LIterature and society

Literature is a creative process. The basic fact about literature is

that the creative individual is indispensable. Without the individual talent there

can be no creation. The artist possesses a specific creative gift that enables him

to use language according to his individual genius. After all, this is how

masterpieces are created. A creative artist like any ordinary individual perceives

the reality but sensitive as he is, he stimulates that reality and imaginatively

transforms it into something new which we call a work of art. The basic question

is for whom does the artist write. A writer may want to share a common

experience, which he finds valuable, or he may write for aesthetic appreciation,

or even for commercial benefits. In all these cases, the essential need is the

interaction with the society. A writer needs the society, as much as the society

might respond to his work. Howsoever gifted a writer might be, no work of art can

possibly be created or appreciated in isolation.

A writer's work is not merely an activity of the body or his sensuous nature.

It is undoubtedly an activity of his consciousness. A writer may claim to create art

out of his own imaginative vision. He may assert that he is confined strictly to its

aesthetic aspects, and writes only to satisfy his creative instincts. Yet the fact

remains that even to the most individualistic writer, the ideas come only through

an experience with life. Even the most escapist writer can create an imaginary

world only after experiencing the realities of the world around him. The work of

an artistic creation is not a work performed in an exclusive or complete fashion

in the mind of the person, who may be addressed as a writer. The idea that comes

to the artist's mind may be a delusion bred of individualistic psychology, together

with a false view of the relation, not so much between body and mind, as between

experience at the physical level and experience at the level of thought. The

aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness converting

into imagination, an experience which is sensuous. The good writer uses his

skill aesthetically in such a manner as to give form to his work, so that the work

is enjoyed not only by a literary and an intellectual reader, but also understood

by a society in general. After all, art is a fusion of literary scholarship and

emotions. It ought to cater to both, the brain that comprehends, and the heart

that feels. The aim of a constructive writer is to use his creative ability, both to

please as well as to instruct. The gifted writer uses his skill to express his

innermost experience. Yet, even the language that he uses is also a social and

cultural construct.

This debate establishes the fact, that the age, the period, and the society,

in which the individual creates, have an essential role to play in any creative

process. Literature as an expression of an artist's sensitivity can only find

fulfilment in the social and cultural set up. No literature is written in a vacuum,

it needs a referent, and a background. No art can grow out of the sole attempt of

a writer. The activity of writing is a corporate activity belonging not only to any

one human being, but to a community. It is performed not only by a man who is

individualistically called 'a writer', but partly by all the other writers to whom

one speaks as influencing him where one really means by collaborating with

him. The activity of artistic creation is not complete without the society, whose

function is not merely a receptive one, but a collaborative one too. The writer

and his work thus stand in a collaborative relation with the entire social and

cultural background. By recognising these relationships and counting upon them

in his work, he strengthens and enriches the work and by denying it, he only

impoverishes literature, which he produces. The most recommended theory for

the writer is to realize one's place as an integral part of a collective embodiment.

The writer is both a mediator and an individual, he is a product of a culture and

also a recipient of its literary and intellectual heritage. Keeping in view this

aspect, it is obvious that all literature is rooted in the age. Each work of art is the

creation of innumerable processes of consciousness, in which, history, culture,

and art play a significant role in the development of each other.

Thus, the basic notion that underlines the relationship between literature

and society is the fact that art in every form is a communal effort. A writer's world

has its roots in the lived reality. He is a medium, who takes in, responds and

gives. According to F.R. Leavis :

The individual writer has to be aware that his work is of the society,

to which it belongs, and not merely added externally to it. A

literature, that is, must be thought of as essentially something more

than an accumulation of separate work, it has organic form, or

constitutes an organic order, in relation to which the individual

writer has his significance and his being.

A writer must be aware that the mind of his country, a mind, which he learns in

time to be much more important than his own private mind, is a mind, which

changes. So his mind is a part of a larger phenomenon, termed as society. All

literature has deep-rooted impressions of the age of its creation.

