In modern society the question is often asked: is literature of any use? Is there any good in the study of literature? Often the questioner has in mind today’s emphasis on technology. He is thinking of the immense value of science and technology and sees that they certainly have a lot to do with making man’s life easier. In such a context the question almost raises itself: is there any ‘use’ of literature?
We must answer the question from several viewpoints. We read literature for pleasure. This is the most basic test: all literature must give pleasure. ‘Pleasure’ itself is an ambiguous word: to ask what kind of pleasure is to admit its several kinds and that each reader differs in his capacity for it.
From childhood onwards, we love the story: the most naïve curiosity, reflected in the question ‘what happened next?’ is all we need to go on reading. The basic requirement for a novel or a play is a story, and its telling. It is a launching paid – in childhood it gives us the pleasure of dreaming: a good series of events is all we need to launch in a dream. Later on, we learn that a ‘higher’ aesthetic pleasure is to be had out of literature: we learn that there is a certain symmetry discernible in the relationship between the characters and images. We learn that a plot is a great intellectual feat, comparable in essence to a scientific theory. We also come to know that the more sophisticated we get, the greater the reserve of our knowledge, the more do we get out of our reading, and hence, the greater our enjoyment.
The last sentence is not in praise of the bookworm, his head stuffed with information, incapable of looking straight at a single sentence without his ‘sophistication’ coming into it. On the contrary we enjoy literary masterpieces for the insight they give us on life and living. It calls for a great deal of insight to be able to match an author’s insights with our own – and change ours or reject his on only one criterion: Truth! The beauty of Hamlet, for example, cannot be appreciated by someone who consistently rejects as possible the given text: i.e. the passages showing Hamlet’s disgust with life. The point is of course debatable: but the reason for mentioning it here is to understand the fact that the first requisite of literary enjoyment is a considerate humility before the work.
Let us elaborate on the literature-life relationship a little more. Many modern critics would have us believe that literature is a matter of books and words and that the words belong to a language all the time, and all we need consider are the words on the paper. A poem is, for them, a series of words put together. Now this is absurd: because if the poet is no where to be considered in a discussion of a poem, and the poem granted, as it were, a ‘virgin birth’, one might as well read seriously computer generated drivel. Often, these critics do just that.
But in the preface to his book “Understanding Poetry”, Cleanth Brooks writes: “Poems (- literary creations) are not written by robots for robots.” The man who writes is a human being, belonging to a particular age and country, having had the benefits of education (in the widest sense), being related to other human beings, influencing them, being influenced by them and then writing. Of course all literature is not a result of such influences, but surely the Victorian Society had its share in making of Dickens? Or the Elizabethan stage conditions on the form of Shakespeare’s plays? We are not reducing these giants to their cultural milieu and yet it is absurd to see them divorced from the context of the age.
Perhaps the opposite extreme has a germ of truth. The view that the writer is an outcast from society, a rebel, a critic and he writes to depict the flaws of his society is very feasible. Certainly there have been novelists, poets and dramatists who have had different views – in fact radically opposed views to those prevalent in society and wrote to shock the complacent into action, but in essence, this viewpoint is an admission that artists are men of vision. They have a vision of how mankind and human society ought to be: and they see the flagrant callousness all around them. One thinks at once of Shaw and his social critical plays. The idea that great literature is the consequence of personal vision has within it an important truth.
What has this to do with the enjoyment of literature? A good deal. We have to hold both these truths in mind when reading a great work: we have to know that here is a man shaped by his environment and who is conveying this work as a part of his vision, his personal Eden. We learn from this that the ratio of conditioning and vision varies: and this is the most fascinating of all pleasures to read and see the force of fact upon fiction, see it changing, creating, integrating various elements to form a harmonious whole — and then detach oneself and ask: what manner of man is this that he has the courage to visualize such levels of meaning (or despair or exaltation) in such conditions?
And if we come away with Sophoclean courage — the kind that animates Antigone against Creon or Dostoyevsky’s vision — the one that created the Great Inquisitor — we know that but for literature we would have never learned this.
