With respect to literature’s
filed in Uncategorized on Sep.02, 2010
I have two problems this evening, each less serious than the other.
The first is that I was invited back to Penn State to address the subject “The Impact of Literature Upon Contemporary Society,” your general visiting-lecture-series topic this season. You have set aside your usual and normal evening pursuits to hear what this particular novelist has to say upon that particular subject. But (a) after twenty-five years of professing literature and presiding over apprentice writers — twelve of those years here at University Park, PA — I’ve yet to master the art of formally lecturing on anything, or for that matter of talking and writing on a blackboard simultaneously. Furthermore, (b) I suspect that literature has no impact, or even any measurable effect, on contemporary society. I am reminded of a colleague from my Penn State days who went to India on a Fulbright grant to study the influence of communism on outlying villages in northern India. Having investigated the matter on location for a full year, he urgently applied for and was awarded a renewal of his research grant in order to continue his field investigations. At the end of two years, he returned to this university and published a report which declared, in essence, that there was no significant influence of communism on outlying villages in northern India.
With respect to literature’s impact upon contemporary society, W. H. Auden said it right: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Neither does fiction, as a rule, even engagée fiction. The sort of fiction that does affect the world of affairs is likely not to be first-rate art, even when, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it is first-rate moral propaganda. Many of us would put Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this category: it is not War and Peace, but Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe during the American Civil War: “So you’re the little lady who caused all this.” The best fiction of Vladimir Nabokov is in my opinion incomparably better stuff than Solzhenitsyn’s; yet Nabokov’s declared objective — so far from changing the world or “impacting” contemporary society, as they say nowadays — is “mere aesthetic bliss.”
So. I have asked and been granted permission to turn the topic around, since contemporary society indisputably has an impact upon contemporary literature. Here is what I have to say
