Topics Literature

Question What is the sense of literature at all? Sometimes I wonder if the sense of literature is merely a capitalistic one. I am a writer myself, I like to write, a creativity in me that walks its own roads. But why do we read fictional texts from others? If I read one of my own, I know "what it is about", I know the grounds, dreams, feelings, hopes, etc. I had while writing. But then someone else reads that- how could he read anything in that text, that I tried to put there rather in between the lines. Does reading literature tells us something about "the other"? Does literature work as a translator between two people with singular minds? Is literature a connection between "myself" and "the other"? Is then, therefore, the sense of literature to (very general) live in a human society?

Accepted:
April 29, 2010

Comments

Thanks for your nice question. It contains many components and I won't be able to respond to all of them. One reason is that I'm hesitant to offer generalizations about literature across the board. Instead, it comes in many genres and sub-genres, and plays different kinds of roles in different cultures. One place you might look for more discussion of these issues is a collection of essays on the "philosophy of literature", here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405141700,descCd-description.html. One of the questions that that volume addresses is the question of what kind of knowledge we can get from literature, and how far that knowledge extends. I take it that this is relevant to your concerns because I'm assuming that if you were a journalist writing for a newspaper, there wouldn't be a big issue about whether someone can learn from what you write. So long as you're not making things up, we can learn about what's going on in, say French politics from your articles. By contrast, if a writer writes fiction, how can we learn anything from that?

As I say, I'm wary of generalizations here, but one point that might help is that if you reflect on it, you'll see that we learn from "fictions" all the time: consider the case of my *supposing* something for the sake of argument. I might ask, "What if we arrange all these books alphabetically by author--won't that make it easier to find them?" And we might agree that it will. Notice that what's in the scope of 'what if' is a tiny fiction--I'm not putting it forth as true. After contemplating the question, we can *learn* something, namely that if we organize those books that way, that will save time finding books in the future. I know this is banal, but I think the model generalizes to more complex cases, to wit:

My suggestion is that sometimes in literature, the author is treating his her characters, staging, background, and so on, as all like a comparatively more complex "what if". Huxley: what if we lived on soma, in a society that was totally centrally controlled all the way down to our sex lives..." Then much of the rest of that book is an exploration of the consequences of that question. In light of that exploration, we can see that a certain sort of social formation would be truly terrible. Or Ursula Le Guin: what if people changed gender regularly? How would that affect our relationships with others? And one who reads this learns something about at the very least herself by contemplating that prospect. I'm sure you can think of other cases (*many* more than I could), some of which explore issues about personal relationships, war, morality, death, and so on.

I don't claim that all literature conforms to this model. And I don't claim that this is the only way in which we can learn from someone else's literary work. But your question was, I think, how it's possible to learn at all from fiction, and this is *one* answer. Accordingly, I'm not comfortable talking about "the sense of literature", since I suspect there are very many senses, but one function or value of literature is as a way of sharing knowledge. If this is correct, it would help us understand part of our reason for valuing so highly the sort of work that you do.