Understanding Literature

According to Alexander Pope “Proper understanding of mankind is man.” In the same way, proper understanding of literature is man. As Annas and Rosen opine in ‘Literature and Society’: “Writers of all sorts have celebrated, explored and puzzled about the entire continuum of human life, sometimes focusing on a moment somewhere in the journey between birth and death, sometimes merging events and images from different stages. Complexity and continuity of human life is enriched by the array of human lives we touch through literature.” (1994, 38).

Matthew Arnold in his essay ‘Culture and Anarchy’ divides, the society into three different groups. The first group comprised the people who possessed the power of money and these he called the ‘barbarians’. The next was the ascendant middle class who were trying to scale the social ladder. These people he called the ‘philistines’. Finally, he clubbed the exploited masses into a single category, the ‘populace’. For Arnold the solution lies not with the ‘barbarians’ but the ‘philistines’ who need to be reformed for the understanding of literature. Literary writing is conditional study by social expectations and assumptions of and about the human gender, race, social class and culture and above all, the historical period that it represents. “We have visualized the novelists of the last two hundred years - all writing together in one room, subject to the same emotions and putting the accidents of their age into the crucible of inspirations and whatever our results. Our method has been sound – sound for an assembling of pseudo – scholars like ourselves. But we must visualize the novelists of the next two hundred years as also writing in the same room. The change in the subject matter will be enormous, they will not change. History, develops, art stands still. The novelist of the future will have to pass all the new facts through the old veritable mechanism of the creative mind.” (Forster, 2004, 139)

E. M. Forster’s findings stand sound for all times, but he is right when he says that ‘art stands still’ which implies the sum total of art, right form the inception of mankind. And man’s awareness towards it, remains the same. It is only to be discovered – rediscovered – and re rediscovered, and artist constructs out of his culled experiences and discoveries if the rhythm of construction is close to his universe; it begets a definite pattern and earns recognition. Bharat Muni, the founder of the science of music and dramaturgy: in his work Natya – Shastra defines Natya (drama or dramatic art) as an art that represents the different situations in life.

It can be birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, adulthood, pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, middle age, aging, old age and death – all accompanied by a definite role assigned to each individual. We also face the dilemma of what is man and what is woman – each trying to get over the other, each defining the course of the other, and each chasing the other in all possible ways. Different dimensions of relationship between the two are less comfortable and more entrapping and this is only to establish-gender identity. And the most striking thing is ‘Love’ that moves the world of literature in different forms. In this way, creation of literature is as lucid as we are or as toilsome as our life may be. It May be. It may be the experience of our life, portrayal of reality or idealism or abstraction. We may have some vision for future, some aesthetic percept, some particular interpretation of some aspect of life and for that matter continuous debate with the present for the sake of the future, call it literacy realism or critical realism. Truly speaking, critical faculty is inherent in each creature activity and every writer claims that his writing is unique, innovative and original. For instance, Emile Zola, the French novelist brought mortage into the novel before the invention of the symbolical milieu of the modem psychological novel with its alterations of general senses, and the substitution of the historical panorama with his own style – chekhov has respect for man, Kafka and Joyce play with the complexities of human mind and Maxim Gorky presents the picture of decadent society. WE may call them progressive, decadent, idealist, realist or anything else – but everything is very close to life. While talking of a novel. R.A. Scott –James rightly comments  ‘The novel is an art because it exhibits something which the artist believes to be like life, or true to life — and because he puts together these elements in an intelligible external form, for no other purpose than to enable us to see what he has seen to derive pleasure from it.” (365-366)

In the same way Henry James asserts that the novel should be accepted as a living entity, a growing organism and a novelist should breathe fine spirit into the craftsmanship of his fictive pictures which would always look fresh and entertaining, varied and interesting. Henry James in ‘The Art of Fiction’ says: “English fiction should have a conscious moral purpose —art is essentially selection whose main care is typical to be inclusive.”

While talking of H.G. Wells, A.C. Ward in his book “Twentieth Century Literature” says -“The novel is in essence discursive, a tapestry of multifarious interest sufficiently elastic in form to take the whole of life within its compass, the home confessional, the initiator of knowledge, the seed of fruitful questing the general central platform for discussions and for the examination of human conduct.”

In this way literature helps us in understanding Man as a whole, it is a source of perennial pleasure that ancient aestheticians of India prefer to call ‘Rasa’. Literature alone can help us in looking at Man and the world as a whole as manifested in myriads of different varieties of shapes and shades and in various amalgams of feeling, emotions, complexities and contradictions. Proper understanding of literature therefore requires nothing but adequate understanding and thorough understanding of man and his society. So understanding literature implies all that is there in humanity and we should be aware of ourselves to get into it.

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‘How amazing is the spirit of man, plaything of nature’s mighty forces, less than the speck of dust in this vast universe! He has hurled defiance at the elemental powers and with his mind, cradle of revolution, sought to master them. Whatever gods there be, there is something god-like in man, as there is also something of the devil in him.’