It is to be noted that under the spell of individualistic prejudices, the writer

may deny the topical influences on his work, but intentionally or unintentionally,

the writer is bound to reflect his age and society. Literature promotes the social

sharing of highly valued emotional experiences and it recalls to men their cultural

ideas. The most valuable works of art so often carry an implication about the society

that they are written for. Literature has played an important role in projecting the

features of every age. In spite of the universality of Shakespeare's plays, it is easy

to discern the Elizabethan characteristics in his works. The entire Elizabethan

theatre was itself a mirror, which had been formed at the centre of the culture of its

time and at the centre of life and awareness of the community. The dramatic art of

Shakespeare and even that of Sophocles, were developed in theatres which focused

at the centre of the life of the community and the complimentary insights of culture.

The relationship between literature and society cannot be more emphasised

than in the works of the writers of the Augustan Age (1700-1745). The leading

writers of this period, (such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison,

Richard Steele and John Dryden) greatly admired the Roman Augustans, and

deliberately imitated their literary forms and subjects. Their emphasis, however,

was on the immediate social concerns, and their ideals of moderation, decorum

and urbanity made the literature of this period leave a heavy stress on the social

aspects. The insistence, that man is a social being, was such as to mean in effect

that all his activities, inner as well as outer, the literature took cognizance of,

were to belong to an overtly social context. Even the finest expressions of the

spirit were to be in resonance with a code of good form, for with such a code the

essential modes and idioms of Augustan culture were intimately associated. The

characteristic movements and dictions of the eighteenth century, in verse as

well as in prose, convey a suggestion of social deportment and company manners.

An age in which such a tradition gets itself established is clearly an age in which

the writer feels himself very much at one with the society. The writer belonging to

such a tradition, projects the truth of the contemporary society, whether he satirizes

it, condemns it, or displays its flaws and blemishes, exposes its reality, or even tries

to uplift the culture. In so doing, the literature produced by such a writer turns out

to be completely a reflection of the age. Likewise, the contemporary life of the 18th

century became the sole subject of the writers of the Augustan Period.

Though the Romantic poets of the 19th century were rather subjective and

introvert in dealing with the things natural (William Wordsworth) and

supernatural (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), they did not exist outside the society.

They did belong to a particular society and their interaction among themselves,

hints at their dependence upon each other, and life around them. Even if a poet

like William Blake claimed : "It is I who see and feel. I see what I see and feel

what I feel. My experience is mine, and in its specific quality lies its significance",

yet the fact remains that the language that Blake used was English language and

not one of his own invention. It is the language that he learnt through an

interaction with his society. Moreover, even if Blake did not expect much of a

readership (he gave up publishing in a serious way, at a very early stage) the

subjects of his poetry, in spite of his mysticism, have a complexion of the life

around him. Unlike the Augustans, these Romantic poets did not seem to have

the society, as a sole objective of their writings. In any case, their poetry, which

comes more or less as a reaction to the Neo-classical writers even in a drift from

the immediate surroundings, did not dwell outside the realm of human realities.

Even though Wordsworth's theory of poetry stated : "Poetry is a spontaneous

overflow of feelings, recollected in tranquillity". This great worshipper of nature

did write about the "Solitary Reaper", "Lucy Gray" and "An Idiot Boy". These are

memorable figures picked out of human life that Wordsworth experienced

sensitively and emotionally. Moreover, Wordsworth came even more close to

society, because he always aimed to have his readership among the common

people. Even John Keats, whose dejection and despondency led him to escape

into a world of imagination could not keep himself removed from the life that he

had left behind. Keats returned to the world of reality as a changed man, but he

returned anyway. P.B. Shelley, the rebel, experienced the world and reacted in a

rebellion, yet, what he rebelled against was the world, where he was born and

bred. The tendency to construct an ivory tower of one's own and to live in a world

of one's own devicing, cut off, not only from the ordinary world of common people,

but even from the corresponding world of the other artists is neither fruitful for

the poet, nor the society, to which he belongs.

