Why Literature Essay Example for Free

Why Literature EssayIt has often happened to me, at control fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother, he explains. She is a great(p) he atomic number 18r and crawl ins lit. straight I ask And what roughly you? bustt you analogous to ask? The answer is nearly al routes the same Of course I like to read, exclusively I am a re al unmatchabley busy person. I postulate heard this explanation dozens of dates this man and numerous thousands of hands like him have so some important things to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in sprightliness sentence, that they dopenot waste their precious epoch buried in a tonic, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt ideal and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essenti aloney an entertainment, an adornment that solitary(prenominal) people with time for recreation can afford.It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess and it can be sacrificed without scruple when one prioritizes the tasks and the duties that be indispensable in the struggle of life. It have the appearance _or_ semblances clear that literature has become to a greater extent than(prenominal) and more than(prenominal) a female activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even off in university de set outments dedicated to the kindities, the women clearly outnumber the men.The explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they resolve fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can vindicatoryify more slow than men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and impute to each sex its character istic virtues and shortcomings but thither is no doubt that there atomic number 18 fewer and fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of readers women predominate.This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent look into form by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed that half of that countrys population has never read a book. The survey as easy revealed that in the minority that does read, the number of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by 6. 2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for these women, but I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of merciful organisms who could read but have decided not to read.They earn my pity not that because they argon unaw be of the pleasure that they be missing, but too because I am convinced that a ball club without literature, or a hostel in which literature has been relegatedlike some isolated viceto the margins of affectio nate and personal life, and transform into something like a sectarian cult, is a purchase order condemned to become uncannyly barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom.I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an ir renewable activity for the constitution of citizens in a red-brick and democratic society, a society of free individuals. pic e blistering in the era of the speciality of intimacy, thank to the prodigious development of science and engineering and to the consequent fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels and com fragmentisements. This cultural trend is, if anything, likely to be accentuated in years to come.To be sure, specialization brings many benefits. It allows for deeper exploration and greater experimentation it is the very engine of growth. Yet it also has negative consequences, for it eliminates those co mmon coiffure noetic and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a deprivation of accessible actualiseing, to the division of merciful beings into ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of knowledge requires specialized lyric poems and increasingly arcane codes, as information becomes more and more specific and compartmentalized.This is the particularism and the division against which an old proverb warned us do not focus to a fault much on the branch or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or to a fault much on the tree, lest you forget that it is part of a forest. Awareness of the existence of the forest creates the smelling of generality, the feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The solipsism of nations and individuals produces paranoia and delirium, dist ortions of reality that generate hatred, wars, and even genocide.In our time, science and technology cannot play an integrating role, precisely because of the infinite naughtyness of knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which have led to specialization and its obscurities. But literature has been, and provide continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of valet de chambre interpret through with(predicate) which merciful beings whitethorn recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how disparate their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances.It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend narrative as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we apprise what we share a s human beings, what remains common in all of us under the bighearted range of differences that separate us.Nothing bust protects a human being against the stupidity of harm, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and that scarce injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation. Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the profuseness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of worlds multi-faceted creativity.Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, simply and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. pic his complex vegetable marrow of contradictory truthsas Isaiah Berlin called themconstitutes the very substance of the human condition. In todays world, this totalizing and living knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature.Not even the other branches of the humanitiesnot philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the hearty scienceshave been able to preserve this integrating vision, this prevalentizing discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed to the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, single out themselves in increasingly segmented and technical sectors whose ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman and man. around critics and theorists would even like to change literature into a science. But this ordain never happen, because fiction does not exist to investigate only a single precinct of experience.It exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life, which cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas without disappearing. This is the meaning of Prousts observation that real life, at last enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature. He was not exaggerating, nor was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was advancing the particular proposition that as a result of literature life is better understood and better lived and that living life more fully necessitates living it and sharing it with others.The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings, compelling them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious of a common origin and a common goal, transcends all temporal barriers. Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, savored, and dreamed through those texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human experience ac ross time and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature. p i c t always irritated Borges when he was asked, What is the use of literature? It seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would reply No one would ask what is the use of a canarys song or a delightful sunset. If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to them, life is even for an instant little ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical justifications? But the question is a good one. For novels and poems are not like the sound of birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were not created by chance or by nature.They are human creations, and it is therefore legitimate to ask how and why they came into the world, and what is their purpose, and why they have lasted so long. literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writers consciousness, projected into it by the combine strength of the unconscious, and the writers sensitivity to the world around him, and the writers emotions and it is these things to which the poet or the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body, movement, rhythm, harmony, and life.An soupy life, to be sure, a life imagined, a life made of languageyet men and women seek out this artificial life, some frequently, others sporadically, because real life falls short for them, and is incapable of offering them what they want. Literature does not produce to exist through the work of a single individual. It exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a part of social lifewhen it becomes, thanks to reading, a shared experience. One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language.A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word , has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-mutes and aphasics, afflicted by ugly problems of communication due to its gross and rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too.A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment he can speak much but he lead say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a vocal limitation. It re sits also a limitation in intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple priming coat that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.We learn how to speak correctlyand deeply, rigorously, and subtlyfrom good literature, and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to have at ones disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel.In a surreptitious way, words bounce in all our actions, even in those actions that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and reached high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of human enjoyment. Literature has even served to confer upon love and propensity and the cozy act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers.It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than unskilled people who have been made into idiots by televisions soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no distinct from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts. Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this task of teaching human beings to use with assurance and with skill the extraordinarily rich possibilities that language encompasses.On the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words to a secondary level with approve to images, which are the primordial language of these media, and to constrain language to its oral expression, to its indispensable minimum, far from its written dimension. To circumscribe a film or a television program as literary is an elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary programs on the radio or on television rarely capture the public. So far as I know, the only exception to this rule was Bernard Pivots program, Apostrophes, in France.And this leads me to think that not only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full mastery of language, but its mess is linked also and indissolubly with the fate of the book, that industrial product that many are now declaring obsolete. pic his brings me to Bill Gates.He was in Madrid not long ago and visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a joint make believe with Microsoft.Among other things, Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the letter - would never be removedfrom ready reckoner softwarea promise that allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five continents to stay a sigh of relief, since the banishment of such an essential letter from cyberspace would have created monumental problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises of the Academ y, verify in a press conference that he expected to accomplish his highest goal before he died.That goal, he explained, is to put an end to motif and then to books.In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued that ready reckoner screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that paper has heretofore assumed. He also insisted that, in addition to being less onerous, computing machines take up less space, and are more easily transportable and also that the transmission of news and literature by these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will have the ecological advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that is a consequence of the paper industry.People will continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will read on computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in the environment. I was not present at Gatess little discourse I learned these details from the press. Had I been there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would have vigorously disputed his analysis. foundation the screen really replace the book in all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new technologies such as the earnings have caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information, and I confess that the Internet provides invaluable suffice to me every day in my work but my gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary reading.That is a chasm that I cannot cross. I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can amalgamate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental submerging and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book. Perhaps this a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a long association ofliterature with books and paper.But even though I enjoy surfing the Web in search of world news, I would never go to the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by Onetti or an essay by Paz, because I am certain that the effect of such a reading would not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would fix a serious blow, even a mortal one. The term literature would not disappear, of course.Yet it would almost certainly be used to mention a type of text as distant from what we understand as literature today as soap operas are from the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare. pic here is still another reason to grant literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the full of life mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live.In all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present. Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the mutinous spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks chancel in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete.To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the confused Knight on the fields of La Mancha, to travel the seas on the back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink arsenic with Emma Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa these are all ways that we have invented to divest ourselves o f the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us.Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarilybut in this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We become more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than we are in the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a disappointment awaits usYet a tremendous realization also awaits us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is bettermore beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfectthan the life that we live while awake, a life conditioned b y the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature, genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious a repugn to what exists. How could we not feel cheated after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past and travel to our world of insignificant details, of boundaries and prohibitions that lie in wait everywhere and, with each step, corrupt our illusions?Even more than the need to sustain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the greatest contribution of literature to human progress is perhaps to remind us (without intending to, in the majority of cases) that the world is badly made and that those who pretend to the contrary, the unchewable and the lucky, are lying and that the world can be improved, and made more like the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create.A free and democratic society must have responsible and critical citizens conscious of the need continuously to examine the world that we inhabit and to try, even though it is more and more an impossible task, to make it more closely resemble the world that we would like to inhabit. And there is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature no better means of forming critical and free citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.Still, to call literature seditious because