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

Why English Literature?

Padma Devkota

Why English Literature?

    Why do you want to study English literature? Wake up from your vague and romantic dreams of roses and poetry. Wake up from your ideals of a perfect world abounding in love and beauty. The world you live in is in reality ugly and torn with violence, which you probably have come to accept as a result of habitual acquaintance with it as an everyday phenomenon. Therein lies the danger to humanity.
    When the frequency of brutal acts around us deadens our sensibility and makes us perceive the ugly as normal, we begin to thrive as sub-humans. There is no weapon, no tool, no pill, nor syrup that can regenerate our benumbed sensibility. It wilts under the blows of incessant brutality that surrounds us, it withers in the heat of violence that erupts everywhere, and it dies for lack of care like an unwatered plant.
    What a desert is to vegetation, savagery is to sensibility. Each insensitive word and action kills another heart. Each show of brutal strength wrings a tear from another eye. We long for a civilization that respects individuality. We want to live in a world where we deserve to be respected because we respect other people. We want to live in a world where we are afraid to hurt the sentiments of other human beings.
    Our longing can only be realized through action, not through certificates we carry in our bags. Our habits of mind and body have to be fashioned to respond in desirable ways dictated by the world we long to create for ourselves and for futurity. This is what education is all about. Our education fails exactly at that point where the transference of goals into action remains incomplete.
    What goal can be nobler than that of promoting a human civilization? Can anyone in a state of sanity justify violence against humanity for whatever cause it may be? Of course not! Yet, the antidote to violence, which is all around us, goes unrecognized as such like some nameless medicinal herb in our front yard. It is there only for discerning eyes.
    A study of literature opens that discerning inward eye, which recognizes the beauty of life that blooms on the meadow of human sensibility. For, a study of literature is a sharing of sensibilities across cultures. And good literature is the best expression of the best minds. What they all tell us, in essence, is to maintain human dignity by not falling into a state of savagery, to remain pro-life in our attitudes, and to uphold the religion of love.
    Peoples across cultures have responded to these human needs in pretty similar ways. Like William Wordsworth, they have lamented, "What Man has made of Man." Man has plundered, slaughtered, tortured, maimed, jived, crippled, bereaved, hurt, wounded, exploited, mocked, enslaved, and snatched the very dignity of living from other human beings. This has been the experience of millions of people living in the world today.
    And, this is what a study of good literature hopes to counteract, not through mere delight in the written word, but through a sharpening of the sensibilities of students who then will uphold civilization against savagery, preservation against destruction of life, and a spontaneous flowing out of the human heart towards other people against a selfish culture of pragmatic self-promotion. Any literature that inspires people to such noble goals rises like a peak to transcendent and transcending altitudes that are forever flushed by the warmth of love and embraced by an abundance of devotion.
    Where do such literatures exist? They are everywhere. The Vedas and the Bibles have lasted for thousands of years because they were able to capture the essence of being human even in that distant past. More modern texts have dealt with more modern problems of being or not being human. From the tribulations of existence to the difficulties of understanding our selves and the world we live in, from the awareness of the painful reality to the aspirations for romantic ideals of the human world, good literature has ever guided our hearts towards light and life.
Our individual capacities determine how much each of us is able to draw out of great works of literature. Mere quantity of ingestion, however, may not determine the correction or enhancement of our individual sensibility. Our cultivated attitudes and aspirations, our personal visions and conceptions, and even the company we keep will influence our taste for culture and sensibility.
Spatiotemporal, political or religious boundaries cannot dictate the company we keep. We befriend Africa, America, China, England, France, India, Japan, and all other nations of the world through the masterpieces of their cultural expressions. Good literature is always worth our time. The university curriculum, of course, has to limit itself to certain objectives to be achieved within a given period of time.
And, English is the medium. There is nothing wrong in this. English is a very powerful world language, which stores almost ninety percent of the world's knowledge. Its scientific and technical vocabulary is unmatched in many other important languages of the world. It has further empowered itself with recent achievements in information technology, space explorations, electronics and the like. It has become so indispensable a medium of human interaction all over the world that mere linguistic competence in English has become a matter of prestige for many people.
But, there is more to it than social prestige alone. Linguistic competence in English brings better job opportunities because it is somehow directly related to performance at work. Like a carpenter who uses a hammer to make many different kinds of furniture, a person with a command over the English language is capable of using it as a good tool in many areas. Because linguistic proficiency improves work efficiency, many employers understand and respect it. So, universities, educational institutes, banks, government offices, NGO's and INGO's, publication houses, media, and many other places willingly hire students of English literature.
While there is a strong job-market for students of English literature, there is much to learn not only in terms of mastering the basic grammar of English but of getting a distinct feel for the nuances within its expressional possibilities. There is much to share in terms of sensibilities respected by the civilized world. There is plenty to learn about our own selves and others. Cultural sharing enhances sensibility, which a course in English literature attempts to provide. Therefore, it can be expected that anyone who respects sensibilities will want to learn what the best minds have so well expressed in the English language. Isn't this enough reason for you to opt for English literature at the Master's level?

(An address delivered at Universal College, Maitidevi, to a gathering of students trying to decide upon a major. Monday, November 28, 2005.)