Literature and Understanding

 Literature & Understanding

You are more complicated than you believe. Literature is a means of explicating behaviours of humanity to teach readers about themselves. Literature helps us make sense of our world. I think a dangerous number of people have forgone a valuable experience that would dramatically change their lives if they read literature. I hope this piece of writing will encourage people like yourself to realise the importance of making sense of their world through literature. 

Literature and Understanding

I asked these questions to make my research clearer. 

What about literature helps us make sense of our world. 

What about literature does not help us make sense of our own world? 

Why does it have this effect? 

So what about this is important to showing us how our minds work? 

Literature and Understanding

Q1: What about literature helps us make sense of our world? 

Literature and Understanding

In this section I will examine three ways in which literature helps readers make sense of their world. The first is anthropology; the second philosophy; the third malevolence.  

Literature and Understanding

Anthropology

Literature and Understanding

Anthropologists, especially ethnographers, help us make sense of the world because they go into places and observe, describe and exp,ian those places to us. Authors are similar to ethnographers because of the way that novels work. Novels are written about They are used as a teaching technique because of their ability to relate to the wider world, the wider cause and create a link to the individual. I got this understanding from an article on Savageminds.org by ‘rachelita2’ in 2013 who formed the view that because authors who write fiction have to use what they know to expand their imagination. Writing is as much a social analysis, as it is a way of storytelling for people to make sense of their world, so might the authors themselves, as anthropologists, take it into account, both as a form of the social analysis and the outlet for our own observation of reality. I remember this quote by Mark Twain being recanted by a famous astrophysicist, Neil degrasse Tyson when I was attending his show ‘A Cosmic Perspective’. “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please”. So in fiction and nonfiction the link between a wider world and the individual is made because of the relationship the writer has through their observation of the world. The biographical or scientific writer will write based on pure fact and hypothesis, because this is their duty to educate the world scientifically, but the fiction writer is tasked with the responsibility of entertainment not only to the reader but his thoughts and does as Mark Twain suggests. 

Literature and Understanding

Many authors however are what we know as philosophers, similar to the scientist but one who specialises in the nature of man and this is possibly the most literal form of an observation on reality, but what you must understand is that there is more than one reality which exists within an individual. Realities which exist in all walks of experience mentally, objectively, spiritually and emotionally. These authors are people like Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Emil Cioran, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and more, but these are just philosophers which aided me in my understanding of my own self. There is however a particular author, who writes Sci Fi, in his work, from my understanding of an article based on an interview with R Scott Bakker by Helen De Cruz 2015 it was discussed how he set his world a realm of medieval fantasy and a story populated with alien civilisations (this reminded me of one of my favourite authors Raymond E. Feist) but the method to the use of alien races was to emulate different philosophies in aliens who resemble humanoid descent, to explore how they might figure themselves out. In the author's opinion his books help the reader and himself understand what has become of meaning in the world. R Scott Bakker had this to say, “Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we can presume that ‘humanoid’ aliens would be profoundly stumped by themselves, and that they would possess a philosophical tradition organized around ‘hard problems’ falling out of their inability to square their scientific self-understanding with their traditional and/or intuitive self-understanding. As speculative as any such consideration of ‘alien philosophy’ must be, it provides a striking, and perhaps important, way to recontextualize contemporary human debates regarding cognition and consciousness.”

Literature and Understanding

Jordan B Peterson gives a lecture uploaded to youtube 2017 on the topic of Harry Potter and the Jungian Shadow, providing a psychoanalytical perspective on ‘Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets”. Jordan B peterson speaks about the importance of being able to withstand and fight malevolence by understanding your own inner shadow. He does this by explaining the archetypal story behind the Harry Potter series. The fight with malevolence, the struggle we all face and asks us to reflect on ourselves before we analyse society. Harry Potter however is a more fictional experience than real and so we should look to the poems and scriptures written by soldiers returned or passed as it is reported in a 2014 article “When the war is over, literature can help us make sense of it all” and how they came to understand themselves which serves as a link for us into a glimpse of their world. 

