Every year when the Swedish Academy announces the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, I find myself contemplating the same age-old questions. What does literature do? Why do we need literature? Would we be worse off, the way we would be worse off if there was no physics or medicine, without literary masterpieces? Simple as these questions may sound, a thorough analysis takes us into the very heart of our human condition.
Literature exists for several reasons. One reason for its enduring presence is that it serves as a witness to the events of the society. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, is a living document of the Spanish Civil War and, in general, of war itself as it vividly portrays the brutalities committed on battlefields. Similarly, Buddhisagar’s Karnali Blues captures the struggles and hardships of the people living in the Karnali region of Nepal. Tolstoy’s War and Peace brings to life the Russian Society of the Napoleonic era and Dickens’ David Copperfield lifts the woes of Victorian children from the ashes and ruins of nineteenth-century England.
Literature and int’l drama festival to be held in Janakpur
Literature is the memory of society. One devours books, great ones, of course, to learn what it meant to be alive a thousand or hundred years ago. However, this is not the only reason why we read masterpieces. More importantly, we also immerse ourselves into the world of classics to experience certain sensations, a certain avalanche that awakens our soul, that jolts us to the flame of self-realization. Emphasizing this virtue of literature, Kafka says, “But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply like that death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forest far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
In keeping with this idea Kafka’s legendary work, the Metamorphosis, cuts exactly like an axe into the heart of the readers. Astounding as its opening is, it enfolds the readers into its swampy world and by the time the novel ends one experiences a heavy stillness in his entire being, the stillness that prompts solitary self-contemplation. Similar, if not the same, experience is motivated while reading Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych. So graphic, so authentic and so deeply moving is the portrayal of the final throes of Ivan Ilych that one finds himself immediately sympathizing with his psychological and spiritual torments. This book, like any masterpiece, stirs us, awakens something powerful within us and, in doing so, stamps into our being the indelible sparks of self-realization.
Kafka and Tolstoy and writers of their genius move us with their words. One finishes Hamlet and one is no longer the same person who sat down to read it. One picks a story by Chekhov, say, The Lady with the Dog, settles at his study desk and disappears into its world, only to reappear as a different person, a wiser and more profound individual. Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, in a similar manner, brings about a transformation in one’s soul, and Tagore’s poetry sharpens one’s blade of perception so that one goes through life armed with the uncompromising ability to drink in everything that life has to offer. In short, literature makes us more human.
In a world threatened by the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, literature is what reminds us that we are more than mere thinking machines. We feel, and with what stormy force our heart throbs – literature is the expression of this fiery throbbing. This year’s Nobel Laureate, Han Kang, communicates this storm of her soul through her works, more specifically through her novel The Vegetarian. The Swedish Academy recognized her “intense poetic prose” while conferring on her the Nobel. This triumph of hers is not only her individual triumph but the triumph of literature itself, of the human soul itself, and as Kafka would put it, “of books that act like the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
