Enjoyment always comes before understanding. What we learn with joy and happiness we remember that forever. No Literature can be produced in a vacuum. Every literary text is a product of a particular context. What is literature? Literature, as the noted Hindi poet cum intellectual told in a personal interview is nothing but an alternative reality. Literature makes available what is missing from our day to day daily life which is nothing but humdrum and monotonous. The concept of reality takes us back to the Ancient Greek thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Modern theorists like George Steiner, Edward W. said to Slavor zizek have debated over such concepts. Literature primarily appeals to our sensitivity and compassion. But in order to see this in reality one must have sensibility and sense. Literature provides us enjoyment as well as it sometimes teaches us morality. But here an important question arises – what is the primary function of literature: to give pleasure or to prescribe moral rules. While George Bernard Shaw , the Fabian Socialist and a vocal modern Irish dramatist was in support of literature as a moral tool, his fellow country man from Ireland Oscar Wilde said that “all art is useless”. While the slogan “Art for Arts Sake” became important for the precursors of modernism, to some literature also became a pragmatic moral tool. No one can deny how literature has played a vital role in human civilization and the progress of human culture, right from the liberal humanists to the social anthropologists cannot deny or forgo the influence of literature. Art and culture cannot be borrowed, but it can be imbibed through passion and hard – labour, as T.S Eliot might have said .In the twentieth century when the dark clouds of the First World War hovered over the sky of the western world and civilization and T.S Eliot was mentioning the danger of London bridge falling down, he also wrote in a different poem- “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycle of Heaven in the twentieth century Bring us further from God and nearer to dust” Literature was often used by the dictators as propaganda but it has also been noticed that propagandist literature has not survived the test of time. The most glaring example of this is the undivided Soviet Russia. When Stelin was ruling over Russia he made life hell for the creative writers where writings were giving support to crises of the country. Whether it was Alexander Solzhenytsis being restricted not to accept The Nobel Prize for Literature, or Ivan klima and Milan Kundera leaving their homeland , or Salman Rashdie being given the Fatwa by the Iranian Mullah Ayatullah Khoemani , or the Bangladeshi woman writer Taslima Nasrin being chased away from her own native land, or more recently the banning of the book The Hindus by Wendy Doniger in Indiaall of these are nothing but the inherent superlative power of literature as a whole. What is the nature of literature? Is it abstract or concrete? Whatever may it be, in this domain one must encounter organicity . No one can deny the dynamic and organic power of literature because it is always moving, never stagnant. The congruity between form and content is an important component. In the Twentieth century the New critics in Southern part of America said that literature is an autonomous and autotelic entity. In order to read literature, a person should not study the biography of the author or poet, or the socio-political-historical and cultural economic background of the social context, rather one should only study the impact of language upon that text. John Crowe Ransom, I.A Richards, William Empson , Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate and others tried to facilitate the divorce of texts from their contexts. This also has a political history behind it. There was the civil War in America regarding the issue of slavery between the North and the South. In that war the North triumphed over the South. The South became diffident and withdrew into a cocoon. This narcissistic tendency later on impinged upon their willingness to withdraw into a shell and thus they propagated the autonomy of the text. Important books like Seven Types of Ambiguity and The Principals of Literary Criticism became Bible for the New critics. During the 1930s the Marxist group of poets started a new phase in English literature. Poets like W.H Auden , Luice Mekneice and Stephen Spender tried to contextualize literary products. But this was also the time when critics like Walter Benjamin , Theodor Adorno and Hokheimar were trying to look at literature from a new angle and they established a new school called The Frankfort School . Herbert Mercuse was also with them. But gradually Mussolini and Hitler came to power in Italy and Germany respectively . They started using art and culture from needs emanating out of their opportunistic goals. Even the world famous Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore was misled and misinterpreted by the Italian media quite intentionally . Mussolini killed his opponents and Hitler killed Lakhs of Jews in concentration camps. Gandhiji said out of frustration that their (the Jewish Peoples) destiny was to collectively commit suicide.
