Why Literature
Literature prompts us to reflect on the human condition. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth we meet a man who craves power. Once attained, he discovers it brings with it a force as consequential as Aeolus’s bag of wind. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God connects us to a woman of color set on freeing herself from the shackles of patriarchy. Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca) lets us in on LGBT community’s resilience in the face of authoritarianism.
Literature is more than the sum of its parts. A voice within it speaks to us. Listen and let it take you. Where? Read and find out. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, offers his readers extraordinary panoramas of past, present, and future in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 probes authoritarianism’s ultimate failure to subjugate the spirit of inquiry. We read literature because minds require knowledge for growth. Left unfed the mind withers. But too often politics dilute or erase literature’s potential. Classrooms, libraries, and media become the victims of gatekeepers.
Literature folds into the arms of the Humanist Tradition, that product of the Enlightenment and ancient Greece’s tradition of democracy and open inquiry. It can incite pushback against the sentinels of propriety by offering voices old and new that speak to the most fundamental questions of our existence. To read works by voices from different races and ethnicities, different gender and sexual identities, different aesthetics and ideological perspectives opens dimensions that could otherwise stay closed. For humans to blossom, literature must be unbound.