it sensitizes a readers consciousness to the imperfections of the world does not meanas churches and governments seem to think it means when they establish censorshipthat literary texts will provoke immediate social upheavals or renovate revolutions. The social and political effects of a poem, a play, or a novel cannot be foreseen, because they are not collectively made or collectively experienced. They are created by individuals and they are read by individuals, who vary enormously in the conclus ions that they draw from their writing and their reading.For this reason, it is fractious, or even impossible, to establish precise patterns. Moreover, the social consequences of a work of literature may have little to do with its aesthetic quality. A fair novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have played a decisive role in raising social and political consciousness of the horrors of slavery in the United States. The fact that these effects of literature are difficult to identify does not imply that they do not exist. The important point is that they are effects brought about by the actions of citizens whose personalities have been formed in part by books.Good literature, while temporarily relieving human dissatisfaction, actually increases it, by developing a critical and non-conformist attitude toward life. It might even be tell that literature makes human beings more likely to be unhappy. To live dissatisfied, and at war with existence, is to seek things that may not be there , to condemn oneself to fight futile battles, like the battles that Colonel Aureliano Buenda fought in One Hundred old age of Solitude, knowing full well that he would lose them all.All this may be true. Yet it is also true that without rebellion against the mediocrity and the squalor of life, we would still live in a primitive state, and history would have stopped. The autonomous individual would not have been created, science and technology would not have progressed, human rights would not have been recognized, freedom would not have existed. All these things are born of unhappiness, of acts of defiance against a life perceived as insufficient or intolerable.For this spirit that scorns life as it isand searches with the madness of Don Quixote, whose insanity derived from the reading of chivalric novelsliterature has served as a great spur. pi c et us attempt a dotty historical reconstruction. Let us imagine a world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novel s. In this kind of atrophied civilization, with its puny lexicon in which groans and ape-like gesticulations would prevail over words, certain adjectives would not exist.Those adjectives include quixotic, Kafkaesque, Rabelaisian, Orwellian, sadistic, and masochistic, all terms of literary origin. To be sure, we would still have insane people, and victims of paranoia and persecution complexes, and people with special appetites and outrageous excesses, and bipeds who enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. But we would not have learned to see, behind these extremes of behavior that are prohibited by the norms of our culture, essential characteristics of the human condition.We would not have discovered our own traits, as only the talents of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, Orwell, de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have revealed them to us. When the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared, its first readers made fun of this extravagant dreamer, as well as the rest of the characters in the novel. Today we know that the insistence of the caballero de la triste figura on seeing giants where there were windmills, and on acting in his seemingly absurd way, is really the highest form of generosity, and a means of reject against the misery of this world in the hope of changing it.Our very notions of the ideal, and of idealism, so redolent with a convinced(p) moral connotation, would not be what they are, would not be clear and respected values, had they not been incarnated in the athletic supporter of a novel through the persuasive force of Cervantess genius. The same can be said of that wasted and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to know through novels. Like a butterfly, she came too close to the flame and was burned in the fire. pic he inventions of all great literary creators open our eyes to unknown aspects of our own condition.They enable us to explore and to understand more fully the c ommon human abyss. When we say Borgesian, the word immediately conjures up the separation of our minds from the rational show of reality and the entry into a fantastic universe, a rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine and arcane, and riddled with literary references and allusions, whose singularities are not foreign to us because in them we recognize hidden desires and intimate truths of our own personality that took shape only thanks to the literary creation of Jorge Luis Borges.The word Kafkaesque comes to mind, like the focus mechanism of those old cameras with their accordion arms, every time we feel threatened, as defenseless individuals, by the oppressive machines of power that have caused so much pain and injustice in the modern worldthe authoritarian regimes, the vertical parties, the intolerant churches, the asphyxiating bureaucrats.Without the short stories and the novels of that tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and lived always on the lookout, we would not have been able to understand the impotent feeling of the isolated individual, or the terror of persecuted and discriminated minorities, confronted with the all-embracing powers that can smash them and eliminate them without the henchmen even showing their faces.The adjective Orwellian, first cousin of Kafkaesque, gives a go to the grievous anguish, the sensation of extreme absurdity, that was generated by totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most sophisticated, cruel, and absolute dictatorships in history, in their control of the actions and the psyches of the members of a society. In 1984, George Orwell described in cold and haunting shades a humanity subjugated to Big Brother, an absolute lord who, through an efficient combination of terror and technology, eliminated liberty, spontaneity, and equality, and transformed society into a beehive of automatons.In this nightmarish world, language also obeys power, and has been transfo rmed into newspeak, purified of all invention and all subjectivity, metamorphosed into a string of platitudes that ensure the individuals slavery to the system. It is true that the minacious prophecy of 1984 did not come to pass, and totalitarian communism in the Soviet Union went the way of totalitarian fascism in Germany and elsewhere and soon thereafter it began to deteriorate also in China, and in anachronistic Cuba and North Korea.But the danger is never whole dispelled, and the word Orwellian continues to describe the danger, and to help us to understand it. pic o literatures unrealities, literatures lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always blandish and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster.This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacri fices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the get through in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity.These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive authority that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see.Uncivilized, bar barian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would settle the daily practices of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities.There would be no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it. When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the depressed magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Afr ica.But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which booksthat is, works of literaturehave become what alchemy became in the era of physics an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority.I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soullessa resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom. It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends only if on our v ision and our will.But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we must read. MARIO VARGAS LLOSAs new book, The Feast of the Goat, will be published by Farrar, Straus Giroux in November. He is professor of Ibero-American Literature and Culture at Georgetown University.