Why do people read fiction (or go to movies)? If the answer is for “amusement” or “entertainment”, will it be the same if the story or the movie ends tragically? Is it entertaining to be sad watching the “good” people defeated by the “evil” one? Fiction teaches its readers by providing them a vast range of experiences that they could not acquire otherwise. Especially for the relative young, conceptions of love, of success in life, of war, of malicious and cleansing virtue are learned from fiction –not from life. And herein lies a great danger, for literary artist are notorious liars, and their lies frequently become the source of people’s conviction about human nature and human society.
For
example, a huge number of tv series exploit Police force, or dedicated surgeon
at hospital, or lawyers always end with a capture, with a successful operation,
with justice triumphant. In the real world, only 10 percents of reported crimes
can be solved by police, and justice seems far away for people.
So,
why do we need literature?
Literature,
like other arts, is essentially an imaginative
act, that is, an act of the writer’s imagination in selecting, ordering
and interpreting life-experience. The
point is that a work of literature does not necessarily give us accurate
information about the way life is actually lived, rather it causes us it to recognize truth about human experience through the direct
presentation of selected experiences. Instead of telling us the way people
act or feel, it involves us in these actions and directs our responses to them.
As readers, we must acknowledge and respond to the essential truths that underlie the surface reality of literature. Reading on the surface level alone is only partly satisfactory. A full understanding and appreciation of literature depends on the ability to analyze and generalize as well.
First
of all one must grasp the exact details of the piece, the surface level in terms
of action, character, order of events and setting. Then one must begin to make
deductions as to theme or themes, the larger ideas that are represented by the
particular incidents of the work. Generalizations which follow must link the
details of the subject matter to a specific technical element of the composition
as well to a relevant aspect of the theme which is being expressed.
Literature presents situations, interactions and oppositions. It suggests a spectrum of values, even of attitudes, but it rarely hand down formulated judgements and conclusions. The reader not only enters into the experience of the action and characters as it unfolds, but he is also left to his own conclusions and evaluations of that experience, of its truthfulness and relevance to real life.
Language –that is, words as they are spoken or written- is the artistic medium or material of all literature. Imaginative literature may go so far as to create worlds and events which never have existed or never can. The illusion of reality in literature presents neither more or less difficulty than the conscious distortion used to focus attention on an idea, a stage of being or the quality of an emotional experience. In both cases, an understanding of the author’s vision comes through a systematic appreciation of or response to the form and texture of composition.
As the work of art, literature also has its own aesthetic pleasure which is not only a general awareness of beauty, but rather precise recognition of design and pattern. Like watching football, the pleasure of player and spectator alike lies in the skill with which the limitations imposed are overcome by expertise and technical accomplishment. In literature, there is the larger structure and composition of events, characters and setting which should be both striking and original. On the other hand, there is recurrence of situations, attitudes, and stylistic characteristics which build up and reinforce our consciousness of a single concept of theme.