The Importance Of Writing: Literature, Power And Responsibility

The importance of writing: literature, power and responsibility

  The objective of this essay is to reflect on several issues on the conception of literature and the function or functions that it can have for us and our lives. To answer these issues, writings of J will be taken into account. Franzen as more outside or "the essay in dark times" along with other related materials.

In his most outside essay (2012), Franzen presents a modern society model in consumerism, product of the capitalist system, and obsessed with the search for pleasure. However, what society considers pleasures are actually uncontrollable addictions, as is the case with random games. It is then that the American writer goes to Dostoevski and his novel The Player (1866), whose protagonist suffers addiction to the roulette game. With this example, Franzen tries to investigate the exercise, perhaps therapeutic, which means writing a novel, because Dostoevski himself suffered addiction to that game when he wrote about Alexei Ivanovich’s misadventures.

And when it comes to looking for what literature could do for us, the answer is always oriented to readers, ignoring writers, both poetry and novels. However, from the ideas exhibited more outside, a new debate about what purposes can have the literature and what it means to make literature from the point of view of the writer himself. Writing a literary work goes from being a simple exercise of ‘creation’ to being an exercise of responsibility and, in the case of the Russian writer, we could say that literature was also an exercise in pure survival.

Dostoevski was in a prison that he himself had created from his grocer. As soon as the player’s project begins, he finally reflects on his addictions and tries to start a new life with what would be his second wife. Literature in this case has clearly demonstrated a form of therapy and salvation. And it is not the only case in which literature can benefit anyone who receives it. Literature has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate that it is an effective tool to cope with psychological problems. Readers like this are able to interpret their own conflicts and finally understand them ‘better’. The latter does not mean that literature serves as a solution to problems, but that reading and writing serve to deal with problems such as loneliness and isolation. Such problems now have a strong prominence. The fact of being in quarantine, isolated from any contact with the outside world, has made people reject the screens to which they have become accustomed by replacing them with books. This has made it possible to travel and meet new cultures and customs without leaving our homes. What was previously considered a hobby among many others has become something much more valuable and significant.

From this last deduction, we could consider these effects that literature has on writers and in readers as literariness. In other words, we could identify literary texts of what are not from that criterion: complexity in terms of sensations, relationship with one’s own experience, precise and at the same time abstract representation of the world, etc. These aspects are also characteristic of philosophy, but literature compared to the latter is open to multiple interpretations, that is, it does not admit a single truth. That is why, when speaking from a literary point of view, there can never be incorrect answers or conclusions provided they are justified. In fact, for each reader there is a different interpretation towards a specific work. The reason is simple: since each reader relates the facts to their own environment, the meaning that will contribute to a reading will be connected to its environment. For this reason, readers constantly and involuntarily do exercises of literary criticism and comparative literature from their own experiences and the different works that enrich their minds.

From this idea, we could also consider literature as an exercise of responsibility by writers. It is a full concentration exercise in which a writer becomes a great responsibility due to the influence that his future work can have in the public. Literature can be considered as something powerful by many or as something dangerous by many others. The censorship teams were aware of this, and, although there are currently such organizations, in many occasions it is tried to avoid the reading of certain writings or tends to undervalue the message that many other works transmit. For example, when the blind sunflowers of Alberto Méndez was eliminated from the list of mandatory readings for the Castilian language and literature test on the EBAU despite the fact that this novel is a strong criticism of the historical memory of Spain;or when you tend to classify novels as youth literature when they come to deal with such recurring issues as mass consumerism, corruption or inequality between rich and poor.

The exercise of ‘doing literature’ then converts a writer into someone influential, but at the same time it makes him someone vulnerable and subject to great pressure. Above all, at present, due to the need for social acceptance and fear of rejection. Perhaps a writer wants to include a series of events in his novel, but he is forced not to do so because his editorial or his readers would not agree with his decision. This does not mean that currently a writer can suffer as much as Paul Sheldon in Misery, but it is true that a writer ends up leaving behind his ‘essence’ due to criticism and fear of disappointing the public.

But reading should be the opposite. If literature is one of the few things that can offer us critical thought, it should not be limited. Read and write have a positive effect worldwide, as mentioned above. And right now that the mental health of people hangs from a thread in many cases due to isolation, reading and writing should be enhanced to the maximum. And it is that literature, in addition to making ourselves ask ourselves who we are or what role we have in the world, makes us enjoy in an inexplicable way;And it gives us a much more valuable well -being than that material and ephemeral well -being that the passions referred to by the American writer on the most outside.