WHAT CAN LITERATURE MAKE HAPPEN? Not much, goes Auden’s line. Banished to its own domicile, seemingly disconnected from the more concrete concerns of the everyday: art, in this iteration, poses no threat, engenders no action. What wars have been declared over a poem, what treaties signed due to a short story? The novel is justified by its supposed ability to nurture empathy. Art and life: entangled but, so the story goes, distinct.
But literature makes a great many things happen, if the increased debates concerning artists and their creations, the real-life “consequences” of art, are any indication. The Me Too movement, endless handwringing over “cancel culture,” exhortations to “separate the art from the artist,” and a grim resurgence of book bannings across the country are all evidence that literature does, in fact, hold some power over its audiences, that it does indeed have the potential to shape our lives. And this very quality is what makes it so seductive and so troubling. “Literature . . . is itself a demonic act, since it exhibits criminal visions in an aggressive way,” observes Simone de Beauvoir in her essay on the very subject, Must We Burn Sade? “That is what gives it its incomparable value.”
Read Full Article »