Download Literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to

Literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to talk about
To say that literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to talk about
oversimplifies literature. For a start, it is impossible to objectively claim any given literature to be the
“best”, and so we must initially amend the statement to a claim that literature is powerful when
doing so. Literature certainly is so; books like A Passage to India demonstrate this well, and are
powerful due to this element of communicating truths that would otherwise be too difficult to talk
about. However, to say this is always true presupposes several things; it presupposes that “truth” is
an absolute, is being communicated by an author in absolute possession of this truth to the reader,
and finally that “truth” is always an active, defined thing. The first two are incorrect because the
“truth” that a work conveys is determined by the reader as much as by the writer, and indeed the
writer need not know the truth that they are supposedly communicating; The Merchant of Venice
serves as an excellent example of this. The last is a more complex flaw in the statement, and is best
highlighted in Hamlet, where the truth communicated is rather the absence of truth; the fact that
there is no absolute answer is the position communicated to the reader, instead of the universal
clear truth supposed in the statement. These examples demonstrate that the statement only applies
to a subsection of literature, and while that subsection does in fact derive its power from the
communication of a “truth” – or at least what the writer considers a truth – other works can derive
equal or even greater power from communicating either changing truths, defined by the reader
instead of the writer, or even, rarely, communicating the very lack of truth.
A Passage to India highlights the fact that the statement can in fact be true in many cases. It
attempts to communicate the idea that the situation in India in the British Raj was incredibly
complicated, and that it was impossible to tell if things would be better when it was removed, but
that despite that Indian independence was the only real option. This is a superb example of
something that it too painful to talk about, because fundamentally this is something that requires us
to be divorced from our preconceived groupings and prior opinions; if we already held that Indian
independence was a moral necessity, a discussion of the topic in this light would be impossible, and
so only a textural way of communicating is possible. A Passage to India is definitely communicating a
truth to us, in the sense of the author telling the reader something specific about the world; lines
like “you can’t break ranks… we can’t break the phalanx” and “no, we can never be friends… not
until India is free” demonstrate this effectively, communicating worldviews both of the British
imperial administration and the Indian populace. This is not, of course, necessarily an absolute truth,
but it is the closest that literature gets to conforming to the proffered statement; it communicates
something that many people have felt to be insightful, and is a very powerful piece. Note, of course,
that there is no question of declaring A Passage to India to be the best literature by some objective
standard; it is powerful (R. Barthes famously said that it is “the best understanding of India a nonIndian can reach”) but not uniquely so. A Passage to India, furthermore, is a work that does not
purely rely on the fact that it communicates a truth to be powerful; it draws on the strength of its
imagery and language, instead, such as “The city, not caressed by the Ganges but bounded by it”.
This means that even when literature draws power from communicating truths too painful to talk
about, this is not the sole mainspring of its power.
However, A Passage to India is unusual in that it has an absolute, maintained truth. In contrast,
works like The Merchant of Venice has the “truth” it conveys shift with the viewer, because of the
way that the truth is bound up with the socio-political context in which it was written. While to
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan audience that he was writing for would have interpreted the story
as a straight-forward morality tale, where the “cursed Jew” who “hates him [Antonio] for he is a
Literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to talk about
Christian” is brought down by the heroic Christians, we as a modern audience are more inclined to
take a favourable view of Shylock; we listen appreciatively to his famous “hath not a Jew eyes?”
speech, and thus view him as a fully developed human character. Of course, this is due in no small
part to the almost miraculously flexible character of Shakespeare’s plays; if he had not written those
speeches in there, such an interpretation of Shylock would prove impossible, but he did, and so we
have the ability to reinterpret the play with changing time. Shakespeare, however, merely serves as
the exemplar of a characteristic of all great literature; AC Bradley said that “every age, every nation,
and every person takes something different from Shakespeare” but this is not merely restricted to
him. The Merchant of Venice provides an excellent demonstration of the fact that what we as
audience view as truth can change, instead of being the platonic absolute implied by the statement;
we can take a different truth from literature than that taken by the original author, as we can extract
a positive view of Shylock from a play constructed around the idea of Jew as devil, whose “house is
hell” and who cares more for his “ducats” than his “daughter”. We should remember, of course, that
Shakespeare certainly did not intend this as the primary view of his play, but that instead we as
reader create the meaning independently; while this essay will stop short of fully embracing ReaderResponse theory, we must accept it to some extent with regard to The Merchant of Venice. This
inherently means that communication is not happening, because communication requires two
entities; a communicator and a receiver, and in this schema the receiver is creating the message; no
communication is taking place, even if the way the text evokes a response is superficially similar.
Texts like Hamlet go even further away from the paradigm defined by the statement. Whereas The
Merchant of Venice evoked a truth which was fundamentally non-communicated, Hamlet only
evokes the idea that truth is fundamentally unachievable. The central dilemma of Hamlet is simply
the extent to which action to remove “a sea of troubles” is virtuous; this is expressed in every
soliloquy of the play, from “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” to “to be or not to be”,
displacing the apparent tension about whether Hamlet should avenge his father’s death by the first
act (after which, recall, he has decided that “if I have any of the son in me / I should not suffer it”,
and then devotes the rest of the play to bewailing his inaction) and then reaching centre stage
throughout. While in A Passage to India, this tension was finally resolved by the author literally
telling us that there can be no dialogue between the two groups until “India is free”, and in The
Merchant of Venice the tension is resolved, but in a different manner now than when Shakespeare
wrote it, in Hamlet the tension remains, unassailable, until the play is brought to an end by the utter
destruction of the cast. Indeed, even beyond this, there is a very real sense that the answer to this
question is unexpressed; Hamlet ends his most famous soliloquy on what AC Bradley called “a damp
squib”, when he concludes “thus conscience does make cowards of us all”. This has been noticed by
many critics, perhaps most importantly by ST Coleridge, who argued that Hamlet was “a dramatic
failure” because “it fails to express its fundamental conflict”. However, a more modern reading of
the play would instead be that the play attempts to express the inexpressible, and does not actually
expect to succeed; rather, it aims to illuminate the impossibility of an answer emerging, the
impossibility of a “truth” ever being found. In a world where we can mathematically show that any
system of rules must contain insolvable propositions (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem) Hamlet
serves to demonstrate the truth of that for certain propositions within our ethical system. This is the
polar opposite of the idea put forth by the statement, as Hamlet is without question not illuminating
a truth; it is rather illuminating the absence of truth, and the futility of the search thereof.
Literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to talk about
In conclusion, the statement “Literature at its best is a way of communicating truths too difficult to
talk about” is fundamentally an oversimplification of the situation. Rather, literature can be powerful
for a range of different reasons; it is, after all, simply a vector for information and ideas, and thus
can be expected to encompass the entirety of human experience. While some literature does indeed
derive its power from communicating truths too difficult to talk about, like for instance A Passage to
India, this is not true for many other texts. The Merchant of Venice demonstrates that the truth the
audience takes from a text can change hugely with time, which inherently demonstrates that
communication is not taking place. Even further from the proffered statement, Hamlet
demonstrates to readers that truth cannot in the end be found; that the quandary pondered by
Hamlet is insolvable within the framework of human morality, and only an act of god – Laertes
taking action – can remove the problem. Even then, the problem is not truly resolved, since the
death of the characters does not actually constitute a resolution of the issues discussed. This means
that the statement is fundamentally inaccurate, and while it does highlight an important area of
literature, and arguably one of the most important roles that literature fills in our society, this is
insufficient to declare it to be the sole arbiter of the “best” literature. We must then conclude by
absolutely disavowing the statement.