Studying literature offers a wide range of intellectual, emotional, and cultural benefits. While individual motivations for studying literature may vary, here is discussed why study of literature is singularly important.
Why study literature? For many among us, literature is mainly a medium of entertainment, rather old fashioned today, being fast outdone by other forms of enjoyment, especially the audio-visual ones. Even for many great authors of the past, literature was a vehicle for the perception of beauty and aesthetics, a source to get “inner delight” with. Aestheticism, which can be best illustrated by the slogan “art for art’s sake”, may appear sheer snobbery of an epoch in literary history; however, even at its inception, it was charmed with a dichotomy, and artists subscribing aestheticism, chose the pole that best suited their purpose. While declaring that literature (and art) has nothing to do with reality and has no didactic purposes, it posits art itself as a viable alternative to a degenerated reality. Schiller proclaimed salvation through art:
“Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.”
Literature defies all sorts of definition; and so is its relationship with human condition and society. However, one thing is pretty clear that “good” works of literature leaves a certain singular impact on our mind that becomes part of our memory. The precise nature of that impression depends on many factors, and right here we are not going to delve into that. The singularity of that impression matters; because an experienced reader quickly identifies imitation or repetition, and the piece of work appears less appealing and dull.
The singularity of a “good” piece of literature is not that it is a “truth” unearthed by the author. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, and we respect that fact. However, the communication of that piece of knowledge fails to evoke any wonder in us, unless we go to the moon and jump nine times higher than we do on earth, or float inside a spacecraft. There was a time, when literary critics were busy deciphering the truth hidden in a literary work, since it is nothing but language, the age old medium of scientific and philosophical truth.
Some cultural traditions have a strong heritage of literary criticism. A literary critic is a person, experienced and skilled in the nuances of literature, who closely reads a literary text, discusses and evaluates it. Such critics are among the best of the readership, since they can articulate what they consider the merits or demerits of the piece of work under discussion. Opinions vary, debates flare up, and sometimes, the critical appreciation of a famous critic, itself, assumes the status of a literary text to be further discussed and debated.
Great authors are great human beings, they are endowed with an extraordinary sensibility towards existence, and their social and natural surrounding; they are the best successors of our cultural inheritance. And they are highly skilled in one or more forms of literature. However, authors themselves are social being, and they are not immuned to the virtues and vices of their society and time. Their ideas, faiths and beliefs are shaped by their social and cultural perspective which their readership may or may not agree with. It is a fact that many great authors strongly adhere to the dominant ideologies of the ruling class, who, very often, are quite oppressive.
However, works of literature, which are generally regarded as “great” by some sort of “common” consensus, are not mere vehicles of their authors’ faith, belief or political leanings. Rather, it is a space where such things are contested. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a classic case of example here. “One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work,” wrote literary critic Harold Bloom in his 1998 book Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human. A favorite of Nazi Germany, the play contains strong anti-Jewish elements. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare himself was immune to the strong anti-Jewish sentiment displayed by the play’s Christian characters. However, it is no accident that the Jewish character is given the most humanizing speech in the play:
“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
With this humanizing speech, the character of Shylock appears with greater dignity than the play’s Christian characters make him to be. The reader or the audience can never fully recover from an allegiance with Shylock although he acts as the villain, but that appears to be his assigned role in a Christian society, where the Christians themselves audaciously do not practice what they prophesize. “The villainy you teach me I will execute,” Shylock says elsewhere to his Christian critics, “I’m going to mirror back to you what you really look like.”
This is not a place for a full-fledge analysis of Shylock’s character. In our present context two things become clear from this example. Firstly, the greatness of a literary work is not limited by the personal faiths and beliefs of the author. In his creative process, he transcends the boundaries of the self and allows the other – more often than not, repressed – voices to speak. Both the self and the other are the extensions of the creative personality. That brings us close to the central focus of the article – great literature makes us rethink and rewrite, questions our set values, challenges the established standards and norms by changing the perspectives, it focuses on our human condition from a different viewpoint, a different angle and defamiliarises the known world; but unlike a well-planned project, it draws no conclusion.
Authors write about anything and everything. They may simulate a realistic world very much akin to the one we live in, or they may create an unreal fantasy totally out of their imagination; they may write about an everyday situation or a common sentiment, or they may evoke something esoteric; however, the feat of creating a piece of literature is achieved only when his language can deliver the singular effect and the reader goes through a sense of novelty; with a jolt – pleasurable or shocking – the reader realizes that her perception about it had been imperfect, and it is still imperfect, however, he is imbued with a refreshingly new, deeper and wider awareness.