WHY WRITING is itself a literary question

My literary journey began with what was considered non-literary. The treatises of Hobbes, the musings of Rousseau... I was fascinated by these philosophical reflections, but often found their dry, convoluted prose a bore to read. I was equally drawn to the fictional work of Orwell, Zamyatin, and Borges but secretly hoped they could put their brilliant, underlying philosophical arguments in straightforward, prosaic writing. I realize, as a reader, I am hard to satisfy. But what if there really was a way to combine the best of two worlds—literature and philosophy, narrative and argumentation? So I took matters into my own hands and began to explore, conjuring character-oriented fantasies while putting down my own line of thinking at the same time, a bold and early attempt to blur the boundary between philosophy and literature. However, when my experiment was turned in as an assignment at school, it was not met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. My teacher had found it too “eccentric”, too “gimmicky” and not “literary enough.”

So the question arises: what is “literary”? A nascent, steadfast conviction began to germinate within me. Perhaps literature never should have been confined by formal requirements if the need to adhere to them trumps a writer’s creative enterprise. It wasn’t until I came across Calvino’s “If One Winter’s Night, A Traveler'' that I was convinced this was true: here was a masterpiece that proved literature is not merely an assemblage of genre-bound fixtures but is in itself an explorative journey. I stepped into the forking path of narratives with Calvino, one moment being a “you” encountering a myriad of misconstrued, mistranslated, and missing stories, one moment delving deep into each narrative and its philosophical underpinnings, symbols, and plotlines. I was fascinated by the rich labyrinth of meanings that Calvino weaves into this novel with multiple stories interrupting and layering over each other. Captivated by his unconventional genius, I felt the urge to emulate him to grasp elusive philosophical ideas that a single genre can simply never adequately carry.