What is literature?

© 2019 IJRAR May 2019, Volume 6, Issue 2 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) What is literature? Dipankar Misra Asst. Prof. of English Gangarampur College & Viplav Kumar Mandal Asst. Prof. of English Gangarampur College Keywords: Life, Literature, Art, Fiction, Representation of life, Alternative life Abstract: It is intriguing to try to define what literature is. Some say it is a fictional representation of life which is taken to be a truthful presentation or rendering of the enigma or phenomena called life. Then if it is something false, how can it hold our attention, lure us after it like something better, brighter, more reverberating than the real life? Alternatively, what happens to our emotions and passions activated through our literary or Art experiences. This article seeks to explore these sweet-sour questions.Before handling any specific literary topic, let us first take up the question "What is literature." Aldous Huxley defined literature as 'a protest against life's inhospitality.' It is because life cheats us; it raises our hope only to dash it to the ground, and Art fulfills our aspirations. It presents an alternative life and world where dreams come true. That is why in the language of R.J. Rees, "We study literature primarily for pleasure."However, this has been the purpose of not the essence of literature, and we have to probe deeper to know what the differentia of literature is. So for this, we have to go to the Greek Masters Aristotle and Plato, for all the theories of literature began with these intellectual giants of Ancient Greece. They defined literature as the imitation of life, which reproduces life, and this mimetic theory in our time has become highly question-begging and is riddled with the shafts of critical questions from the critics. It is nebulous, inadequate, ambiguous and highly imprecise and this has been countered by Kant, the 18thcentury German Philosopher-who opined that Art is not imitative but creative. It creates a world of its own free from the bondage of reality. Art is not a mere photographic transcript of life. Art is fiction having the illusion of reality. So literature is fiction, imaginative and creative which brings into being something non-existent and this is the differentia which marks it out from the other branches of knowledge.So Art is a lie. But if it is a lie, how can it please us? If our mind is so prone to feed on falsehoods, these scientific machines such as computers and satellites would not have come into existence. So we will have to remember Polonius's (character in Shakespeare's play "Hamlet") "There is a method in his madness." That is, Hamlet had put on that 'antic disposition to know the truth about his father's assassin. That is why Picasso's words are here worth remembering, "Art is a lie to reveal the truth." However, there has been a dichotomy between fact and fiction and our ideas about them. Fiction is a tissue of lies. What were the figments of the artist's imagination seems to be more interesting than life itself? That is why it is well-said "Art is more real than life." But why? As we know, the spectator of a football match is privileged over the player with respect to watching the match. The player who is very much in the thick of the same cannot see it whole while the spectator can watch it through and through. Likewise, we the 'livers' of life cannot feel life as a whole while Art, which presents an image of life can satisfy our desire to "see life steadily and see it whole." So Art appears to be far more interesting than life itself. IJRAR19K2120 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR)www.ijrar.org 865 © 2019 IJRAR May 2019, Volume 6, Issue 2 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) But, as we know, Art takes its raw material from life so that the lies that it presents must ring true. It must be contextualized in their specific spaciotemporal juncture so that the situations and experiences of the characters must smack of truth. So a world is imagined into being. So fact and fiction are interchangeable—fiction changes into fact and vice versa. So it is a reversible process. "There is no absolute distinction between fact and fiction." ^ Every day in our newspapers we hear of the tragedies---thousands of people drowned; 20 died in a plane crash;…etc. But do they move us to tears? Are they not tantamount to falsehoods because they do not appeal to us—to our imagination and these are very likely to be forgotten. If life as life does not appeal to us, does it seem to be real? But who can forget the tragedies of Hamlet, Macbeth, Antonio, and Cleopatra? They are far more real to us than actual everyday tragedies. So life itself is a kind of falsehood because we are prone to forget it. And what is life? Philosophically speaking, one can deny the existence of everything but not one’s own existence. So, if one brushes aside literature, one can very well do the same with life. And modern philosophy and science do not believe in objective reality, but in subjective reality, i.e., the perceiver shaped reality. What is true to you is real for you and nothing else. And literature gives us the taste of this fleeting, watery, ever-changing reality. Now let us consider the question-what is this imaginative, artistic rendering or representation of life? Let us take an example. A beautiful girl began dreaming in her sleep that a fierce tiger was slouching towards her. She was terrified, breathless and began sobbing in her dream and the tiger came, and when it sprang upon her, she woke up with a blaring scream and to her pleasant surprise, found that she was dreaming and tears coursed down from her one eye, and she laughed at the other. The false tiger has drawn tears, but the realization of the truth made her laugh. Similarly, the lie that is presented on the stage can extract the real response of humanity whereas real-life experience may leave us proof against any such emotion as in the case of screaming banner headlines of a newspaper. However, there is a difference between art emotion and life emotion. Oscar Wilde has said that 'Art emotion is sterile while life emotion is active' Let us take the example of Shakespeare's "Othello." When he murders Desdemona by strangulating her- our emotion is stirred and becomes violent, but we sit still and enjoy the spectacle –How gracefully Othello murders Desdemona. But, when we hear the soul-killing scream of the wife of my next door neighbor being strangulated by her drunken husband, do we sit still? It gives rise to an active, powerful life emotion in us, and we rush to save the poor woman. So in practical life, we hate the ghastliness and cruelty of the same deed which we enjoy in a performance similar in point. So that is literature and real-life—Art and reality. Reality passing through the magic prism of the artist's imagination is fictionalized and reproduced. And this is literature. Reference: ^Difference Between Fact and Truth | Difference Between. http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-fact-and-truth/ IJRAR19K2120 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR)www.ijrar.org 866