Padma Devkota

What Is Good Literature?[1]

I want to begin by thanking the Literary Association of Nepal (LAN) for giving me this pleasant and honorable task of lighting the inaugural lamp today on the occasion of its Annual Conference 2013. May the light of this lamp burn throughout the year! May it kindle in our hearts a love for good literature, a thirst for the pursuit happiness through knowledge and a desire to use that knowledge for the cultural enhancement of our nation if not of the whole world!

Personally, I have been associated with LAN since its inception in 1980 when Professor Durga Prasad Bhandari was the President, Professor Yugeshwar Verma its Vice-President, and Professor Shreedhar Lohani its Secretary. I have been a part of its vicissitudes and seen how it has risen again and again to meet its scholarly goals and its general objectives despite financial and other problems in addition to the initial lack of paper writers. I am well aware of the tensions and anxiety that forerun an event such as the one that we have just inaugurated today. This is why I must congratulate all of you, especially the members of the executive committee, for keeping alive what must not wither away or die. Literature, and especially the Humanities, is going through a difficult period in our universities especially because of the present phase of political transition from utter confusion to higher sense. Once the transition is complete, I am sure that Literature and the Humanities will be given all due respect and recognition in our universities. Any government that does not give due importance to the Humanities will naturally weaken itself through spiritual and ethical atrophy.

Good literature has the virtue of being universally understood as the most soul-searching human activity, which transcends mere material existence. It is only when literature is regarded as a consumable product that its social and utilitarian function begins to outweigh its symbolic significance, its aesthetic expressions and its spiritual resonance. It is then that ideological lessons tend to take over the so-called social uselessness of art and literature. It is true also that good literature fashions attitudes and ambitions of people who take to heart its concerns, cogitations, and cognitions of what a good life is or should be. However, good literature is never didactic like good ideological propaganda literature. Poetry and propaganda stand miles apart, but totalitarian regimes often benefit by mixing up these two in confused public heads. Good literature is suggestive, simple in its concerns for human welfare, beautiful in its expressions of simple events of ordinary life, truthful in its recordings of human conditions, apt in its expressions of human values that are generally acceptable, and always optimistic and positive in its vision of human societies and progress. Good literature is different from a good book. A good book is readable but what it offers is not necessarily true; it is entertaining but not necessarily realistic; it is popular but not necessarily profound in its insights into minds, societies and cultures. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a bad book, which very few people read; but it is good literature. Ann Rynd’s Atlas Shrugged is a good book which many people read but not necessarily good literature. Sometimes mere popularity seems to stand as a measuring rod of good literature as in the case of Harry Potter. Although all the seven volumes of this series make interesting reading, they neither offer fresh philosophic perspectives into human life and condition, nor record the lived history of human pain, fear, dream or hope. It is a good series to read for mere entertainment, not for serious statements or profound understandings concerning human life and society. However, I must also admit that it is an excellent sample of good children’s literature.

                Good, serious literature must necessarily stir our emotions and, thereby, lead us to reexamine our thoughts, attitudes and traditions. This is why literature also makes things happen in the world. Today’s conference, for instance focuses on one particular instance of injustice: violence against women, which is a global issue. The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8 is also violence against women and girls. Such violence, which takes place at home or in the public sphere, is only one example of injustice that gives rise to human suffering. Injustice and other similar inflictions of pain and suffering by human beings on other human beings or groups of people in the name of gender, race, religion, money, political power, etc. become the basic themes of literature. Injustice is one of the many problems of the human society against which poets and writers have been crying out since eons ago. This is what William Wordsworth bemoans when he writes: “And much it grieved my heart to think,/ What man has made of man.” And this is what Maya Angelou speaks out against so powerfully in “Still I Rise”:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

It seems to me that the best among poets is capable of speaking out more powerfully than the best among literary critics or theoreticians. These pour out their heart; those pin down their brains. Passion and piety often convinces us more quickly than any rosy rings of logic and rhetoric.

Good literature, therefore, educates the public sentiment with a gentle wave of the literary wand. People need to be educated all the year round. Any civilized society needs to develop a reading culture where ideas expressed by poets and writers are discussed so that one does not forget the injustice done by political regimes, races, religious groups or individuals upon other groups or individuals.  Keeping in mind the pains of evil helps us shun evil. So, one would expect such education to reduce crime and violence. One would expect politicizing an issue to solve some of our problems. One would expect that making laws against domestic violence against women would reduce such violence. The reality is that evil never dies and we are forced to fight it every day of our life with the best intention of a final victory, which (and I whisper this to you) is another fiction, another ideal we create to enhance our life. Of course, literature is concerned with denouncing such evil and sensitizing people to the need for common happiness. Any literature that deals with such social problems and issues and thinks about it seriously is good literature. And all good literature is optimistic, encouraging and warm with hopes of a better future.

Yet, we also know that, despite everything else, many writers and scholars are not placed in positions from where they can do anything much to improve unemployment and economic distress at home, which leads to such violence. They can at the most maintain their faith in good literature and keep shooing evil away with powerful voices that are heard by the masses. They can cultivate faith in synergetic action and in its ultimate positive effect, if not in eliminating crime and violence, at least in keeping these at bay. Once again, Maya Angelou beautifully expresses this act of eternally rising up against unending violence in the following lines:

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

I wish this Annual Conference of the Literary Association of Nepal a grand success. I hope it will encourage scholars to rise against evil, against sloth, against mediocrity to a loftiness of the spirit, to a profound sense of purpose and to an intellectual height that is visible from across all sorts of frontiers.

Thank you.

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[1] Inaugural Address: Annual Conference 2013, LAN