Critical Essay Draft

Eat, Pray, Love is supposed to change women’s lives. Just ask the women of the “Eat, Pray Love Inspirational Movement” on Oprah’s web site, who wish to recreate author Elizabeth Gilbert’s experience for themselves. Or ask your own sister, mother, or female co-worker. Eat, Pray, Love is the book that everyone’s sister, mother, and female co-worker seems to be reading.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir tells the story of her own life-changing experience. In her mid-thirties, Ms. Gilbert, or “Liz,” as she encourages her readers to familiarly call her, leaves her husband to find herself by traveling around the world (for a year of rollicking cultural tourism, but that’s a different essay). She divides her book between her time in Italy, where she finds pleasure, because the Italians are so into pleasure (“eat”); India, where she finds spirituality, because the Indians are so spiritual (“pray”); and Indonesia, where she finds balance, because, evidently, the Indonesians are really balanced (curiously enough, “love,” rather than “balance”).

Although Liz seems to love reading, whether she is wiling her days away with a book in a park in Rome, garden in Bali, or her Ashram’s library in India, her own book is somewhat of an anti-literature. First of all, Eat, Pray, Love is not fiction; it’s true. At times it seems like fiction, with its perfectly constructed plot and flawed yet ultimately loveable characters. Liz begins her story thin, depressed, unsure of herself, and single; by the end of the novel, she is slender yet curvy, happy, confident, and, wouldn’t you know it, she’s found true love. In short, she’s come of age, however belatedly, and gotten the guy. But despite these novelistic, romantic comedy-esque plot fixtures, Eat, Pray, Love is a memoir by someone young, modern, witty, and likeable. More literally than a work of fiction could, Eat, Pray, Love tells its readers, “if Liz can do it, you can do it, too!” A novel may help readers with the “how” of solving their problems by inspiring them to contemplate their lives or relationships, but cannot be a reliable source of “what’ to do because, after all, its not true. Gilbert, on the other hand, tells her readers exactly what to do: move to Indonesia and find your inner voices. And, judging from the book’s message board on Oprah’s web site, many readers do.

Secondly, Eat, Pray, Love is not great literature because it does nothing interesting with its own medium; it is not literature at all, because it does not even try. There are multiple components to the medium she uses: plot, character, and language itself, and Gilbert’s are all standard fare: acceptable, enjoyable, but nothing new.

Most importantly, Eat, Pray, Love is not literature because it’s too easy. It’s short and simple enough to read in a sitting, and catchy enough that you probably will. Not once will the reader puzzle over gilbert's word choice or struggle with her plot's construction. But what’s the problem with that? At the end of the day (literally) who wants to come home from work to suffer through Ulysses for a few hours? And even if you did, what would be the point?

Good art changes its audience’s life. Not necessarily in so literal a way as convincing them to move to Indonesia, but by changing the way they think about words, images, colors, sounds, people, history, and art itself. And, as Gilbert herself tells us, the process of change involves struggle along with pleasure. Reading Proust, viewing Picasso, watching Godard, listening to Beethoven—each of these experiences, while potentially beautiful and rewarding, is also hard. And, particularly in the case of literature, it can take a long time, which makes it even harder for us YouTube watchers and blog readers. I’m not sure exactly what purpose subjecting yourself to hundreds of hours of Proust would serve, the way Liz can’t say exactly what purpose meditating in a mosquito-filled night serves in a particularly powerful scene during “pray.” Maybe asking what the point is is not exactly the right question, in an era in which the only purpose considered rational is minimizing time; as John Fowles puts it in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, an era in which it seems “as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash.” It’s been suggested from the beginning of philosophical aesthetics that one of the nice things about art is that it doesn’t need to have a purpose; as Kant puts it, art is purposive rather than purposeful. Meaning, art makes its audience think without telling them what to think.

This essay originally began with the rather dramatic proclamation, “literature is dead, and Eat, Pray, Love is a joyous dance at the funeral of something no one like much in the first place.” But that’s a little harsh and not entirely fair to Gilbert, who is hardly the first person to write a book that is better as a diversion and seller than it is a work of art. It’s not entirely Gilbert’s fault if people want to read books that give them a quick thrill, just like it’s not just the drug dealer’s fault, but also the buyer’s and, of course, society’s. But with her all-too-breezy style, Gilbert sacrifices Eat, Pray, Love’s ability to change its reader’s life in a literary way. It’s too much pasta and not enough Ashram.