Literature has the effect of humanizing us, making us more human. It is the gentle handmaiden of understanding. The greatest Scripture have a literary greatness: the first five chapters of Genesis are remarkable in their rhythmic simplicity of diction: they have inspired more literary masterpieces than any other text. However the distinction between religion and scripture must be made clear. Dogmatists armed with ignorance have not always been prevailed. The Savonarolas have not always triumphed, even if they succeeded in damaging a few of Michelangelo’s’ creations. It is the literary virtue of religion that generates human tolerance: the Sermon on the Mount has a transcendent poetic beauty all its own.
To return to the point. Literature is one of the humanities. “Our deepest human need is to make a sense of our lives,” said Archibald Macleish, “and poetry is a means to this end.” That seems a strange thing to say in an age like ours, when questions such as “Is verse a dying technique?” are discussed seriously by leading critics. We are a technological society. We hardly have the time or the inclination to read, let alone compose, poetry: and yet poetry, like the perennial grass, continues to sprout from unlikely places. In any discussion on why we read and enjoy literature, we cannot omit poetry.
And at that, modern poetry. The enjoyment of Chaucer and Tennyson, is certainly on a completely different place that that of Hopkins or Eliot. Modern poetry is enigmatic: certainly most people (rightly) claim they are ill equipped to understand it and leave it alone. But they are missing something remarkably intense: they are saying in effect that self-knowledge is unnecessary and that life has a static quality it has had in previous centuries. Both these attitudes are wrong: self-knowledge is a must always, particularly in this strife torn century and life has taken a dynamic turn it has never had before. Poetry is, as MacLeish said, one of the means to make sense of our lives. Or to quote Wallace Stevens, who conceived of his task as poet to be “to make of man himself the instrument of knowledge and the medium of universal value.” If the cost is a little effort in understanding surely the rewards are worthwhile.
One of the problems is the difficulty of modern poetry. Modern poetry leaves many of the connecting lines, which lead the reader gently from one idea to another. It asks the reader to “fill in” the connections from his own mind. This makes it so hard and sharp in impact, so dramatic, so rich that one wonders at the genius that must have gone into it. The force is beamed directly at the reader’s mind, leaving him bewildered. He doesn’t know, for example, why when with no transitional line, no warning Prufrock says
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas
he feels that an exact feeling of despair has been conveyed. He has never thought of ‘claws’ and ‘seas’ in this manner before. He feels a certain sadness, and is in rapport with Prufrock knowing that at one lonely moment when a deep sense of impotence overwhelmed him he felt like that. While we are generalizing (this cannot possibly be true for every reader) it is nevertheless true that these lines have captured a human response we cannot believe possible without knowing the lines.
This then is why modern poetry is a must. In no other age did it devote itself to the primarily human as it does in ours. It speaks to us not about gods, goddesses, heroes or warriors: but about ourselves. The poet is offering a single version of what is like to be in an age devoid of human values. “The purpose of poetry,” writes Paul Engle, “is to expand and intensify your sense of life by giving you examples of one man’s look at the intensities of his own life as the intelligence in his head has ordered them into the shape of the poem.”
The key phrase is “your sense of life,” – and is richly suggestive. We take it to refer – not to any kind of vitalism, but to dignity: a human and humanizing dignity. Literature makes us look on ourselves as dignified beings; it teaches us the root of human dignity. The very fact of reading is a participation and salute: a participation in the author’s vision, and a salute to our common humanness. To admire Shakespeare for his great plays is in essence to admire oneself, because it is to see Shakespeare’s potential – however little – reflected in oneself.
Literature can never be replaced by anything else, because language, a social creation, has within it a timeless quality that sustains the works of literature from century to century. Stone is replaced by steel — opening new avenues in architectural creativity; but words are at once the most primitive and the most recent of innovations, every utterance grants their existence a freshness. In a similar way, the sense of life also, is a previous fragile gift. It is so easy to lose it, so easy to sink into depravity, frustration, panic and despair, so easy to betray the soul in a wild rush for things. Literature, then, is the persuasive friend always at hand to remind us of the greatness within us, always showing man his place anew at the pinnacle of creation: a dignified being.
Of all the reasons why we read and enjoy literature, the greatest is this: it gives us the sense of life and redeems the entire spectrum of activity – be it mundane, routine, soul-eating or debasing, it redeems the things men do as a sign — not of punishment but of necessity: an assurance that in spite of all this, man still has within him a sacred glow that is never spent, and that the dearest freshness that lives deep down things is his, forever.