the noumenal planes of organic space and time, and both of these with the knowledge of novelists and the strength of dramatists on the phenomenal planes, down below, of organic volume and mass, all of whom are supreme as opposed to primal.

12. For where falsity, ugliness, ignorance, and weakness are concerned, we are dealing less with positive manifestations of the above than with their negative counterparts, viz. antiphilosophers, antipoets, antinovelists, and antidramatists, all of whom correspond to inorganic primacy.

13. Thus not joy, love, pleasure, or pride ... so much as woe, hatred, pain, and humility (if not humiliation) characterize the respective anti-literary predilections of antiphilosophers, antipoets, antinovelists, and antidramatists, all of whom are symptomatic of 'literature' in an age or society which is more under the influence, so to speak, of inorganic primacy in cosmic and/or geologic fashion than under that of organic supremacy, with its personal and/or universal approaches, necessarily positive, to the phenomenal and noumenal alternatives described above.

14. Thus an idealistic shadow to transcendentalism in the case of philosophy, a naturalistic shadow to humanism in the case of fiction, a realistic shadow to nonconformism in the case of theatre, and a materialistic shadow to fundamentalism in the case of poetry - the worst of all possible literary worlds.

15. Certainly anti-literature can be cultural, philistine, civilized, or barbarous, depending on the genre, but it will be so in negative terms, and thus as a primal backdrop to that which is supreme ... whether on metaphysical, physical, chemical, or metachemical terms, as applying to organic philosophy, fiction, drama, and poetry, the mark of literary maturation across all the Elements.