If the Romantic poets of the 19th century spoke of their experience as mystics

and spiritualists, for the Victorian writers, the 19th century English society once

again became the main concern. Unlike the Neo-Classicists, the Victorian writers

not merely ridiculed or satirized the vices of society. They did not aim only to instruct

through amusement. More philosophic in their approach towards life, writers like

Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Browning and Tennyson, dealt with the social problems

as reformers. In the 19th century England, several changes occurred, shaking the

society to its foundations and leaving people in a state of mental turmoil. Old beliefs

and convictions were undermined and people were groping for a life-line in the

chaos around them. At this crucial stage, literary men acted as beacon of light.

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is a perfect expression of this phase of English

society. It is a statement to be taken as it stands, of what money can do, good and

bad, how it can change, make distinction of a class, how it can prevent virtue,

sweeten manners, open up new fields of enjoyment and suspicion. The mood of the

book represents the true reality of the age. Other novelists of this age described

in their works the mammonism and squalor in the society, and highlighted the

need for love, understanding and companionship, rejecting materialistic values.

Charlotte Bronte in her works, realistically focused direct attention on men and

women and their conditions. The literature produced by these writers is a

manifestation of the conditions prevailing in the contemporary society.

While discussing this deep rooted alliance between literature and society,

the important factor to be noted is that though Literature reflects the age and deals

with life at all levels, it may not be construed as just a documentation. An artist,

a writer, after all is not merely a chronicler. What he gives is surely an imaginative

recording of the facts. A crucial debate that has engaged many literary critics is the

position of an artist as a creator and as an imitator. But the end result of such

discussions and debates, is clearly the fact that even though an artist may be

considered to be a God, a creator, who gives form through his skill as a writer yet

this form obviously takes an initiative from the life around him. A true artist, as the

conscience of the race, tries to use his genius as a writer in such a way that

human race finds proper nourishment in his work. Even the literature of the

twentieth century holds the position of informing, instructing and guiding the

contemporary life characterised by complete disorder and chaos. The writers of

the present century like T.S. Eliot, have dealt enthusiastically with the modern

sensibility. T.S. Eliot has dexterously delineated the picture of the modern waste

land, depicting the structure of feelings of isolation, meaninglessness of life and

the consequent frustrations. But it is in the writings of the literary artists, that

man actually comes to view reality and at the same time finds the underlying

hope and a note of affirmation. It is the poet who helps an ordinary man to

understand his real situation and learn to struggle with the reality, and find

means of survival.

The relationship between literature and society to which the writer belongs

and for whom he writes, can thus be concluded by what Pope said. When Pope

wrote that the poet's business was to say "what oft was thought, but never so well

expressed", we may interpret his words as meaning that the poet's difference from

his readers lies in the fact that, though both do exactly the same thing, namely

express a particular emotion in particular words, the poet is a man, who can

solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the readers can express it

only when the poet has shown them how to do so. The poet is not singular either

in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing it; he is singular only in

his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel, and all may want to

express. If writers are really to express what all have felt, they ought to share

emotions of all. Their experience, the general attitude they express towards life,

must be of the same kind as that of the persons, among whom they hope to find a

readership. If they form themselves into a special clique, the emotions they express

will be the emotions only of that clique. The writer, if he wants to produce healthy

and fruitful literature ought to step out of his own subjectivity and isolation and

the most essential theory prescribed for a writer, who writes with a serious purpose

is to realize one's place as an integral part of a collective embodiment.

If the contemporary literary scenario is suffering a setback, it is only

because of the characterized break between the self and the community. The

impasse has grown out of the split between the human ego and the universe. This

break is an expression of a unique human being's attempt to create himself in

his own image and his attempt to claim the primacy of the human ego. In no way

can the isolated artist create fruitful art out of his unique self. Man in his art, as

in everything else, is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to

others like himself. As artist, he uses certain language and writes a certain word,

and this language, he has learned from the world to which he belongs. Even the

most precocious of the poets learns and reads poetry before he writes.

Moreover, just as every artist stands in relation to the other artists, from whom

he has acquired his art, so he stands in relation to the society for which he writes it.

The theories of Plato and Aristotle still stand more valid than the theories

that profess the significance of art only for art's sake. Such art can be understood

by a distinguished class of poets, who believe themselves to be poets, removed

from reality.