The genocide of Hitler was so traumatic that the survivors like Paul Celan either committed suicide or novelists like Imre Kartes showed the meaninglessness of life in his fictions like The Liquidation or Kaddish for a Child Not Born (“Kaddish” is the jewish word for prayer for a death of a person). But the history of torture and persecution of literary artists (particularly Writers) was happening since a long time back. But it reached its pinnacle in the twentieth century when Anna Akhmatova’s husband and son were killed due to stalin’s dictatorial stratagems . Akhmatova’s long narrative poem Requiem bears witness to this fact. But it is also true that literacy writers like Hemingway and Lorca joined wars and fought in battles . The wound and trauma of war created the great novel A Farewell to Arms which came out of the pen of Hemingway. Again it was Pablo Neruda who expressed the sense of happiness and rebellion of the Spanish people in his poems. Like the characters of Waiting for Godot we can only wait and only with hope, not with hopelessness . The Existentialists like Camus and Jean Paul Sartre hoped for the best but prepared for the worst. ‘No one can ever forget Camus’ character Mersault’s famous words at the beginning of the novel The Stranger –“Mother died today. May be yesterday. I do not know”. And who can forget Sartre’s unforgettable words- “The blinding sun of torture is at its zenith. It lights up the whole country .Under that merciless glare there is not a single laugh that does not ring false, there is not a single face that is not painted to hide fear or anger and there is not a single action that does not betray our disgust and complicity”. (Jean Paul Sartre, from the Preface to the Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon). Coming back to the concept of alternative reality as espoused by literature one must proceed with caution. Literature is also a sort of wish- fulfillment and that is precisely where the concept of “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge) comes. Literature enables us to see dreams, hope a new, see life amidst death, mirth in gloom and freshness in farewell. If literature is a reflection of society, then society also reflects literature. Literature does not make one weak, it rather makes one strong. Literature, after all, is a mode of defamiliarization as the Russian Formalists advocated or what Bertolt Brecht told “Alienation effect”. Literature, if it is true, then it must speak for humanity as a character says in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December “For God’s sake, let’s open the universe a little”. Literature teaches one to be humble, benevolent and humane. It also teaches one to be vocal against injustice, oppression and dictatorship. Literature never limits one’s existence, rather it opens up a broad horizon, it shows us to accept our strengths and foibles equally. Literature expands our mental horizon, it teaches us to be submissive and benevolent. The grace that one often showers on others comes from the core of the heart and that is where human beings’ mystery of compassion lies. We do not know when death will knock us down but we do know that as long as we live we should do good deeds. Literature awakens and strengthens our moral sensibility. The concept of ideology in literature is as old as antiquity. Every author colours his/her literary work with a certain kind of ideology. But having said that it must be noted that no writer should be ideologically so biased that the human aspect is missing from the work. In Marxist paradigm literature has often been looked as a testament to a particular type of ideology- i.e; that of class struggle. According to the Marxists the “base’’ is the economic aspect and “the superstructure” is art work and both of these are integrally related. Nobody will say no to literature showing a glaring path to a blinding person but that blind person must have the desire to confront truth. We can triumph over our innermost fear, paranoia and unease through the perusal of literature. Henrik Ibsen, the famous playwright of Norway once said “Living means fighting within you the ghosts of dark power; writing means putting on trial your inmost self”. Literature, according to the modern psychological exponents like Sigmund Freud is a product of neurosis. He believes that all art is a product of sickness. But if we reflect upon this comment that literature is nothing but a product of sick mind then a question immediately comes to our mind- are all writers mentally disturbed? The statement however appears to be authentic if we look into the examples like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Jean Jenet and many others. Harold Bloom said that every writer tries to evade and be enriched by his/her previous writers in his book the Anxiety Of Influence. All art need not necessarily be product of sick mind but in all art the life of all mind becomes important. It is only through the exploration of the “life of the mind” that one can catch the essence of literature. All Literature must strive towards producing a particular ideology – i.e, the ideology of humanity. We all are human beings and we are all mortals and that is why we should not be like Icarus or Doctor Faustus. During the time of the Renaissance the philosopher Erasmus said that “Man is the measure of all things”. From the dawn of the Western Renaissance onwards man’s gradual journey towards an anthropocentric universe began. In the twentieth century there was mass killing, then two world wars and as George Steiner said that the same age was the age of transcendental homelessness. With the arrival and appropriation of many critical theories from the second half of the twentieth century our approach to literature changed. Structuralism, post- structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytical criticism, myth criticism, Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Gynocriticism Post-positivism, Reader Response theory and other criticial Schools totally shattered our conventional view of literature. Again literature became associated with context. The literary texts were interlinked with their contexts. All these critical schools came from France or rather Paris. No one can forget Roland Barthes’ jump from structuralism to post structuralism, no one can forget Derrida’s concept of “Differance” or “Aporia” or “Deconstruction”. Theories became new windows for us to look at traditional and conventional literature from a new angle. When Gayetri Chakravarty Spivak translated Derrida’s seminal French book Of Grammatology into English, it shattered every arm-chair intellectual’s critical view on literature. Who can forget the historical debate between Derrida and Emanuel Levinas? Thus literature and theory became integrally related. With the coming up of postcolonial critical theory our conception of traditional texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Jane Austen’s Emma totally changed. When Edward W. said published his culturally seminal book Orientalism in 1978 the new network between colonial venture and scholasticism came to be exposed. Thus we find from all our above discussion that every piece of literary work (rather text) is a product of a particular context. The sub-altern critics brought to light the condition of the marginalized voice or what Gayetri Chakravarty Spivak asked in her important essay “Can the sub-altern speak”? Our answer to it can be framed like this if the sub-altern cannot speak, then the sub-altern can at least listen and spit. The responses of critics to literature have always been biased by their own ideologies. But it must be asserted that a critic should look at literature from a dispassionate viewpoint. And that is what our contributors have tried to do in this book. Literature can hardly be ignored in our contemporary period as it is the sentinel of our conscience. We live in a world shattered by different perverse ideologies, dangerous thinkings, off-beat views, global warming, mass-killing and terrorism. Every day we wake up with the fear of loss, anxiety and cataclysmic feelings. And it is precisely in this context we can say that literature can give us some consolation and mental food for thought. Literature again is nothing but an alternative reality but that alternative reality is much more beautiful than the world we live in.
(The author an author of 14 books in English is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Bongaigaon College Assam. Views are his own)
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