Daily Times

Eastha in the flagship novel of Arundhati Roy, one of my favourite thinkers, the God of Small Things, has two thoughts: one is anything can happen to anyone and second is; it is best to be prepared.

Life is fraught with tensions and irresolute junctures and there is no elixir to this malaise as Samuel Beckett truly blurts the only sin is the sin of being born. Inasmuch as there is no cure then one must expiate this situation by going to French thinker Alert Camus. Camus writes in his novel a happy death: “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” This courage is what pushes you forward and gives you a silver lining to have a cup of coffee. But what I am trying to arrive at is that how literature rescues you when things run awry. As French poet, essayist and critic Charles Baudelaire in one of his essays writes,” You can live three days without bread; without poetry, never and those of you that maintain the contrary are mistaken; they do not know themselves.”

Moreover, the pioneering Russian short story writer Anton Chekov writes, ” Art does not have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” Literature do not entail any obligation and is not bound to dispense medicine in order to cure but nonetheless it has an ineffable power to enthral human mind for a time period. Before some days I was reading a poem by a modern Iranian poet Sohrab Seperi. The title of the poem was Nishaani which in Persian means address. A rider, no one knows of what, asks a wayfarer: where is the friend’s house? The wayfarer takes a branch of light from his lips and points his finger to a poplar tree and ushers him the way. But the way to the friend’s house is incredibly surreal and brimming with metaphors, similes, symbols and many more literary devices; where an alley of a garden is even greener than God’s dream. You also witness flowers of loneliness and find an eternal fountain of earthly myths gushing forth. ”At last,” the wayfarer says to the rider ” you will see a child who will lift a chick out of a nest of light. Ask him ‘Where is the friend’s house?’

If you declaim, in a vain enterprise, this poem to a man in a cubicle attending to the customers of a company, the reply would be pathetic. Then the question is what this poem gives us and why we should read it? The late eminent Indian critic Shamsur Rehman Farooq says this whole phenomenon of ” give and take” is in effect informed by capitalistic shibboleths. Literature is not created to prove a mathematical equation but it is created to try and understand what kind of creature we are. It is futile to expect a bonanza of precious stones that will make you rich from literature. What one must expect from literature is enhancement of human imagination and penetration into the entrails of human society. When human was in its precocious stage of life, what he did was gossip. This gossip fostered its imagination which led to an incredible capacity of memory.

Modern age is at a perpetual phase drifting into an abyss of information and data. There is no time for modern man to reprieve and bask in nature and what I understand in such a grossly fiendish and inhuman age only literature can cool us down. Literature does not wield a magic wand but it has that ineffable power to generate an aura of munificence and magnanimity in us. In a sense literature is a kind of refuge and an evanescent cancellation or postponement of what Beckett called the sin of being born. I am not very much pond of fantasy and pot-boiler fiction but I adore and truly appreciate the corpus of JRR Tolkien. Tolkien quite suavely illustrates my point. He writes, ” Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” Tolkien wrote fantasy, the Hobbit being my favourite, but I will conflate, and not circumscribe it into limits, fantasy with literature inasmuch as literature let us escape the excruciating freight of existence. I am not festooning literature with the crown of jewel, as it seems, but trying to take stock of its significance for us as a human civilization.

Literature imbues a nation with the thirst of reading and writing. English fiction writer E.M Forster writes, ” reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.” He is suggesting the thirst of knowledge was ignited by the clarion call of literature to West which concomitantly led the West to spread its tentacles across the world. But Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood adds something intriguing about the intrinsic affinity of literature with democracy which is the form of government the entire world profess. She writes, ” Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.” Ergo for a nation to spawn adamant democratic traits the passion of reading and writing literature becomes indispensable for it. A plethora of writers understand and write about literature in very different perspective but all concur that literature is very much important for us as a human civilisation.

Moreover, it is essential to note that to understand the rancour and rage of a people held in memory of a particular war, literature is the best area. In an article published in 2014 in the guardian news teenage site member alannahbee argues that we need literature, not facts and figures, to help young people fully understand that the war was fought by people just like them. Here the writer is indicative of WW1 which broke off on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914. How one can palpably understand the emotions of a mother whose entire family was did away with in the war by just skimming and scanning through history books of insipid facts and dates? To get an all-comprehensive feel one ought to bank on the literature produced at that period. What this suggests is that being human being the prism of literature can help us more understand our moorings, identities and footing on this earth than hard facts.

French philosopher Michel Foucault is a daunting and mercurial philosopher. His ideas are like poetries. Each time you read them they unleash different meanings. He writes ” Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.” And these line speak volumes to us in grappling with the meaninglessness of life, in a literary sense, precipitated upon us. I take these line more in literary terms than in philosophical terms. How literature permeates all other fields of knowledge is in itself a moot debate. Literature is pervasive, even some historians write history books while maintaining a literary flavour of writing and philosophy is more so.

I am an ardent buff of American poet Louise Gluck who was awarded Nobel Prize in literature in 2020. I adore her poetries because she gives fascinating lives to such ideas as death, existence and ambiguity of human nature. For example, in her poem the red poppy she writes, ” Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human?” This is the power of literature which gives birth to such questions in a facile style of poetic diction. I mentioned her here because this poem corroborates my idea of literature.” The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. ” Begins the read poppy. The governance of feelings is more halcyon, paradisiac and just than the governance of mind which is egregiously bad. Furthermore, these lines are important to understand how feelings are equally important as mind is. Even so, the mind is the place where feelings originate but human has ripped this relation. Louise Gluck finishes here poem with this melancholic line:” I speak because I am shattered.”

All in all, by the all aforementioned details it is now somehow clear how much literature is important to us. Life is worth living when there is literature. Imagine if there were no story, poetry and music how unsavoury and tasteless would our lives have become. That being said, what is striking of literature is that even the most distressing literature relays a kind of gentle feel to the reader as it helps him or her make sense of that distress felt by someone who is a stranger. In addition to that, we can say that literature is not confined by any theme and ideology as the post-modern theoretician of literature batter the walls of theories which try to minimize the options of interpretations to reader. Someone has rightly written, ” only the week minded refuse to be influenced by literature.”

The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at shahabakram0852@gmail.com