I think what I got from the whole talk also sat well with me because it reminded me so much of Lord of the Flies. A book I read the previous year, which taught me that sin was inherent in our nature and even in a heaven we would manage to falter that world, Sin is like a seed which grows when it is most delicate. Later I would find that Dostoevsky had written a book called the brothers Karamazov and within it was a chapter called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ it imagined that the second coming of christ already took place and he’d appeared in Spain during the highest power of the catholic church and Christ had returned to renew his teachings. But the grand inquisitor has Jesus arrested and sent to an underground confine. In the middle of the night, the inquisitor visits jesus and explains that he cannot allow Jesus to perform his teachings on this Earth, because he threatened a great instability to society. He said that Christ was too ambitious, too pure, too…perfect. The fact is people have not been able to live according to his law, that Jesus should admit he failed and his Ideas of redemption were essentially misguided. But The Grand Inquisitor is not a monster but he is in fact portrayed admirably. He is a guide to a crucial idea… that human beings cannot survive in purity and this is something we should reconcile with gracefully, rather than with fury. This is an example of how Literature grants us wisdom and disillusionment. 

Literature and Understanding

Q2: What about literature does not help? In this question I will address the ability to create romanticism and cynicism. 

Literature and Understanding

Thanks to the help of a few videos by School of Life in 2016 I was able to find there is a disappointing aspect to literature. Although not as harmful reading can be like a drug with the symptoms producing a disappointed idealist. A person who comes away from a story, from their escape to return back into reality and make them sometimes resentful to the mundanity of everyday life as opposed to the worlds we romanticise over when we lie awake at night or look out the classroom window wishing for an alternate universe where we were somehow the protagonist of a galaxy far far away… or someplace once upon a time, even something more simple where we just led a more desirable life than what we currently endure. I think this is where the cult of nerds and geeks flock to. They are sort of in their own religion and this can be a good thing, especially for introverts but the flip side to this coin is that it is just a tail. People try to live the same way as their characters, I could say that as early as the 1800’s did humanity try to simulate or replicate the love lives and habits of characters and stories in books and media which so dangerously became ingrained into our society, making people think there was a correct way that love should be had and followed by say … a series of steps or gestures that had been used in something humanity had observed in literature or movies. Take Paris as a quick example, so many people romanticize Paris and then once they get there they realize it's just full of bitter, chain-smoking people and the streets smell nothing like perfume and roses. As a result (although I personally love this atmosphere) it produces a fresh batch of pessimists and cynics who deny their hope for something better in the world that could serve them some kind of happiness.

Literature and Understanding

Q3 & 4: Why does it have this effect and what is so important? In this question I investigate the importance of knowing the effects of reading and what they do.

A debate has erupted over whether reading fiction makes human beings more moral. But what if its real value consists in something even more fundamental? An argument formed by Annie Paul in 2013 suggesting that, reading made us more intelligent and compassionate beings. She says that we can do this by doing the sort of reading which great literature requires, a more in depth inclination for our cognitive function to contribute with empathy to their characters. Annie Paul also makes a point which I think is cognitively fundamental and I thoroughly agree with, when she makes the opinion that a true in depth use of reading is by which we slip unconsciously and often helplessly into the other's skin, voice and soul. She states that other conclusions similar to her like Oakley and Mars are supported by recent studies in neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science. The studies speak that deep reading, the kind that involves slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity is a distinctive experience. Which differs from what the social norm considers to be reading by decoding symbols. But not only is it to read in a mechanistic way as it is to learn the very human way of the finding of meaning and and of interpreting when it comes to reading the person or situation in the story. 

“The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. ... Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read--and what we absorb from our reading -- will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.”

Literature and Understanding

I think and I use my experience as a reader and student of the sources I used to aid me in this essay, that Literature has an entire Universe to offer as my previous examination of the Book Thief also proved to state. Books offer education, it was what we used before the internet. It gave us meaning and purpose and drive and still does to those devoted to the ‘art’ of reading. I do believe we can gain an understanding of the world, because that is why our ancestors wrote them and left them in libraries for, it was for us to learn from them, the stories and fables which they used to explain anything and everything to children and adults about how to be with the world and interact with the many things in it. Although the negative part is fiction can give us a sense of falsity that we should live a certain way or the world should be a certain place, but books also serve to show us that there are a great many realities we have to face and that is how we should overcome them. We should not become entrapped in the book but rather entrap the book in us and our reality. As Victor Hugo said “ The Human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal we live”